That’s [part of] what regulatory frameworks are supposed to accomplish: minimize and compensate for capitalism’s excesses. A free market can do a lot of very impressive things with surprising efficiency, but it fails on a number of things societies value, FOSS included.
IMHO, there should be more robust publicly funded support for license enforcement, facilitated access to forming charitable/non-profit organizations, subsidized grants/loans, and something akin to the Public Broadcasting Service, but for the internet. Sort of like a national intranet, with federated social media, web archives, public service portals, email, digital asset storage, and software development and distribution resources.
But that’s just my democratic socialist head-canon. No doubt such a system would be incredibly difficult to implement, and come with any number of unintended consequences that, for the purposes of this discussion, I chose to ignore. It’s also worth noting that there are several of those things in the USA’s federal government already: you can find open source software repositories for a number of federal agencies, like NASA and the NSA (which includes several fun projects).
Ego driven and foolish. Starship stacks up a multitude of project risks each of which has to be perfectly solved or the whole project fails. As Elon fans will point out, all of these problems can be solved in KSP. But only a fraction of them will work out in real life.
Elon has been quoted in the media recently proposing preposterous launch cadences. He has to, even though they are preposterous as they appear to be. If he had to admit that launch cadence is never going to be much faster than Falcon, he would also be admitting that getting starship to the moon will never happen.
If he had to admit that Starship isn't up to its payload spec, he would have to admit that no matter the launch cadence, starship will never be refueled in orbit, and therefore never get beyond low Earth orbit.
Apollo is the subject of several books on project management for good reason. Starship will become a case study in how not to do it.
... untill Musk no longer matters. After that, that project is going in the trash faster than you can blink. Its a collosal waste of time, money, and resources, and its never going to work.
I've been anxious about this prospect. Having seen the rightward ideological lurch all over the world caused by immigration in the last 15-years, the relatively extreme mass migration that's likely as the planet gets warmer promises to be an existential threat to any number of societies. In my opinion, we should be looking ahead and tempering our attitudes for what seems increasingly inevitable. It's quite literally the least we can do, since the cessation of oil consumption has yet to make an appearance at the proverbial table.
I’m more inclined to agree with you, but the replies to this did strike me as darkly funny. These exceptions for the chosen in-group are some of the hallmarks of fascism, and this administration has leveraged several other popular tropes as well—fetishizing Greek/Roman mythologies, hobbling academia and the press, ethnic cleansing, Christian Nationalism, revisionist history, idolatry, eugenics, etc.. Fascism is a term I would have called absurdly exaggerated just a few years ago, but to the extent that the President and his administration are the leaders in both policy and diplomacy, I think it’s probably fair to level a judgement that their behavior is the contemporary set standard for the United States. This is a fascist country right now.
But I agree with you that nuance-free oversimplifications are likely unhelpful in any meaningful discussion.
These things don’t usually happen overnight, and for the vast majority of the public it will never be directly visible. It’s not like someone flips a “Anti-Antifa” switch and a bunch of ultra-starched uniformed troops start goose-stepping through Toledo. It’s a developing series of dynamic events, many of them will seem rational, justified even, but the result is concentrated executive power, a toothless legislature, a complicit judiciary, and a pliant mainstream press. I’m sure there are lots of people who will recognize these for what they are: an alarming number of dominoes falling towards a totalitarian dictatorship.
However the United States is a big, complex beast of a country, and the judiciary has not been fully captured, and neither has the legislature. All we need to do to stop this creeping authoritarianism is show up in-force and vote overwhelmingly against it this November. They will obviously try to confuse the issue with any close calls, and use such opportunities to assert dominion over local/state governments. We cannot let that happen. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to show up strong enough to make the results beyond question. That’s the ultimate test that we are still a nation of laws, and I am cautiously optimistic.
I’m usually very tolerant of others’ varying capacities, but 100% this. High-school level reading and comprehension shouldn’t be a hard ask for professionals.
Sending a wall of text in an email is, IME, ~never^1 the right thing to do. If more than a fraction of colleagues fall into that bad habit, soon all anyone will be doing is email. Let alone if you try to respond to one of the too many points in an overlong message, or loop someone else into the conversation(s) which are now hopelessly fragmented. It's akin to a self-inflicted DoS attack.
1. Exceptions do exist (eg if the message is intended solely for and addressed to a single recipient, and includes a disclaimer / request / reminder about general email hygiene), but they're vanishingly rare.
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