>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

This is the crux. Optimization of supply chains to eliminate inventory makes them frail. Or, to quote Wirth:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The last of the US federal helium reserve - including land and equipment - was sold in 2024.

Is joke of course. Was angling for the same joke.

3He is normal helium atom with an extra neutron, hoped to be used in some forms of fusion. It's not considered radioactive. Emitted by the sun it's trapped in lunar rock possibly at concentrations of up to 50 parts per billion but more likely 5-10ppb. The utility of extracting it from the Moon is hotly debated. On Earth isolating it from normal helium involves the same sort of centrifuge used to isolate isotopes of uranium, radium, hydrogen but there is far less of it than in lunar soil.

This is not actually the case in the subject at hand. It's all normal helium. When cooled enough all other gases will precipitate out as they freeze - including Hydrogen - leaving only helium as a gas and so easily isolated. That's actually why it's valuable since it's the only gas that will boil off at temperatures so low that the conductors immersed in the fluid will superconduct supporting the currents necessary for the intense electromagnets used in imaging and such. /Explaining nerd jokes since 1983

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

Other similar stars were here in this galaxy for 8 billion years before the Sun even formed - twice as long as then to now. Inception of life as we know it on Earth was effectively instant upon planet formation, which was contemporaneous with solar ignition.

There are no FTL speeds. No exceptions.