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Comment Re:Precedents only matter when SCOTUS says they do (Score 2, Informative) 176

yeah, that's why SCOTUS was not given Judicial Review powers in the Constitution and just declared fifteen years later that it had that ultimate power "because we have to".

The Legislature is supposed to manage this nonsense. It has been in a coma since 1995.

Comment Re:Small enough to be interesting (Score 1) 35

Given its small size it might be better to land a small mining module on the rock and then carve it up in situ to expand that module into a small space station.

We need to do this with the Taurus cluster to prevent another Tunguska event, but better to start small and practice closer. It's so much more profitable to not lift mass from Earth than it is to send it down.

Taurus has enough asteroids to build Space Station Alpha. Might be a nice vacation spot.

Comment Re:They tried (Score 1) 44

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

Comment Re:Growing body of evidence of damage to humans (Score 0) 17

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

Comment Aspects (Score 1) 76

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

Comment Pentagon Papers (Score -1, Troll) 263

They don't have to do this but most "journalists" are hacks that engage in Access Journalism (which is a type of bribery).

They aren't hard-driving gumshoe drunks like the legendary journalists of yore who sought to speak truth to power. They're mostly stenographers for the rich and powerful now (yay, journalism school!)

It will be interesting to see if any leave out of principle. I doubt more than 10% will. You can pretty much distrust any stories from the ones who stay.

Comment Re:Going for gold (Score 1) 259

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

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