Collective punishment is fine if you're choosing to be there. Search "BDSM group punishment" on pornhub.

Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

Much of the body positivity movement just says you shouldn't be mean to fat people, or anyone else, because of their body shape. That's what the words mean: body positivity.

There are some crazy body positivity types who actually claim that any amount of obesity is just fine and has no adverse health implications at all, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary (although I haven't met any that think anorexia is cool). That is indeed RFK Jr style crazy.

Wah, BMI is a stupid measure because I am all muscles!

Okay, we came up with much better criteria based on clinically validated measures like waist to hip ratio.

Wah, moving the goalposts! Now pass me the cheetos.

Not exactly apples-to-apples. That's like saying there is no experimental evidence that an addition problem with n+1 digits where n is the most anyone has bothered to actually add can be performed.

Besides my statement being just as true as the one I quoted, it is indeed "apples-to-apples."

You can break factoring-based public key enrcryption with quantum computers, just like you can do with classical computers. Both problems are scaling up. Both problems have possible fundamental limits in the way of scaling up to current key lengths. The difference is that for classical computing we know we're already bumping into those limits.

There is definitely theoretical evidence that movement in time can go in any direction, FTL (hello warp), and transporters can be things

An episode of Star Trek isn't theoretical evidence. There's no (definitive) theoretical evidence those things are impossible, but that's not the same as theoretical evidence that they are possible.

AI =/= LLM.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

It's not that funny. Purges of the military and government are pretty standard practice when taking over a country. You kick out anybody who can't be relied upon to support you. The problem is there tend not to be a big pool of both qualified and politically reliable replacements so by emphasizing the latter the former suffers.

Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Surviving Martian soil is the easy part. Being able to survive at near zero air pressure is the hard part.

That's not what a cancellation fee does, though. By definition, when you pay a cancellation fee, they are no longer providing service.

Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.

It's too bad you lead with this bullshit. Purposely putting their giant rocket within a fart of reaching a stable orbit is a demonstration of exquisite control, not failure. There's absolutely no reason they won't be "reaching orbit" whenever they like next year.

Rendezvous is tricky, but they already do it all the time, and with much higher stakes. Orbital fuel transfer has been done (including by SpaceX IIRC), doing it again with Starship wouldn't really be too surprising. I would be surprised if they have a finished version of a fuel depot a year from now, but not so much if they stick a stripped down Starship up there to practice on.

I'd be really surprised if they fulfill their HLS contract next year, but I'll also be surprised if they don't beat Blue Origin, Lockheed and Boeing, and with a much more capable lander at a lower cost. Artemis looks like it's been watered down into another flag planting mission, but maybe SpaceX will be able to sell lunar transport to somebody who actually wants to do something interesting. Blue Origin and Co definitely won't be.

Mars, whatever.

Would US government rocketry have been successful if not for all the preceding work by a bunch of Nazis? Would the US government itself have been successful if not for all the prceding work by enlightenment philosophers? Would enlightenment philosophers have been successful if not for all the preceding work by Gutenberg and his printing press? Would Guttenberg and his press have been successful if not for the preceding work by a bunch of lazy winos?

It's true that governments have been big launch customers. Many (not all) launch companies have designed rockets to serve government customers and then also launched private payloads on them. "On the back of" kind of suggests the GP thinks all the private satellites are ride shares on government launches, which just isn't true.

Governments aren't even the majority of the market anymore:

https://www.grandviewresearch....

Because that $2,000 is consideration for the other party providing something. If the penalty clause is the entire remainder of the contract fee, then the other party should also be compelled to provide service for the remainder of the contract term, or some equivalent consideration. Otherwise, it isn't really much of a contract.

If they get out of providing service, then you should get out of paying, except for some penalty to make up for sunk costs, e.g. the prorated cost of provisioning initial service, the prorated cost of a phone that was free with contract, etc., plus some *reasonable* amount to discourage people from pulling out of the contract on a whim.

Also, understand that the company providing the service had way more power over the contract than you. You were almost certainly told "take it or leave it" when presented with the contract. That's why putting limits on what contracts of adhesion can do is generally considered to be a critical function of government.