I know it's fun to rag on China, but your statement doesn't even make sense. If someone is valuable enough to warrant a travel ban, they aren't going to murder them for expressing dissent.

The best system is social democracy. Government in charge, not corporations, and government working for the electorate thanks to an electoral system that provides proper representation.

It works because it's not authoritarian, but instead gives individuals a real stake on society and in government. There is a strong social contract that is upheld, where as in other democracies like the UK and US the social contract is more of a scam than a deal.

That doesn't taste like wood.

Seriously it's a huge pain in the ass buying fruit now because so much of it tastes like garbage. Over farming means there aren't enough nutrients in the soil and they grow the fruit to be too large so the tree cannot get the flavor components to the fruit.

Grapes especially are a total crapshoot. And oranges are just a waste of money now. They're just balls of cellulose.

I mean I think it's kind of hard to fuck up a banana but if anyone can do it it's large grocery store chains...

And we need to stop giving him credit for things engineers do. He's not a visionary he had none of these ideas. Most of the hard work was done by NASA many years ago and they abandoned it because it wasn't worth the trouble.

The only reason muskrat picked this up is because the prospect of a cheap reusable rocket would be more profitable and it gave him something he could promise investors to keep the line going up so that he could use boosted stock prices to inflate his net worth and keep the scam going until he was where he is today.

And where he is today is about to loot your 401k and your retirement savings in general. I keep saying this but go look up Patrick Boyle's YouTube video on the SpaceX IPO. The entire thing is a complicated scam to steal our retirement money by forcing your retirement investments into high risk companies with limited viable addressable markets.

It is possible the engineers doing the work to keep the scam going we'll produce real work. They are not scammers and they are actually trying to produce good useful work. However none of that is going to pay off in your lifetime or mine. The absolute best case scenario here is that the rockets can be reused a few times marginally decreasing the cost of multiple launches.

But like I said NASA abandoned reusable rockets. They did not do that without good cause. We simply do not have the material science to make a rocket that can be easily and safely reused again and again. Maybe we will someday but we don't have it now. And we're not likely to have it anytime soon even if we threw all the money in the world at it. So any gains are at best going to be marginal and we have vast amounts of money going to something where we could be taking those resources and putting them into something more productive.

But something more productive would not keep the stock scam that Elon Musk has been running for some time going. Several people have pointed this out before me but guys like Elon Musk do not want successful companies. Successful companies are expected to deliver reliable returns now. What Elon Musk wants and guys like him are companies that are perpetually on the cusp of some big breakout so that they can be massively overvalued based on potential value. They want nothing but the potential and never anything real. If muskrat ever actually produced something real that worked consistently he would be expected to convert that into a long-term profitable company and his stock prices would collapse as they settled into their real long-term value. That would of course tank his net worth. Because it would bring it down to the real world instead of shooting it up to the Moon as they say.

I guess what I'm saying is don't be distracted by the occasional bit of useful tech that squeezes out of all these nasty little stock scams. Because sooner or later you and me are going to have to bail out these two big to fail companies and their politically connected Insiders and when we do we're going to lose everything just like we did in 2008 and spend 20 years trying to rebuild...

So Marx didn't really have a vision. He identified the problem as the ruling class but he couldn't come up with a solution to that. It was basically just fuck it I don't know what to do kill the fuckers was his solution.

But I don't think he ever thought that was a viable solution per se I just don't think he could come up with anything else.

There's absolutely nothing communist about it. It's a capitalist Nation through and through. They literally have the same healthcare system that America does. You get your health care insurance through your employer and if your employer doesn't offer it you don't have it.

China is what's called anarcho capitalism. Or sometimes what's called a kleptocracy. I wouldn't call them a kekistocracy, that's more like what America is becoming under Donald Trump and his cronies. A kekistocracy is government by the most incompetent and corrupt. China's ruling class is corrupt as fuck but they are at least competent. The same goes for Russia and their dictatorship.

It's important to understand that there's nothing socialist or communist about China because if you don't you're going to think that if you can just keep the scary socialists and or Communists out of power then you will be safe. And absolutely nothing could be further from the truth.

Fuck off, bigot.

