Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK

Valid points, perhaps well made, but undercut by the vacuous AC Subject that you propagated. Lazy? Or just unthinking? You undercut your own position and the main result appears (by the scrollbar metric) to be helping AC "guide" half of the discussion.

As usual, my own thoughts tend to wander into nether regions, but I wonder whether it would be possible to reach any sort of agreement about what constitutes a good discussion. It is certainly my impression that there used to be a lot of them on Slashdot, but these days? Not so much. I also noticed that Slashdot appears to be down to its final editor.

So here's my funny idea how to pollute the Slashdot conversations with AI support. The latest owners (whoever?) should recruit a couple of AIs for editorial slots. Let's go all pie in the sky. Let's include enhancing the moderation system to also evaluate the work of the human and inhuman (dare I say subhuman?) editors. Which editor picks the best stories in terms of producing those "good discussions" we somehow agreed were good? Which editor produced the best summaries that induced the most humans to actually look at the fine articles? Heck, why not even consider which editor was least attractive for AC drivel, with or without AI support for extra slop.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.

The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

Not very persuasive but you have me speculating if you were one of those overclockers. I suspect the main philosophical difference is that you think hardware is more important than software and I'm in the other camp. We seem to be in an abnormal condition because the computer hardware has been changing so rapidly for a few decades now...

Anyway, at the rate things are changing these months, I am actually worried that I may live long enough to see how it all comes out in the wash.

NAK

So the vacuous Subject apparently spans about a third of the large discussion? Thanks to the vacuous propagation? There should be a kind of meta-moderation of the discussions. Dare I say correlated to the kinds of FPs? But looking at your [nomadic's] post, your concern is escaping me and a Subject change might have helped.

Anyway, my too-obvious-to-be-insightful reaction and the obligatory joke I am l looking for in response to this topic involves some sort of categorical search constraint. There are ALWAYS some kinds of labor that are in short supply, but that doesn't do much to help the ALWAYS much larger number of people who are unable to supply those specific categories of labor that are in short supply.

Again with the speculations on "If I were a betting..." but good luck in convincing me that Bezos is too stupid to understand what he has done, though I'm pretty sure he would use some flavor of the "making money is an ethically pure motivation" excuse. Again with the "I bet to differ" stuff?

Personal disclaimer needed? Or some kind of rat race exemption? For most of my motley career I was able to go where the labor was in short supply, and it worked well for me. But looking at the current situation, I am unable to spot any of the jobs that I did that can't be done with AI now, and the AIs are continuing to improve rapidly. Rather too rapidly to be worrying much about the unintended consequences. For example, did you even notice that the mass market paperback business went extinct?

Thanks for saving me a long and tedious search, though I'm still going to try to root around the discussion a bit. (Main reason to reply is to try to figure what key terms I should look for, since the moderation has become so useless these years.) And you told it well, too. Even used some of the examples that I came to mind. I'm hoping the discussion will expand into broader considerations of stock-market madness as the new balloons are madly inflating all over the world.

So... "stock" and "balloon" seem to be the key words? And of course there will be the obligatory search check of the moderators' collective opinions about Funny...

Don't take this is criticism, shilly, because I am grateful, but I'm also unsure if "insightful" was the best mod. It appears you have 3 insight votes, 1 vote for informative, and 1 for overrated, presumably by a typical wannabe censor. In this case of the too obvious? My problem remains with the moderation system, which apparently needs the help of Nomad the Changeling... But on reflection, I'm beginning to agree with the "insightful" though I also want to check some of the details... For example, I think that nine years depends on some unconventional accounting. (This week I had a couple of meetings with a former internal auditor at Enron, though one of the principled ones who looked around and left quickly... I should have asked him about "creative accounting". But that's another term to search for in the discussion?)