That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

No. It isnt. Your 4% figure is closer to what is needed for a rocket sitting on the earth. LEO alone.
Just getting to LEO means on is roughly 50% of the way to anywhere else in the solar system.
The Apollo missions, for example, were 55%.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

I want to remind you that I never said 400 tons of fuel, I just used your numbers. I said 8 launches, calling Musk's 4 bull. Even with only 100 tons/fuel per launch, that's 800 tons without changing stuff up should be allow them to stuff more fuel into starship, saving weight via not needing other cargo stuff, just bigger tanks.

Also, I said "reach the moon", not "land on it".

And changing development timelines is pretty normal.

You're still rewriting the proposals to get your figures.
It isn't 100 tons of fuel per launch, it is closer to 150 that they are figuring. Hundreds of m/s is still many tons of fuel.
10 launches, not 16.
400 tons of fuel plus 220 tons is 620T total, that is about 65% fuel, easily enough to reach the moon.
Landing with 220T would need some more, but as I said, i discounted Musk's statement.

Besides, who says we'll go to the moon with v3 instead of the 200t v4?

And with saying a year or more for 5 launches, SpaceX is expending starships faster now. There isn’t any real reason to thing that they won't have 4 or more rockets and be able to turn them around quickly to get the fuel launched rapidly. Lots of testing and development first though. I'll fully admit that.
Basically just figure that starship will have to same reuse abilities as falcon 9, roughly.

They still aren't reducing payload. 200 tons is intended for block 4, block 3 is 100 tons. 100 tons was the planned payloads for the starships I was looking at.
What you might be missing is that a "refueler" starship isn't necessarily restricted to just its payload capacity for fuel transfer. It could be deliberately redesigned for holding more fuel more efficiently, so when I looked it up, the plan is 8 launches. Not to mention that maybe Starship doesn't need the full 1600 tons for a moon mission. Right now, I'm seeing estimates of 8-10, though higher is possible of course. It's active development, things could change. Musk said it could be as few as four, but I tend to discount him.

Looking, it's around 6 km/s of delta-v to land on the moon from LEO. It should have right around 6 km/s when fully loaded (100 tons). So a full fuel load would be mandated. But they're also figuring on the lunar starship having some fuel on board after launch, and tanker starships being able to move ~150 tons per launch.

16 flights would be a worst case scenario.

Looking at figures for SLS for deliveries to LEO vs TLI, you're looking at needing ~60-70% of the payload to LEO to be propellant for TLI. In an ideal sense, around 50% might work, but 55% is probably the realistic minimum.

I moved zero goalposts. Moving the goalposts is when a person initially supports one position, then changes it when challenged. Given that I'd only made ONE post of the topic, that's hard to do.

The discussion was about equivalency, as you say. Personally, I consider "cost" a very important metric when considering equivalency. It's not like I only looked at cost either, I looked at the total payload as well. I considered the number of launches as well, for which Starship would still be cheaper even if it takes 10 times as many launches.

As for it being a "fucking month" of launches, who says? SpaceX is building multiple starship launch points, they've launched 3 falcon rockets in a single day before, 14 rockets in a single month.
If it takes 10 launches for the mission, that would be closer to two weeks, not a month. They CAN keep it up right now. They've done it before. Yes, lots of stuff to scale up, but you should recognize that Starship is still in development, they can build more hardware and ground equipment as necessary to support this stuff.

Also, is it really worth spending 10 times as much in order to send 1/3rd the stuff "in a single shot" in order to save a week or so? Odds are, given the costs of SLS, that they wouldn't save the time anyways - delays and overruns will still let Starship launch faster (once in service).

And you've actually identified yourself as the moron, thank you very much. You see, I'm not the one that called SLS obsolete. You did.

It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.

I don't know what what means?

Somebody did make a price comparison, I did.

And yes, I looked into it. Looking into something doesn't have to be a deep dive, I don't need to be 100% up on the topic.

Besides, v3 is only v3. There's more development room. Besides, you must not have looked into it by your own standard, because v3 is bigger than V2, increasing capacity, bot decreasing it.

For all the savings of launch capacity if it takes 3 launches of starship to equal 1 launch of SLS, Starship costs so much less that we can just build more launch capacity. Ground facilities are not that expensive.

Looking, SLS is 47 metric tons to lunar transfer orbit, starship is 100 to the surface.
But you are right, it is 10-20 expended starships for 1 SLS launch. Closer to 100 for recovered reusable starships.