NOT a chicken and egg problem. The real genius is building the two businesses together - you need to build a large capacity for space launch, and make it less wasteful (i.e. reusable rockets) to get the cost down. BUT to get costs down you need volume. So you start your own business that needs a lot of launch capacity, paid for by your customers. The need for huge volumes of space launch capacity will come, so later your simply expand your customer base to fill your launches.

IIRC (and I may be wrong) Rockefeller did something similar - bought up all the oil refineries and built railroads with the sole purpose of moving oil from the oil wells of others to the refineries he owned. And other cargo on those railroads came later.

Maybe look at it more of "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" than a chicken and egg situation.

Anyone thought to build massive solar power arrays ON the grounds of old nuke plants???? Problem solved!

As in mine. Seems simple enough - you need an ID to get a ballot, and are crossed off the current roles by the attendants who look you up, so no repeat customers. You mark your ballot, no identifying information on it, just the votes. Then feed it into the counting machine and are shown the door out - with police there to make sure you do in fact exit.

The counting machine tallies the votes and there is no reason it can't be updating a master count somewhere for near-instant vote updates.

Simple, anonymous, with the paper ballots there for re-counting if necessary.

With everyone at the polling place watching everyone else there is no way to stuff the ballot box or cheat. No way to vote multiple times (unless impersonating others with fake IDs, and even that would be found out if the others showed up to vote themselves).

Still cannot grok why anything more complex, (or good god involving Windows!), would be desired by anyone.

I think the idea is that it is a safety net. If you have a job you pay into it and it mostly cancels out (probably though pay more in than get out, so it's a tax to you). If you lose your nice job, the payments continue and your payments back in get cut off. Giving you an income again - immediately - instead of applying for aid and jumping through hoops while the bills pile up. In that way, it is superior to what we have in the US today. In most other ways I think it's generally infeasible, but that's another discussion altogether.

Well said Charlie! Getting old is not much fun, physically. Many don't make allowances for that. My knees are complaining enough days now that I'm going to look into the new powered exoskeletons in a few years. Still early days for them, but they show promise.

Not at all - I've done the Crawford trail hike up (and down) Mt. Washington in New Hampshire with friends. 18 miles of Mountain terrain in one day. At the top you can get souvenirs like bumper stickers for your car: "This car climbed Mt. Washington".

Unfortunately they did not have any T-shirts like: "Forget the car - this BODY climbed Mt. Washington".

Pity - I would have bought one. There being an auto roadway to the summit in no way diminished our satisfaction.

Found the other Amiga user!

If I amputate your mustache and affix it to myself, am I wearing a fake mustache?

It sounds like you're saying no. I disagree. If I were wearing a wig made of human hair, my hair is still fake, even if my fake hair is made of real hair.

So we have to account for multiple possibilities - the robot could be wearing a real fake mustache, a fake fake mustache, or perhaps one day we'll see them extrude their own.

And now that Meta has made small hand-held devices that you talk to, and that talk back, as interfaces to AI agents, we have officially come full circle.

Correct - though we had some nuclear powered cruisers, they're all decommissioned - and have been for some time.

That assumes (a) there's a price tag on the item, (b) that price updates happen correctly and (c) the barcode/scanner/computer registers the right item.

I will not use them, but that's because of a quirk of our legal system that leaves customers exposed when they aren't with a cashier.

People have been arrested after the fact over self-checkout mistakes that never would have happened had there been a human cashier. The reason is that the cashier signals acceptance of the deal, takes the money, and concludes the transaction. If they make a scanning mistake, or the price is wrong, or the barcode was wrong, or whatever, that's on the store - they accepted payment and concluded the transaction. If you use their robot scanner, you are representing to the machine what you claim to be purchasing, and LP can later review cameras and call the cops if they disagree.

Florida, which apparently is more enthusiastic about self-checkout than elsewhere, has defense lawyers advertising in this lane. I'll deal with humans and nope out on that whole game, thanks.

It is Apple.

Sure, but the legal mess is chaos for later.

I'm talking about the many folks who have reason kicking them when they're down, right now.

I imagine a lot of Russian businesses are very focused on the particulars of their relationship with Yandex, monitoring systems are demanding attention for everything, and technical folks are scrambling and tired by now.

I also imagine there are a lot of well-rested folks, both Russian and not, who know of an opportunity to make it worse.

Someone so wrapped up in toxic incel bullshit they're losing the ability to hold a theory of mind about other people.

They like to throw out random statistics as totems to appear somewhat tethered to reality, which betrays some remaining awareness of how far gone they are. But they're decorative facts, little different from land acknowledgements or prefatory "I'm not a racist, but..." noises, for similar purposes.

But in general, they no longer treat people as humans, with their own complicated inner lives and desires and confusions and insecurities. No, everyone is locked in to little set-piece lives governed by their looks and genes, performing deterministic dramas that just happen to highlight the incels' own insecurities. A weird, pathetic self-induced solipsism in which being miserable is more comfortable than confronting their own egos and accepting that dealing with insecurity is just part of the human condition.

It is pointless to suggest this, but I will anyway: the fix is to actually talk to humans like you're one, too. Don't run some game you think you're supposed to play, don't put on a mask, don't puff up. Have a conversation, learn how they're different, what they care about, what makes them tick. If you don't treat (at least all) your interpersonal relations as conflicts to either win or lose, you might find you actually... enjoy their company, and they might find they enjoy yours.