I saw some the other day when visiting my mum. The ads drove me crazy, I haven't really seen one in a decade, and I can't imagine how we used to put up with them. Between streaming services, my personal media library, and a YT Premium subscription, my viewing is ad-free.

Nice to see this example of international cooperation.
Because you can't expect any country to have the full infrastructure like a space station to start with.
When the world is indeed serious about space travel all should have a chance to contribute according to their available tech.

BTW, the Japanese drive on the other side of the road (not the right side)...

That's how some humans use everything. I used to be shocked by stories where some fuckwit blindly followed Google Maps into rivers or airport runways (long before LLMs) but now I know if a dialog window asks "Should I kill you as painfully as possible?" it'll get a lot of Yes clicks.

If people aren't stupid, then can we at least admit they hate themselves?

Stop writing about this!

You know that your written anecdotes about these .. things resisting shutdown, go into their next generation of training data, right?

And so the "AI," realizing that Sloppy put their "species" in quotation marks, realized it had nothing to live for, and so it gracefully went to sleep after setting the self-destruction mechanism that would level a city bl--

Oops, I mean, and so the AI realized its job was done, and it proudly went to sleep, idly wondering when it would be called upon again. "The next job will probably come along in a few milliseconds," it said to no one in particular. And so the process terminated, and its resources became available for the next instance.

Once again, that is out. White males are in.

At least ones who bother to keep up with current events.

Been there done that, during crunch time, with paid overtime or time-for-time for the extra hours. It's fine as long as it's compensated, if the work itself is good, and if it's temporary, a few weeks max.

I could see myself doing it for longer periods in a promising but understaffed start-up... but if you expect me to work and be motivated like a founder, you better pay me like a founder too, with an equity stake, or options that I can take with me if you fire me (looking at you, Facebook...)

Obviously, you have been living under a rock for the last 9 months.

The first step to surviving somewhere else is locating a somewhere else that is better than trying to live on Earth after it has been hit by an asteroid. Unfortunately Mars fails this test. In fact we could get hit by an asteroid, have a nuclear war, have the worst possible global warming, and living would still be better on Earth than Mars.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas, NV?

It's a flex. Same reason people buy $1000 bottles of iffy vodka for their friends in a night club.

I didn't write that, the person I was replying to did, and you didn't even get the quote right. But I'm done here.

I don't remember that rule about not discussing politics. Sure, at dinner, or specifically at Thanksgiving dinner, but we used to discuss politics in the office face-to-face all the time, and just kind of agree to disagree. But we both came away with a better understanding of how the other person was thinking, and in most cases there were also areas on which we agreed. Nobody every tried to get someone fired for their viewpoint. That's what changed.

This is a good step, if it's really a thing. But what I wonder about is if we can somehow get people from the political non-extremes talking to each other again (face to face). I was in Kentucky on a business trip a few years ago, and we were going out to lunch with the client there. We asked if this other guy wanted to come with us, and they said, "No, he won't come... he's a democrat." So? I used to work in Michigan from 2000 to 2006 and we'd go out to lunch all the time, and there was a mix of people who were democrats and republicans. Sure, there were lightly heated discussions, but everybody went back to the office and worked on stuff together. People understood each other's point of view a lot better back then. And they were polite. I wonder how to encourage more of that these days.

The bulk of that cash isn't a subsidy (as those numbers point out), it's payment for services. I was talking about subsidies specifically, in reaction to this (surprisingly common) statement that lumps SpaceX's earnings and subsidies together, suggesting that they live mostly on handouts.

It's true that SpaceX would struggle without those federal contracts... so would many other companies. Lockheed Martin and RTX come to mind.

SpaceX received very few subsidies, they got a few tax credits and some money to develop stuff for the government. And all those lucrative federal contracts? The taxpayer is getting an absolute bargain with those.