A cargo plane can crash a maximum of once and can carry hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of packages. A drone carries one. Furthermore, a cargo plane will move from hub to hub, carrying cargo in each flight. A drone must go in both directions for that one package.

So whilst I technically agree with you, if an aircraft can carry N times as much as a drone, then the drone MUST be 2N times as reliable as an aircraft to be considered equal.

Ooooh, this should be interesting.

Trump, et al, don't consider proof to be all that important, all that matters is publicity, headlines, and transfer of more power to Trump personally.

The courts will likely take a very different view. Unless hard evidence (something Trump has never been able to supply in any court case, either instigated by him or against him), terrorism charges won't survive. But, of course, Trump isn't interested in winning cases like this, he's interested in playing victim and demanding more power.

True, but conditionally.

Remember the Firestone/Bridgestone tyre scandal, when the company got hauled into Senate hearings because SUVs kept rolling? Remember the Boeing scandal, when their aircraft would plunge out the sky? If a product is operated when known to be defective, your immunity in the case of accidents shrinks.

So it's going to depend on just how safe Amazon drones are. If they're normally safe and reliable, Amazon is safe. If, however, Amazon drones are well-known to lose control under normal and expected conditions, then the picture changes sharply.

As of now, we (the regular plebs) don't know which of those two cases it is. We should not second-guess in either direction, but rather acknowledge that it hinges entirely on what anyone finds out.

Amazon is working on the repairs?

If they can't fly a drone without turning it into a weapon of mass destruction, I'm not entirely convinced I'd feel safe with them a thousand miles of fresh bricks and just-mixed mortar. Always assuming that that's what was delivered. The robots go to a specific coordinate in a warehouse, not a specific product, and there's plenty of bogus stuff sold via Amazon stores.

If I were in that building, I would be very very scared to hear Amazon was repairing it.

The doubts will last for as long as the depression, during which the wealthy will be buying up bitcoin like mad. Once Bitcoin heads back into the 100k region, everyone will decide it IS digital gold, and push it up higher, at which point the wealthy will sell off, causing a collapse that the "everyone elsers" essentially pay for, and the cycle will continue.

And that is all bitcoin is. It's all the stock market is, too. A tool for pumping money from 401K plans and the gambling poor into the hands of the wealthy.

He's a Martian robot spy send to sabotage the Earth prior to the invasion.

He probably bought shares in the company that makes the bars and considered that good enough.

Duggan: You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Romana: If YOU wanted an omelette, I'd expect to find a pile of broken crockery, a cooker in flames and an unconscious chef.

I dunno, I.... just connect this scene to Musk's diabolical plans.

Misread that as "lunches" and wondered when SpaceX started hiring hobbits from the Shire.

Hmmmm. Microsoft did just fine with lying (even in court), and Enron would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those pesky kids and their mangy brownouts.

Psychologists argue that a primary trait of a good CEO is psychopathy, since it requires a personality that has no remorse or compassion and a willingness to do whatever it takes.

^thermodynamics^reality

I thought the plan was to use Grok to replace the rocket engineers.

Be fair! Musk rolled a natural 20 and passed his Charisma check agains the Orc Shareholders. Perfectly fair roll. Ok, the lead weight that fell out a little later was a little suspect, but that was definitely a natural 20.

The good news is that the Kessler effect won't wreck the next 14 parsecs.

The bad news is that I'm pretty certain we're well within that region. Even back in the Space Shuttle days, they were replacing windscreens due to paint flecks causing massive damage. We've far, far more stuff out there now.

Taxing assets is indeed incredibly hard.

A tax system based around the logistics function (so that the tax owed is the definite integral between the starting point and end point, with no tax credits for anything, and the function is asymptotic to acceptable extremes at both ends) would seem to be the best system in terms of a pay-as-you-earn type function, because you don't get anomalies on boundary conditions or weird pay schedules, and you should be able to eliminate most of the cost of the tax rebate system.

However, integrating that with assets is hard. Which assets would be included? If all of them, then that would have to include properties, and property values fluctuate massively. If you only include "squishy" assets like stocks (where you can sell them quickly), it would be easier but you'd have to know what happens if the upper end of the integral is below the lower end. Do you pay back? If so, what happens during a market crash? If neither side pays anything when the tax integral is negative, is that something that can be exploited to form a loophole in the system?

I honestly think one of the S-curves would be the logically correct tax system (so every cent is effectively in a new tax bracket), but deciding what goes in there is not easy.