NOT a chicken and egg problem. The real genius is building the two businesses together - you need to build a large capacity for space launch, and make it less wasteful (i.e. reusable rockets) to get the cost down. BUT to get costs down you need volume. So you start your own business that needs a lot of launch capacity, paid for by your customers. The need for huge volumes of space launch capacity will come, so later your simply expand your customer base to fill your launches.

IIRC (and I may be wrong) Rockefeller did something similar - bought up all the oil refineries and built railroads with the sole purpose of moving oil from the oil wells of others to the refineries he owned. And other cargo on those railroads came later.

Maybe look at it more of "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" than a chicken and egg situation.

Anyone thought to build massive solar power arrays ON the grounds of old nuke plants???? Problem solved!

As in mine. Seems simple enough - you need an ID to get a ballot, and are crossed off the current roles by the attendants who look you up, so no repeat customers. You mark your ballot, no identifying information on it, just the votes. Then feed it into the counting machine and are shown the door out - with police there to make sure you do in fact exit.

The counting machine tallies the votes and there is no reason it can't be updating a master count somewhere for near-instant vote updates.

Simple, anonymous, with the paper ballots there for re-counting if necessary.

With everyone at the polling place watching everyone else there is no way to stuff the ballot box or cheat. No way to vote multiple times (unless impersonating others with fake IDs, and even that would be found out if the others showed up to vote themselves).

Still cannot grok why anything more complex, (or good god involving Windows!), would be desired by anyone.

I think the idea is that it is a safety net. If you have a job you pay into it and it mostly cancels out (probably though pay more in than get out, so it's a tax to you). If you lose your nice job, the payments continue and your payments back in get cut off. Giving you an income again - immediately - instead of applying for aid and jumping through hoops while the bills pile up. In that way, it is superior to what we have in the US today. In most other ways I think it's generally infeasible, but that's another discussion altogether.

Well said Charlie! Getting old is not much fun, physically. Many don't make allowances for that. My knees are complaining enough days now that I'm going to look into the new powered exoskeletons in a few years. Still early days for them, but they show promise.

Not at all - I've done the Crawford trail hike up (and down) Mt. Washington in New Hampshire with friends. 18 miles of Mountain terrain in one day. At the top you can get souvenirs like bumper stickers for your car: "This car climbed Mt. Washington".

Unfortunately they did not have any T-shirts like: "Forget the car - this BODY climbed Mt. Washington".

Pity - I would have bought one. There being an auto roadway to the summit in no way diminished our satisfaction.

Found the other Amiga user!

And now that Meta has made small hand-held devices that you talk to, and that talk back, as interfaces to AI agents, we have officially come full circle.

Correct - though we had some nuclear powered cruisers, they're all decommissioned - and have been for some time.

THIS is why we have Slashdot. Thanks for looking into this JoshuaZ! Let us know what you find out. We'll stay tuned.

Police also get conditioned by being around the absolute worst examples of human beings on a regular basis. That can corrode the soul of a regular person. Especially one that joins with the intention of really making a difference. All too often it will seem like making no difference at all - and that will corrode you as well.

Police are like a bilge pump - all we ask is to make sure the boat doesn't get swamped. It's a thankless, never-ending job, and the pump may despair in the end because it can never, ever, make the bilges dry.

I thought it was Mar Florida (Sea of Florida) - that's what I've been calling it since this fiasco began.

I would say the most brilliant strategy for the Democratic party in 2028 would be a massive advertising campaign for the presidency: DJT as a write-in for President

Think about it.

Good way to think about it - I usually summarize it as "talent is cheap!" Meaning that there is lots of talent out there - it's not as rare as everyone thinks, nor is it all that is needed.

But maybe there is a 4th axis - humility/insecurity. Quite a few of the best in every field are humble or insecure to a degree. Drives their work-ethic, and makes them open to accepting criticism and strive to make themselves better. An arrogant talent won't.

Sounds to me like the launch/deployment went just fine. Problems started when the rescue craft started heading to the telescope. Agreed the company made shoddy components.

Maybe the takeaway for $30M was to simplify - make the equipment on the rescue craft as simple as possible. More like a remote controlled jetpack than an autonomous rescue vehicle.

Steep price in any case.