The flying system seems to be the same one used in Thunderbirds.

I think at one time they did say they had antigravity of some sort. Apparently all it can do is make the ship weightless, and you need rockets in order to make it move around or change it's velocity.

The moon base set, as well as a lot of the models, were built for continuing the show UFO which was pretty successful at the time. That however got cancelled in the USA, and they had to come up with some new idea that reused the sets. That led to this strange story...

Orbital Factories are unlikely to employ very many human workers.

For used cars, at least, I would like to test-drive the actual one I am buying. It is not clear from the description whether this is possible though.

A deliberate attack to knock out as many satellites as possible is a very different thing from Kessler syndrome. The blame for such an act would in no way be on the owner of the satellites that got taken out.

China is a threat when it allows them to game the stock market to get rich quick. China isn't a threat, when it allows them to game the stock market to get rich quick. American companies are a threat when it allows them to game the stock market to get rich quick. Getting the idea here?

There's 10,000 starlink sats, each of which is about 30 m^2. That's 300,000 m^2. Meanwhile, the total area available in that orbit is 510,000,000,000,000 m^2, they take up 0.000,000,05% of the space up there. And that's assuming that they sit flat on the orbital plane, which they don't.

It works with subsidized phone plans. So not sure what you are trying to get at here.

There isn't a political union, only a trade union. All the laws are in the interest of improving trade.

You said what the difference is yourself. Leave, rejoin, leave rejoin, leave rejoin causes chaos and churn. Leave, rejoin can be a populace being tricked by right wing elements into making a dumb decision, and it's very unlikely that a country that's done that is going to re-leave after discovering how badly it turned out for them. Do you really think the UK would be likely to leave again any time in the next 50 years if they rejoined now, having discovered just how wrong the tories were, and just how right the left were? If they were made to join schengen, and the euro to re-join then they lose their border checkpoints, and ability to produce currency, and leaving becomes much harder, adding yet more reasons why it's unlikely that they'd re-leave.

It doesn't make any sense to say "no, we're not going to trade with the 5th biggest economy in the world, that's right next door to us, because this one time, they made a dumb mistake."

Apparently none have been seen over Epstein island

Holy shit... I just noticed...

"€, 'blah' £, $!"

Did slashdot finally fix the stupid text encoding bug?

Meh, taking petty revenge doesn't make sense from a diplomatic stand point. The fact is that both the UK, and the EU have a lot to gain by trading with each other, and sharing regulations. Refusing to do that is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Dealing with countries like Orban's Hungary is easily doable by taking a much more nuanced approach than "once you leave you're done".

For example, the UK would hopefully learn its lesson about leaving because before they left, they had a privileged position, with vetos, and the ability to opt out of implementing certain regulation, and not being part of schengen, and opting out of the €uro, and ... By leaving and rejoining (if it ever happens) they will (presumably) lose all of those benefits. If they were to do it again, and prove themselves to be abusing the mechanism, I'm sure the penalties would become much more harsh, and people would become much more reticent to let them back in.

Long story short - most diplomacy works best by taking a nuanced, and in general, forgiving approach, not by blunty applying rules like "if you leave you never get back in".

Of course... I might be biased in all these. I'm a Scot who voted to stay in (like most Scots by a wide margin). I of course very much want it to be possible for us to rejoin.

No idea why you'd want to say "you've got to stay out for 2 decades", but certainly "you've got to actually participate in the union if you want back in" is entirely reasonable, and I say that as a Brit.

Uhhhh... I'm sorry, what? No it hasn't. Generally, the more socialist areas of Europe have had far lower poverty rates than the more capitalist areas, and America. Unchecked capitalism has been an absolute disaster for poverty.