Cool.

Now imagine that Trump could deplatform all Democrats from government, employment and the financial system by simply deleting their Digital ID.

One click, all gone. Nothing they can do about it because they no longer exist in the digital world.

> Falcon 9 generously halved the previous price to orbit.

Note that there's a difference between price and cost.

I've seen estimates of a Falcon-9 flight with a reused booster costing around $20,000,000 which is about $1,000 a kilo to orbit. The Space Shuttle was around $20,000 a kilo and Ariane is apparently over $5,000 a kilo. So the cost is maybe 1/5 of traditional launchers.

The price is higher because when there's no competition in your price range there's no reason to cut prices lower than you have to.

If laws were primarily used by criminals to rob the law-abiding, why would you want laws?

The Sullivan Act was literally pushed by a gang-affiliated politician because the gangs were fed up with law-abiding folks shooting them when they tried to commit crimes and wanted the law-abiding disarmed.

Was that law a good idea?

"Just because something always fails, why should we stop doing it? Maybe it will work this time!"

That and because he's not Christian.

Regulation is always used by big business to keep small competitors out of the market. So why should we keep doing it?

It doesn't seem possible to disentangle LEO lift from missiles with rocket technology so you can understand the argument.

Same with Starlink. We just learned that the attack on the Girl's high school dorm in Luhansk last week was done with four plywood and epoxy drone airplanes with manually targeted rockets strapped to the wings. Strapped to the top of the fuselage was a Starlink mini, per analyst reports (cf. Garland Nixon stream from last night) so operators could guide the rockets into the dormitory.

Perhaps with Exodus Technology's lifters we can get away from rockets for lift. I'm rooting for their success.

Some are blaming AI targeting but that just shows Musk is hip deep in the whole kill stack. Most of his stuff is dual-use, so there is always public cover. Same can be said of NASA of course.

1. China has a real government, so Xi will subsidize sales in China to take the low/mid-range gaming market away from Nvidia.
2. China has a real government, so Xi will subsidize sales outside China to take the low/mid-range gaming market away from Nvidia. Even more so if necessary to make the choice between the Nvidia card and Chinese card a no-brainer.

Nvidia's nightmare is that China starts churning out cheap GPUs and AI chips which undercut Nvidia's market. If they put just 64GB of VRAM on this 3060-equivalent card they could easily start taking the low-end AI market from Nvidia.

> Russia is so far beyond bankrupt that resuscitating roscosmos doesn't belong anywhere on its radar right now.

Russia just successfully launched its next-gen Soyuz rocket and they're raking in cash thanks to the massive increase in the price of oil from Trump's war in the Middle East. They're still behind SpaceX because they aren't even trying to reuse the launchers but they probably don't have a high enough launch rate for that to make sense.

I don't know any Catholic who listens to the Fake Pope so he has nothing to worry about. He's pushing this because his master told him to.

> We should want appropriate government regulation of AI.

Big business wants regulation to keep small competitors out of the market.

"Appropriate government regulation of AI" will be used to kill open-source AI projects and ensure that our beloved billionaires control all AI models.

When "AI-enthused defense contractors with names out of Tolkien" are literally a genre I suspect that he chose that particular citation because he knew it would lead to a few amusing crashouts.

Not if you have solar installed.

So California just provided all big companies a hugh incentive to move all their jobs to a different state before starting their layoffs?

Yep. Meta Reality Labs, Meta's metaverse division, has been losing billions ever since they bought Oculus and renamed the company Meta to indicate they were now a metaverse company... right before Zuck decided they were an AI company. What will Facebook be focusing on tomorrow? Which way is the wind blowing?

Startups are FUN! I remember my first job, crawling though an attic to run our own RS-232 cables between the VAX and our dumb terminals in our private offices. Good times! Also made one of my dumbest ever moves at that job, i.e. looped one of the highest priority communication tasks, which required making the walk of shame to the server room to reboot the machine that a dozen other people were working on.