Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

And that attitude is why you are going to lose.

They cant get their own designs manufactured on EUV machines built by a Dutch company, due to export restrictions placed on those machines by the US...

Which just means that China will develop its own independent capability.

And yes, that might take 10-20 years, but to China thats not a long time, thats just the time it takes - while other countries think about timescales in 5-10 year spurts, China has plans set out 50 years ahead. And China accepts that things take time.

So it really depends on what you mean by "fast".

Ahh no, services and software are not included in the trade deficit calculations for some reason...

So the fact that the world uses American cloud services, financial services and other things - yeah, not important, and you should definitely ignore the fact that those things alone flip deficits on their heads for most countries.

The US: "You arent buying enough from us! You need to buy more from us!"

Also the US: "You cant buy basically anything that you actually need, we forbid it - buy more cheap bulk goods that you can get from anywhere rather than the technology goods you actually want perhaps?"

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

It *is* the equivalent of a visa because it dictates whether or not you can travel to the US. If you cannot travel to the US, you cannot use your visa waiver privilege.

They can call it whatever they want, and you can fixate on the name if you want to bury your head in the sand.

There is literally no way to travel to the US currently without either an ESTA or a visa. At this point, visa waiver doesnt matter because its been nullified by the ESTA requirement.

"Hey, you no longer need prior permission to travel to the US, how cool is that!!! Oh, but you need to ask permission to travel to the US before you can use that privilege..."

Sorry but I disagree - an ESTA dictates whether you can travel at all, it does not fill the same role as an arrivals card because you are already in transit at that point, and arrivals cards also cover things like bio security, customs requirements etc.

With the expansion of ESTA to entry by land in 2022, you literally cannot present at any US entry point without having been approved first by the US government - if you do not have that permission, you cant use your visa waiver privilege at all, and the point of that privilege was that you did not need prior permission!

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

If you were eligible to get an ESTA, then you were eligible for VWP - without the ESTA existing you wouldnt be going to an consulate, you would just be flying/driving/sailing/walking/whatever to the US. And you still have the same likelihood of being granted entry.

My point is, the VWP is pointless because it was supposed to be a "you dont need to apply for permission before travelling" privilege for some countries citizens, and now it very much is a "theres no way to go to the US without applying for permission before travelling".

Effectively, you now need prior permission to travel to the US. Either its with an ESTA or its with an actual traditional visa.

Also, the ranking is flawed because most western nations these days require a pre-travel electronic authorisation of some sort, which basically is the equivalent to a visa (you cant travel to the country without one).

For example, the US has a Visa Waiver Program with many countries, which technically means you can travel to the US without applying for a visa.

But, since 2007 you have needed either an ESTA or an actual issued visa before you can travel to the US by sea or air.

And the ESTA requirement was expanded to travel by land in 2022, basically meaning there is no way to arrive at the US without prior approval - so in actuality, the ESTA is now a visa for the US, but not one which allows actual entry, just the possibility of entry.

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.