If the only thing in your life is entertainment, then you are already (metaphorically) dead. Goethe wrote about this in Faust.

Some people put a lot of work into curating their slop feed.

Reagan and Stockman made much of the 'multiplier effect' to justify their bloated military spending, but actually NASA has the highest multiplier effect of anything the US gov't does, something like 7 to 1. This would indicate NASA's R&D generates enough in taxes that they actually **MAKE MONEY** off the organization. Gerard O'Neil's university class did a study in the late '70s and found, to everyone's astonishment, that just the taxes of the advances in telecommunications generated by the space program would have paid for the entire Apollo program by the mid-'80s.

By all the gods, conservatives are the biggest frelling cowards on the planet. We spend more than the next ten countries COMBINED, eight of which are our frelling ALLIES, and it's still not enough to calm their fears of the boogieman under the bed.

The US military has two uses currently, as a protection racket for multinational corporations and dictatorships which reward our high officials sufficiently and as mercenaries against the powerless who attempt to resist them.

Ah, live in Colorado too? Seriously there were something like 14 props/amendments on the ballot this year, most of which were insane right wing copypasta that some megadonor group apparently pushes every year in every state with direct ballot initiatives. The couple that were specific to our state were switching from flat tax to income tax (and a tax cut for everyone making less than $250000) as well as another right wing one to trick people into undoing the income tax change.

It's the cost of a viable and vigorous free press. If it is easier to sue an win a defamation suit, it becomes a powerful tool to stifle reporting. It's also important to people who post on public forums because lowered protection cultured result in expensive court cases for them as well.

In Meta's case, if they actually did it then that may reach the actual malice level, depending on what was said, but IANAL so who knows?

Because 1984 was just copying what people were already doing.

Can we start a whisper campaign to discredit Facebook?

Before I make an argument, I want to know if you have the intellect to understand it. That's why I asked if you'd read the paper or not.

You're talking about someone else's goalposts, not mine. I can't think of a real scenario where space data centers are cheaper than land data centers.

Maybe or maybe not, but it's actively under construction.

That's a problem? As someone from a northern climate, it baffles me that the fear of the dark is this powerful. I doubt predators lurking in the shadows are put out by a difference of 60 minutes. "Oh drat! My abduction is foiled by a clock adjustment. Curses!"

Orbital data centers interfere with space bats and weightless warblers. You can't win.

Did you actually read the paper, or did you watch a movie made by someone who pretended to read the paper?

Datacenters in space are to support Golden Dome. Google is working for the US military. It's not about price.

NASA isn't allowed to "launch something better, cobbled together with modern tech", they can only do what the herd of technophobic lawyers in Congress allow them to do. Unfortunately they put a far, far higher priority on killing people around the world than advancing our species into the future.

2025 Pentagram budget - $750 billion
All NASA budgets since creation combined, including Apollo - $650 billion

2025 Space Farce budget - $32 billion
2025 NASA budget - $25 billion

This is why we can't have nice things.

I am not an alarmist, and I don't reach for the regulatory hammer on a whim - or, actually ever - but I can't think of more objectionable, destructive behaviour. Build an empire on the backs of the output of the masses, then systematically destroy the value of that world for everybody but themselves. How is this not hijacking click through en masse?

I think Google needs to be stopped. And since the moat is so vast, I think it should be done by government intervention.

Good luck with that, though, on the American front.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.