Bezos suffers Projectile Dysfunction.

They'll make a deal with the king to promote more non woke content.

Well, at least that would still be some progress....

Slashdot now the home of Luddites? "Why do we need a SPACE BASE?"
A lot of people write off space 'competition' as just militaristic dick-flexing.
You do understand where ICBMs came from? There isn't a serious question that space is absolutely now a context for global-state competition; it's not dick-flexing to recognize that this will shortly expand from orbital space to really the entire cislunar sphere.
It is, in fact, one of the generally-undisputed roles of government to try to recognize a strategic vulnerability and address it proactively.

Further - and this may end up getting modded to oblivion as recounting these facts is distasteful on /. -
SpaceX is multiples cheaper than competitives in launch cost per kg - $1500-$4000 vs $18k alternatives vs $54k NASA
To suggest "SpaceX is a slush fund from Trump to Elon" makes no sense. I want our govt to be using the CHEAPEST AVAILABLE LAUNCH capability. Are you asserting they shouldn't?

BlueOrigin is well behind but commercial launch development is *significantly* driving down costs, that's unquestionable.

As far as "publicly funded" ...would you rather it be a corporate thing entirely? Does that make sense?

"It's accepted that Lithium is not rare."
You and I and some may recognize that, but the media organs have been screeching for some time about China's "monopoly" on rare earths and the west's "vulnerability" for a decade or more.
I can't count the number of times I've had to explain that yes, in fact the US has world-leading deposits of lithium. (as much as 40 million tons of reserves. vs Chinas 10)

"this process is welcome. As it has a dramatic reduction in toxic residuals from processing"
Fully agree, this would be a wonderful opportunity. Not only does this absolutely mean less toxins anywhere, this would open the chance of actually doing lithium recovery domestically (it doesn't really matter how clean the process is, I expect crowds of Earth Firsters gathering to oppose any such industry, regardless; this would just mean it has a reasonable chance of moving out of the morass of environmental protests...).

With the growing ability to run local models at home on your own hardware, especially if you have Apple Silicon computers....I'm wondering if soon we'll see a LARGE drop in subscriptions to the Frontier models?

From what I'm seeing these local models can do what about 98% of the populace needs....and you aren't sharing your data with a corporation that is just sucking up all your data into their AI?

While Blackstone's ratio has endured for nearly 1000y (Maimonides said it ca 1100 I believe) and Franklin tried to codge it for himself, every persuasive case for it involves CAPITAL punishment.
(Obviously, there's no un-do button on that....)

And if you poll most people today, they regard mis-conviction about the same as mis-exoneration meaning letting someone accidentally go free is considered just as bad as accidental conviction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And while Franklin's bullshit about safety and liberty is even more-quoted in the US, it's constantly misunderstood. Constantly the word 'essential' is skipped past. On an absolute basis, we routinely trade liberty for safety - anytime we stop at a stop light with nobody around, or stay on the right side of the empty road.

I'm actually pretty militantly libertarian myself, but thoughtless, reactive libertarianism has the odor of chaos and anarchy.

In your rush-to-snark, you misread the previous poster as part of your anti-elon congregation yourself.
The post wasn't ironic, it was genuine, pointing out there isn't anything close as an alternative.

It's not because you were born different than me. Your body adapts to however you eat. It responds well to your typical diet because that's what it's used to. If you switch to a different diet there will be a short period of your body being confused and telling you to go back to what it knows. Then it will adapt to the new diet, and you'll find eating healthy food feels great.

I consider my regular diet to be for the most part Healthy!!

My blood work numbers verify this...

I like veggies, I try to eat what's in season, I mix this in with a very LOW carb diet...ditching most all grains and leaning Keto towards the carnivore side of things.

I like to cook and most all I consume is cooked from scratch.

Someone rapes your mother, and the police know who it was (and thus his license), but they don't know where he is.

Are you seriously going to argue "it doesn't matter if we could catch your mother's rapist using new technology"?

No..what matters is they get a fucking warrant to then access any information they want.

They should not just have dragnet type data to they can just look through to find a crime.....they should need probably cause, and get warrants....you know, like the US Constitution says?

Crimes go unsolved every day! Serious crimes

That sucks.

BUT....it is still MORE important to protect our constitutional rights,.....dragnets without specific warrants cannot be tolerated.....

...is to not collect the data in the first place.

ok, if the teddybear eyes were not made in one country the fur made in another the stuffing made in another the packaging made in another then all assembled in yet another.....it would cost 20 times more.. because we can't afford to pay workers to do so..... we would need to find an alternative to the teddybear. like a block of wood or an old sock. do you understand that.....?

Really?

It really wasn't THAT long ago that in the US we did precisely that...we make pretty much EVERYTHING in country....go back to look at the 70's and 60's...etc.

We make most of what we consumed....no reason we couldn't do it again...

Is that a serious question? Even in the late '70s when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the kids were dealing with the technology the parents didn't understand. While that is starting to be inverted (GenX and Millennials seemed to be peak tech-able), many parents still rely on the kids for that sort of thing.

Except that SpaceX is massively profitable and offering the lowest launch prices compared to anyone by a large margin - so ... why wouldn't people continue to invest?

I checked a few different analyses and they said that comparisons are challenging because Chinese tests are generally much milder and less "real world" than US test regimes. (Not to mention that the Chinese micro ev is sort of a China only vehicle type).
Generally Tesla are ranked extremely well in Chinese "real world" tests too.