Non sequitur. None of your examples were ever thought to be "stupid." Maybe controversial for a time, but not stupid.
That's different from this...how? Anyway, allow me to introduce you to the "laser":
https://press.uchicago.edu/Mis...
Free to do whatever you want, as long as it does not impact others negatively.
In case you didn't notice, GP was upset over the idea that somebody owns a yacht, which is fairly common and not just a driveby analogy. So while they're potentially thousands of miles away at sea, he's steaming about the fact that they exist, because he has his own ideas about how somebody else's money must be spent.
What he is after is not what a free society looks like. Though some of you are of the opinion that a free society can't have rich people in it, so I may be speaking to deaf ears on this, but trust me, there are many very good reasons why socialism not only doesn't work, but makes people much worse off. Some of you guys argue "well if only it was tried!" but it has been, dozens of times, and every single time, as in 100%, the outcome was the same: Institutional poverty for all but the politburo and their inner circle. Hence why so few of them survived after the fall of the USSR, including the ones that weren't even in the USSR.
And launching a million satellites into earth-orbit space is likely to do just that. Its several orders of magnitude beyond the number of active satellites currently there.
So that Sandra Bullock movie you saw is fiction, by the way. Some of you guys are arguing that Starlink is pushing us there, only it's not, and in fact it can't. Below a certain altitude, smaller mass objects are easily countered by the atmosphere, which is where the real concern for Kessler Syndrome lies. The "kissing atmosphere" in that movie was stupid primarily because the atmosphere extends well beyond the altitude of the ISS, which also puts it well beyond where they were at in that movie. Entertaining sure, but that's all that it is. A lot of other problems with that movie as well, but you get the idea.
People shouldn't be allowed to just go ahead and do such things without compliance with regulations and treaties, just because they have the "time and money" to accomplish them.
And guess what? Nobody is.
And BTW, Russia has been un-free for a while now, not just "recently."
I don't know about you, but I've been watching the Ukraine war more than any other topic over the last few years. And to that extent, I've been watching what's going on with the Rusian economy. Sure, they're not free -- Gorbachev handed that to them on a silver platter, and in return they spat in his face. Russia does not want democracy. Russian culture is fundamentally incompatible with it. They longed for another Tsar, and they got one. Western values will never work there, nor should we try to force that on them. Russians are as Russians do. However, Russia for a long time didn't want to go back to socialism. Likely most of them still don't. But their government is pulling them into that direction. Private enterprise there is largely being taxed out of existence, and they're rapidly returning to pretend work for pretend pay. The private sector hasn't been nationalized completely there, but at this point, the private sector no longer has any autonomy from the government, making it just short of de-facto socialism. The only reason it's just short of it is that people are still allowed to go into business for themselves there, even though it's basically impossible without breaking the law by evading taxes.