A data center is like a flat windowless office building without people in it, and more computers. ...roads? These are immobile computers. They're offering money because people are showing up to city meetings and crying about them a lot because of stupid shit they read online about not even data centers, something something AI. Nobody is browsing realtor.com looking for data centers in the town. If your house is right up against an industrial/commercial zone, that's the best neighbor you could get among the other options.

In the immediate vicinity I get it, if there were zoning changes being asked for next door to make that happen, you should consider it and go to city meetings, be informed. Over a far wider area there could be electricity rate impacts when new large scale power users come in, of course, another reason to stay informed, fight for protection from rate increases to pay for a few pigs. But depressing home values, that's a stretch.

More positively than unregulated capitalism. More negatively than other parts of the world with far more heavy regulations.

Only if you want to take the discussion off topic. No you don't have socialism when it comes to your insurance system.

How many of your friends are in the news? The fact that there is a specific law about this with specific punishments should tell you that just because something isn't seen by you personally doesn't mean it doesn't happen. There's a Texas passed a law due to this, and the law was signed into power with the blood of children.

Also it's a false comparison. I bet you know out of your extended group of people at least one person who has been a cause of an accident, maybe even someone who has hit a person. The schoolbus overtaking rule is an "idiots rule", just like boomgates at a level crossing are "idiot gates". Both exist to resolve an issue created by imperfect driving in the first place (the first being fast passing combined with slow reaction time, the second being idiots who ignore the blinking lights). The risks applied to automated systems aren't the same. That's not a reason to say that Waymo shouldn't follow the laws, but it is a case to say that the laws may not need to be equal for both systems (up next: let's talk about stop signs and why cyclists are legally allowed to not stop at them in many jurisdictions, and why it's a good idea in general to not consider all vehicles as equal.).

That is absolutely false. Firstly, prices are almost universally changed during business hours. You can probably walk down the isle of your local supermarket and find someone with a price / tag labelling machine adjusting one *right now* if you bothered to look.

The register issue is handled quite simply: you keep the lowest of the two prices at checkout and you have zero legal liability. There is no paperwork involved.

I can tell you've never worked retail before. I agree with the rest of your point: this is stuff that was already happening. But the idea that somehow this only happened at night without customers present or that someone is opening themselves to massive fines is just plain absurd.

Only in a general sense. Prices are constantly adjusted. Go to your local store you'll probably find someone *right now* with a price sticker machine. It would take an employee all of 10 minutes to do the entire drinks section, and you can predict a heatwave days in advance. The reality is price adjustments (e.g. during sales) are a constant event for a retail business and the whole digital price tag thing is just a general cost reduction scheme, not some nefarious idea to invent new capitalistic ways to fuck you over.

Amazing milestone aside, the choice of wording here remains spot on. The capabilities of the system has nothing to do with the testing regime. The fact that they had an abundance of caution and focused on other things first has nothing to do with this achievement. They reached orbit. All the other things alone are only relevant if they were building a commercial air-liner.

Reaching orbit is a milestone for a space fairing vehicle, and one that they just reached. Kudos to the team, but they don't need you making excuses for them.

In Chicago in 2024, there were 586 homocides in Chicago and 6 fatal police involved shootings. When you live in a bad neighborhood you're 195x more likely to be killed by a criminal than a cop. Again...I don't want to be killed by a police officer, but the probability is MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely that I will be killed by a routine criminal.

So...they were a victim of a crime. The criminal happened to be a law enforcement officer. So you're advocating for less police? no police? I clearly stated that EVERYONE who lives in a ghetto or bad neighborhood wants BETTER police and often more of them. Whether or not your assailant was a cop, professional criminal or random mentally ill person, only privileged people in comfort can scream ABJECT STUPIDITY like ACAB or "defund the police". For the rest, the rely on the cops to protect them from worse people. And yeah, if someone is going to bring a criminal cop to justice, it will be some branch of law enforcement.

No one is saying police are perfect, and they should be held accountable for all crimes and every application of force should be appropriately scrutinized and investigated. However, you're comparing bullets and bee-stings. Both kill people. However, I'll wager you'd rather walk through a flower garden with buzzing bees than an active shootout.

The air in space is really hard on mics so for cost savings most engineers leave them off.