> It's not injecting any wealth into rural communities
This statement couldn’t be more jingoistic.
Why do virtually ALL communities solicit industry and commercial growth?
Why do you think cities are the only areas that benefit from such growth?
Why do you think none of the money recirculates back into the community?
Your way of life is effectively subsidized, and at some point it simply will not be affordable. The difficulty supplying water alone in many parts of the US will basically cause suburbs to die. Your notion of personal freedoms cannot override reality, no matter how often you pound the table.
Yet NYC, for example, is highly subsidized compared to neighboring suburbs no matter how you slice it. Its water isn’t cheap. The majority have fully subsidized healthcare. SNAP and section 8 are high. Transportation costs are massive. Education cost is much higher per student. Taxes are considerably higher.
I pay less to maintain, heat, and mortgage a 2000 square foot home, plus maintain a car, than it costs to rent a small Brooklyn apartment and take the subway every day.
Wasn't the debt a big concern a year ago
Yes - and it still is.
have tariffs reduced it as promised?
Yes - a couple hundred billion of new revenue in one year isn’t chump change.
assuming launch cost of $20 per kg which is actually double the $10 per kg that both Stoke Space and SpaceX are claiming they will achieve with re-usable flight.
What? I can put a Kg in orbit for $20? That's close to first class postal rates, that seems a bit off... SpaceX Falcon Heavy costs $1,400 per Kg today they plan/hope to reduce that cost in the future...
The very same article discusses future costs potentially plunging below $20 per kg for the next SpaceX generation (Starship): “It would [require] about 70 flights [of reuse per Starship] to get to costs per kilogram 100 times less (1% of the cost) of SpaceX Falcon Heavy.” Note that some Falcon boosters have already achieved about thirty reuses.
. . . picked up several million U.S. customers:
- 5G Home over three million
- Fiber about four million
- Satellite over a million
That’s for all of 2025.
. . . there are other large factors at play.
As just one example: inflation adjusted, over the last ten years, the total cost to employ a full time minimum wage worker in the UK has risen almost fifty percent - from ~19k pounds to ~27k pounds. The youth unemployment rate in general is stubbornly around 15 percent - which is around triple the overall rate.
. . . picked up several million U.S. customers:
- 5G Home over three million
- Fiber about four million
- Satellite over a million
The point is that much of what self-anointed “liberals” define as “reality” isn’t actual reality.
I personally don’t buy into the narrative-trumps-empirical schtik but, hey, to each his own!
Keep on believing brother! We’re all with you!
Yep, "ideologically biased" in recognizing actual facts, instead of the "alternate facts" (a.k.a. "lies") pushed by the administration.
Well, a nice totalitarian regime cannot have people that see reality, unless they are fundamentally evil. (JD probably rides on that horse, because he does have some mental skills.) The then upcoming Theocracy can use people that see what is even less.
You are 100% correct sir! As proof, let’s consult the 2021 100% liberal-approved fact check guide:
* The inflation is minimal and, regardless, is “temporary”.
* The border is secure, and cannot be closed any further without new congressional legislation.
* Biden is fully mentally competent.
* Judging by identity instead of character is democratic.
* Decriminalizing crime and defunding policing are wonderful ideas.
* Violent crime rates haven’t spiked.
* The working class is doing well economically. Low paid non-citizens weren’t responsible for the vast majority of job gains.
* The laptop is a Russian plant and the Steele Report is gospel.
* Smollet was attacked by MAGA.
* The lab leak theory is not at all credible.
* The GF riots were “peaceful”.
* Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.
* Hormonal and surgical transitions for children are scientific and moral.
* The Afghanistan withdrawal was a success.
* Restarting Nord Stream 2 and stopping PennEast are helpful actions.
* Refusing to arm Ukrainians is a great idea.
* Funding Hamas and Iran is smart.
* The Houthis should be removed from terrorist watch lists.
* The majority of Black Americans: support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, or support illegal immigration.
* It is “fake news” that Kamala was a border czar, donated to free GF rioters, and was rated the most liberal Senator.
* The government isn’t telling social media to suppress dissenting empirically backed information.
* Florida K-12 doesn’t rank in the top 5 per NAEP scores, and number one per U.S. News. California hasn’t plummeted to the middle.
Oh wait. Which administration were you talking about?
"It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias."
- Stephen Colbert
Exactly! As proof, let’s consult the 2021 100% liberal-approved fact check guide:
* The inflation is minimal and, regardless, is “temporary”.
* The border is secure, and cannot be closed any further without new congressional legislation.
* Biden is fully mentally competent.
* Judging by identity instead of character is democratic.
* Decriminalizing crime and defunding policing are wonderful ideas.
* Violent crime rates haven’t spiked.
* The working class is doing well economically. Low paid non-citizens weren’t responsible for the vast majority of job gains.
* The laptop is a Russian plant and the Steele Report is gospel.
* Smollet was attacked by MAGA.
* The lab leak theory is not at all credible.
* The GF riots were “peaceful”.
* Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.
* Hormonal and surgical transitions for children are scientific and moral.
* The Afghanistan withdrawal was a success.
* Restarting Nord Stream 2 and stopping PennEast are helpful actions.
