The *exact* same idea with the *exact* same complaints from the Left, the UCS, all the progressive crybabies...can reasonably be seen as having ended the Soviet Union by ramming it financially into its own contradictions.
Is that ACTUALLY what you guys at the Paul Robeson bookstore are all still salty about? That the guys you insisted all along were the "good guys" turned out not to be?

Anyway, the idea that defense = escalation hasn't been a thing since MAD was largely abandoned in the 1990s. Welcome to the post cold-war era, comrade.

...and it is genuinely an efficiency gain: now I can completely avoid 2 shit product families from only 1 vendor.

That's great!

"The US is escalating"?
That's a rather specious viewpoint, isn't it? Or did you intend to lie by omission?

The Soviets/Russians have had space based weapons platforms in orbit since the 1960s
The Chinese have had weapons aloft for at least 10y.
Honestly, if the US *doesn't* have functional, effective orbital weapons already up there, they're fucking incompetent.

And, if investors don't like it, they can walk away, can't they?
Isn't that how the free market works? Convince people to invest in you, great. If you're an asshole or do stupid things, they take their $ away.

Look, I get it, slashdot despises Musk for many, many things (some even have to do with actual business or technology). But this is up to investors and their choices.

SpaceX IPO $160 today $162. Not really compelling unless one believes in their mission.
Tesla 1y was $442, now is $385. Not very compelling.
 

...would somehow also cause Slashdot to seethe in fury.

You guys are hilarious.

Who says I'm NOT outraged by that? Why the simplistic binary?

Personally, I believe that anyone getting a dime of government $ should be banned from voting / donating politically due to conflict of interest.
This includes the welfare poor BUT ALSO the management (c-suites, I'd guess) of ANY company with
- federal contracts
- using public resources (ie oil companies on federal lands)
- in-law tax benefits.

I also believe corporations should have escalating tax rates for owned dwellings; that is, like people they can have that single homestead property, but the next is full-tax, the next 150% tax, the next 200% etc.

Make no mistake, yes, I do object to LONG TERM free ride programs for the poor as an alternative to sorting their lives out. But I'm even MORE aggressive about taxation of corporations that want to enjoy the upside of capitalism but be fully socialist on the downsides. "Too big to fail" is bullshit; capitalism REQUIRES companies to die like forests need fires.

So....no answer, confirmed.
I have read about UBI, extensively, because its advocates never tire of begging for other people's money.

I mean...the people who have for decades fought long and hard to inform people about the catastrophic threats facing corals should be DELIGHTED that there is a serious, significant prospect of improving their survival.
This is, very clearly, a pure, intrinsic good.

Right?

Because if they're not delighted then one might question whether they really were that concerned about the corals themselves in the first place. One might even speculate that 'teh coRalz are DyIng!" was really about just a useful poster-child for an ideology or something less salutary....

Corals are literally one of the oldest lifeforms on the planet. They evolved >500m years ago, when the earth was vastly warmer. (It's about 15-16C now, 500m yr ago it was 30C or higher).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They survived even warmer times - 36C in the mesozoic - and cooler, as low as 11C.

And - contrary to the "but it's changing FASTER!" meme, that's not true: global temps have changed occasionally **much** more rapidly than what we see today. Chicxulub caused 20-30C drops that lasted for decades, followed by vaporized carbonates and global wildfires that raised planetary temps as much as +5C for 100,000 years.

So please stop believing the bullshit that corals 'are on the verge of extinction' or such nonsense. Corals have AMPLE opportunities (moreso than most species) to mitigate climate swings - they populate other latitudes (Too warm? Cooler/deeper corals flourish as their latitudes become more amenable. Too cool? Shallow corals in equatorial seas survive to repopulate the ocean quickly.)

So you just want a free ride for everyone.

And still want people to think you're sane? Where precisely does this free ride come from? "The rich"?
Let's do some quick math (I know I've already lost you here): Musk is worth a $trn. The US with it's shitty social systems, spends $5trn per year.
Us+EU spends $12trn (and that's only on 10% of the world population). Let's laughably pretend net wealth means cash: the wealth ripped from the entire top 1% could cover the world at the (crummy) level of "Western" social systems for about 2 years.

What happens next, Einstein? You've eaten all your seed corn and turned your milk cows into sandwich meat. Who -precisely- is going to have $10trn needed for the next month?

Because the goal is not to be on the public tit forever?

Here's the blunt truth:
- we can't all be rich
- life is hard fucking work for most people
- sometimes people make bad choices
- sometimes there isn't a "do over" option
- the ostensible goal of a considerate society is to safety-net people through hard times *to get them back on their feet*, not to make it so some lazy people don't ever have to work because they don't want to. This is why Democrats want all public assistance to channel through big faceless government; former systems of community aid tended to be judgemental: if the local church helped Otto sober up and get a job and Otto goes right back on the sauce, well, tough shit Otto, there are other people who CAN use that help instead of him.

The moment you hand free money to most poor people, they (mostly) lose/spend/waste it. This has been known since Roman times.

  "It's a lot to ask of someone to get their life together in 12 months, when a lot of these issues are structural or systemic," OR PERSONAL. I like how they left that out.

AFAIK (I could be wrong) New Glenn has managed 3 flights.
This is a cheerfully optimistic plan.

Now every hundred thousand years we are going to have slashdot filled with posts saying "the leap second is stupid! It causes accidents and increased stress!" while a wave of others insist we need the leap second or our children will be standing waiting for the bus in the dark.

If ai kills all these stupid fucking crypto currencies, I'm on ai's side.
Finally a positive use case.

Not everyone is purely driven by ideology.