They have everything they need, land and water and electricity and tons and tons and tons of money. The billionaires can go anytime they want. California doesn't need them.

You're right about one thing though keep taxing billionaires and there won't be any, just citizens. And I think that's a good thing.

You have to consolidate your loans into private loans to do this and as soon as you do that you lose all the protections that come from having public loans. You will then have your wages immediately garnished by the private company that owns your loans

Trump is a crook and everyone knows it. Every single thing he does has to be scrutinized for the angle. Meanwhile they just retired Air Force One and replaced it with a foreign made plane that is probably stuffed full of listening devices. It was also a 1 billion dollar bribe to Trump and he plans to take the plane when he leaves office, if he leaves office, and use it as his personal taxpayer funded jet.

I used to think the baby boomers could burn everything to the ground for everybody else and get away with it but Trump is accelerating the pace so fast I don't think they're going to get away with it. The older ones of course will die before the shit hits the fan but if you're under 60 you're in for a world of hurt and maybe even the under 65 set isn't going to get away with it

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

The people who built the submarine intentionally sailed it into international waters in order to get around the regulations that would prevent them from deploying an unsafe submersible like that. There were regulations in place to stop them. The point I was making was that it is trivial to get around those regulations because you can just load your shit up sail it out into international waters and suddenly blammo no regulations.

The solution would be additional regulations that prevented them from taking the unsafe submersible into international waters but nobody wants to do that because we often use workarounds like that to allow underpaid crews of sailors to go out in unsafe vessels to make money for billionaires or at least multi multi-millionaires...

I don't know why you would write something so obviously wrong. Did you just point chat GTP at my post and ask for a conservative themed reply? Or are you really that dedicated to being obviously wrong?

You're trying to boil down complex processes to a single sentence. That's the kind of thinking a 12 year old engages in. I'm not insulting you but I am calling you out. You are a full grown man and I think you know better.

There's a guy on YouTube that does these hilarious videos about how formula 1 teams cheat. So the formula One governing body will come up with all sorts of rules and the racing teams will do increasingly crazy shit to cheat those rules and win, oftentimes they will violate the Spirit of the rule without the letter of the rule and get away with it until next season.

That's why doing a simple straightforward regulatory framework like you suggest doesn't work and it doesn't exist. You are there have arbitrarily applied rules by a well ruling class or you don't really have any rules because they are child's Play to get around.

This is why the law is so stupidly complex and why we need lawyers to interpret it. It's like patching and operating system only the operating system is basic human reality so you can't just delete everything and start over.

I get the impulse to want to go back to a simpler time when everything was more straightforward but we just can't do that. We have to live in the world we live in.

Is because if something can save a billionaire half a plugged nickel they're going to do it. It's the same reason we worry about nuclear meltdowns. Yes all of these problems have long since been solved but it costs a bit of money to solve them. That's money that could go to making the next trillionaire.

America has tons of land we can put wind and solar farms on. It makes absolutely no sense to take the risk of our virtually untethered billionaire class skipping out on some maintenance or proper storage of nuclear waste in safe locations. We already know that we as a country are unwilling to curtail even an ounce of their power. There is a thread here about taxing Californian billionaires that is dominated by people convinced that if you tax people with more money than God then the next obvious thing is they're going to text you until you lose your house. That is actually in that thread.

I would block any attempt to deploy nuclear power in America outside of military applications because sooner or later American voters are going to do something stupid and put somebody stupid in charge and it's going to blow up in my face. I mean for fuck sakes we are about to give Iran $300 billion dollars cash and that's the best we can hope for out of the mess that the American voter put us in. And you want me to let those idiots decide how nuclear power gets regulated? Not a fucking chance. I would rather die from lung cancer breathing in toxic fumes from a coal fired plant.

Nuclear problems are social not technical and so us nerds like to pretend they don't exist because the last thing we want to think about are those filthy filthy humans getting in the way of our super cool technology

We're always trying to shift the blame to government but here I don't think there's anything the government could really do unless we want to start walking down ports. The guys who did this crap already knew what they were doing was unsafe and that any regulator that came across it would shut that shit down fast. So what they would do is they load everything up and then take it out to sea until they were far enough out that they were no longer covered by Canadian law.

At that point all you've got is maritime law which is pretty lax.

There are ways to stop this but it would require a lot more regulation and good luck getting that implemented with all the money and politics. It wouldn't just affect assholes like these it would impact every business on the planet. Now I would argue that's a good thing because we could certainly do with more regulation after 50 years of deregulation but again, money in politics.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

Once you got that much money get out of the way and let somebody else take a crack at it. I mean look at bezos and muskrat. What have they done for us lately? It's pretty clear once a billionaire gets up to the top they stop being useful. At best you get one good idea out of somebody and that's really stretching things.

You had your turn now get out of the way and let somebody else try

Now instead of attacking the basic concept of taxes because you lost that argument you're retreating to a different argument. This is a Gish scallop or a Mote and bailey. It's a logical fallacy because you're losing the argument.

You don't have a choice. You will have a government and it will be a large powerful Central government. That's because government is like a nuclear bomb. Once we invented it we were stuck with it. It's too useful. You cannot put that genie back in the bottle.

So instead of throwing up your hands and giving up like a fucking child you need to be an adult and actually fix the God damn problem. And then you need to do a fucked ton of work on maintenance so that when the systems start to break down, and they will just like your car breaks down, you have to get up off your ass and fix it. And that's your life. Over and over and over again fixing shit that other people try to break because human beings are not perfect animals.

Being an adult sucks. But you don't have any other options

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

Because if you're not stupid you don't have a single supplier. Even if one of the other suppliers isn't quite up to snuff you make sure that they get up to snuff so that you don't have a single supplier. Monopolies suck.

You are pushing direct lies. France critically depends on the European grid and has in the recent past needed to buy enough electricity to drive up prices all over Europe.

Yes. Trump has no understanding of how reality works. He only can (somewhat, barely staying out of prison) navigate being rich and powerful. He is not even an accomplished liar because he believes the nonsense he claims. But while Trump tries to only give positions to people even dumber and more disconnected than he is, he is failing at that as well and some people in his administration have more insight that he has. They just have no honor or integrity.

I do hope a significant fraction of his supporters (and hence enablers) are recoverable. Because if they are not, they represent a severe long-term problem. And while I think the only path the US has left is into the 2nd world, this will go better and recovery will be more likely and faster if many of the cultists revert to being ordinary people instead of fanatics.