* Refusing to arm Ukrainians is a great idea.
* Funding Hamas and Iran is smart.
* The Houthis should be removed from terrorist watch lists.
* The majority of Black Americans: support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, or support illegal immigration.
* It is “fake news” that Kamala was a border czar, donated to free GF rioters, and was rated the most liberal Senator.
* The government isn’t telling social media to suppress dissenting empirically backed information.
* Florida K-12 doesn’t rank in the top 5 per NAEP scores, and number one per U.S. News. California hasn’t plummeted to the middle.
On the other hand, this doesnâ(TM)t seem to be evidence that weâ(TM)re living in a simulation.
I don't mean computer simulation.
I mean that a good part of the reality we believe we experience is a simulation our brain provides to our consciousness so that it doesn't feel like it's in the passenger seat - which most of the time it actually is.
Ah, I missed that - thank you for clearing that up. That makes a lot more sense to me.
Although “most of the time it actually is” is quite a blow to the id - my ego isn’t reacting well to that.
> Basically, the little red hen offering the bread to the other animals just so she can withdraw the offer at the end is just her being a total a-hole.
The assumption that she would share? That was contingent on getting some help in return - which would help her have the resources to grow enough wheat for everyone. Siding with the lazy? It’s siding with that neighbor with a “bad back”, living on disability, that goes skiing on the weekends, and labels everyone who complains about paying taxes a “fascist”.
> Also, you know what happened to the hen in the end? Whether rugged individualist, whiny a-hole who wants everyone to do her work for her, gourmet bread enthusiast, or just a chicken who wanted to do some farming of her own, there was one simple ending. The farmer chopped her head off and ate her. You can make that into any analogy you want: the struggle of the proletariat against capitalism/imperialism/communism for example.
The story doesn’t actually end that way. What you describe is most analogous to the Stalin ending. Stalin wielding the ax - killing the hard worker that grows the wheat - with the “proletariat” cheering him on.
So this new interpretation is literally a microcosm of the early progressives’ view of the Soviet Union. It’s that of Walter Duranty, an American NYT journalist and progressive “hero”, who praised Stalin while purposefully “forgetting” to report on the Holodomor (mass starvation as Stalin “shared” Ukraine’s wheat and decimated Ukrainian farmers).
Not coincidentally, the NYT did something very similar later by, early on, giving initially sympathetic “progressive” coverage to each of Castro, Khomeini, and Chavez in succession. It’s a century long pattern.
> That's the thing though, it will just be projection. A stretch to find some way to stamp one ism or another onto a simple story.
The projection you chose is illuminating. The interesting twist is that, in the course of the longer conversation, you’ve now changed to essentially agreeing that the hen represents a rugged individual in the most common interpretation, but now also term her an “a-hole”. Now, using your interpretation and exact words, this means it’s a “struggle of the proletariat” allegory, complete with the jettisoning of enlightenment ideals like blind justice, property rights, personal agency, and the sanctity of individual life.
But that jettisoning? It includes killing “fascist rugged individual non-believers”, “sharing” their fruits, killing productivity, and spurring mass starvation.
> I want to ignore the Red Hen because it is a simplistic children's fable. Still, the hen is not a rugged individualist, she just bakes bread and eats it herself. She asks everyone for help at each stage. She's not a rugged individualist.
That isn’t at all the conventional interpretation. It reads similar to claims Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm were warnings against out-of-control capitalism instead of out-of-control collectivism - a claim that Orwellianly reverses Orwell’s own words in interviews about the book.
The Little Red Hen clearly portrays the hen as someone who does the work herself - sows and reaps her own wheat - while the other animals refuse to contribute despite numerous invitations to help. That’s classic rugged individualism by any objective standard: self-reliance, personal responsibility, and earning one’s own reward. The other animals, who expect to share while refusing to contribute, are most obviously understood, by far, as collectivist free-riders.
But I understand why many folks don’t buy into this argument. With just a few hundred mostly monosyllabic words, The Little Red Hen manages to rather convincingly dismantle a couple thousand pages of Das Kapital “logic”. Folks that have copiously invested their time in the latter are loath to acknowledge its core failings - it’s a sunk cost fallacy.
> There's a number of empirical evidence showing that decisions are made in the brain faster than consciousness can explain, but test subjects still explain why they made that decision - despite scientists being able to measure that signals were already sent to the muscles by the time the "conscious" part of the brain started activating
The brain pulls a similar trick backfilling time itself - vision has a high latency, something like a 100 ms, so one’s “conscious” purposely smooths out the situation. For a moving object, the brain’s retrospective backfilling sets its position in the consciousness where it infers the object should be at the 50 ms mark in the past - not where photons hitting the eyeball “saw” the object’s position 100 ms ago.
On the other hand, this doesn’t seem to be evidence that we’re living in a simulation. The specific experiments you discuss don’t violate causality or indicate a conscious-divorced-from-reality time shift. It’s just that the conscious lags slightly: it decides to type the letter A, or press a button, etc, then the reflexive parts of the brain subsequently type the A before the consciousness becomes fully aware the typing or button push actually occurred.
The disks are getting full; purge a file today.
