Actually those numbers are from OMB. I didn't ask AI. And, yes, they're percentages of spending.

Undoubtedly the origin of the Hobbit-steals-dragons-treasure meme.

I think you mean, "so the middle men can pocket the savings".

On a percentage basis, mostly what we get for our tax dollars is entitlements, like social security (22%), medicare (14%) and medicaid (10%), plus interest (14%).

The ONLY problem is that not everyone else has done so yet. Government shouldn't be allowed to tax income and profit.

I have a ":w! saves" mug ;)

I have to ask: did you literally never use a computer lab at all in the DOS era?

Not "logging into DOS" - logging into your account. I literally said "mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands", e.g., you're at the DOS prompt. When you want to login, you ran LOGIN.EXE, which "mounted" your network account. I believe it was Novell NetWare-based.

Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss.

Same sort of technique I used back in secondary school, lol ;) We had a programming class (in Basic on DOS), and it was painfully trivial, so I'd always complete the assignments in like 5 minutes and then spend the rest of class messing around. So one thing I wrote was a program that mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands, and when someone ran the login command and typed in their username and password, it would say that the password was incorrect so they'd think they had typed it wrong (while it was actually saving their username and password, then logging out of my account), so that when they tried again, it worked. I would launch on a bunch of computers in the lab after class when I could get away with it..

Among the passwords collected were the teacher's administrator username and password. So when it came time to write my final project for the course, among the various demo-style scenes in it was a stereogram generator. The hidden image in the stereogram was her username and password. ;)

(Thankfully she had a good attitude about it... seemed like she wanted to get mad at me but also found it funny. In retrospect, that could have gone very badly had she gotten angry...)

Yeah, this is what I always worry about when I see studies like this. I know they always try to control for confounders, but it's really hard to do right. If you mess up, you get another "Regular wine drinking improves your health!" craze (wine consumption is correlated with wealth and better access to healthcare, and also, people with serious health problems often have to give up drinking)

Yeah, Musk could definitely drive the whole thing sideways. I'm afraid he might be getting increasingly detached from reality. I'm not so worried about the lack of focus on the chomper; it seems to me that the real issues facing Starship are all about how to handle re-entry heat. Also engine re-lights, but I have little concern they can solve that; it's been done many times before, including by SpaceX. If they can solve the rapid reuse after reentry problem, something no one else has done, ever, building various form factors will be a simple matter of engineering.

Yes, it was all super entertaining, especially with PJ covering all of it, and rarely missing a trick. Good times for those of us watching from the cheap seats. A huge waste of time and resources for IBM.

That's absolutely not what it means.

"Left the labor force" doesn't mean "they lost their job" it means "they aren't looking for a job". Examples of cases where people "leave the labor force" include (but aren't limited to):

* Retired.
* Had a child and decided to become a stay-at-home parent.
* Decided to spend their time caring for an elderly relative.
* Decided to go back to school.
* Gave up on working after being unable to find a job.
* Had a financial windfall and decided to stop working.

And so on. The "gave up after being unable to find a job" is not particularly likely in a job market where only 4.2% of people who want a job don't have one, though I suppose some may choose not to work rather than work in a less-desirable job than they had before.

Also, it's July 2. June employment numbers are basically worthless at this point. Give them a quarter or so to get more data and correct the numbers. The initial numbers are based on only on employer reporting data, which skews it in various ways. The government uses several other data sources including surveys, but it takes time for that data to come in, which is why these numbers are generally corrected 2-3 months after they come out.

Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.

Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.

I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.

Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:

So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."

Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.

The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.

Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.