Tsiolkovsky’all

Why do you persist in treating the rich differently? They are just people. They aren’t a special class of people that are better or smarter. They just have more money.

Treat everyone the same, and this comes out as “why tax people”. Well, that’s a complicated question with a pretty clear answer that I don’t think is worth repeating.

Stop assuming they’re better than you. They aren’t.

Civil society requires the willing participation of the populace. It’s the best kind of society, but it’s only available to a culture that has decided not to be assholes.

I choose not to be an asshole. Even when it would be easy. Even when it would improve my life or mood or bank balance. I refuse to idolize people that are assholes. Even if they’re rich.

Even in the strictest of command economies, the opportunity to be an asshole exists. You can’t command your way into a scenario where the choice of villainy is simply unavailable. Every single one of us has to make the choice to turn away from the pull of assholery ourselves and to refuse to countenance it in others.

I still believe that we, as a species, have both the capability and the requirement to step back from that cliff. We’ve done it before. Mostly, I don’t want to live in the world your approach would create. I think the only people that would enjoy it are the folks you’ve given your free will away to.

I’ll argue! Most of this is simply wrong… but first I’m going to reject the premise of your argument.

You’re providing a false choice by suggesting that money can only be concentrated or diffused and that it can only be concentrated or diffused at the level of the single individual. You’ve placed two extremes on the table (a command economy driven by oligarchs vs a command economy driven by autocrats) and asked us to pick.

I pick neither. A command economy is not necessary to achieve reasonable societal goals, and it’s not necessary to flip the switch all the way into a 1950s Red Scare version of communism to be able to see where the economic model of unfettered capitalism breaks down.

The next problem is that you conflate the question of “how should the government collect taxes” with the question of “how should an economy operate”. Those are different questions with different answers, but the underlying principle is the same.

The government should prevent circumstances in which being an asshole is financially rewarded. The citizens should try to avoid being assholes. A civil society should correct the behavior of people that are being assholes using social pressures.

In the economic arena, that basically boils down to “not fucking over the little guy”. The government should seek to prevent circumstances where the little guy gets fucked over. The citizens should try not to fuck each other over. A civil society should shun those who violate that norm.

In the taxes arena, that basically boils down to “pay your fair share.” We all know what that looks like and feels like because we’ve had to divvy up the check after a long night of drinking. Folks with cash throw in some extra to cover their friends that might be struggling, a couple of people that are doing well might just “make the check right at the end of the night.” It works out. People know how to do this instinctively. People, by and large, know what their fair share is. Some just don’t want to pay.

In a situation where people consistently make the moral choice to not be an asshole, a lot of economic models can work. The breakdown isn’t in the economic model, it’s in the role of the civil society - society is not enforcing the “don’t be an asshole” rule. Instead, we’ve decided to idolize the assholes.

There’s not an economic model that works when everyone is trying to fuck over everyone else.

You’re focused on the wrong problem.

Dude that line of reasoning went out with Reagan, and the last time it worked was in the 1920s. You might want that to be how the rich behave, but mostly they just lock capital away and watch the numbers grow.

We don’t need an economy based on pandering to rich assholes in the hopes they give us money. We need an economy where everyone pays their fucking taxes. It’s that easy. If the very wealthy stopped hiding their money and coming up with impenetrable tax evasion schemes and just paid their taxes like everyone else, we wouldn’t have to raise them on anyone.

Betting White House networks are too locked down to game on. If Elon is gonna live under the stairs, he needs his leet gaming setup.

The reason I am generally skeptical of the technology is the same reason I’m not going to try to give you a definition.

I’ve never seen it solve a problem or be proposed as a reasonable solution to a problem. What happens instead is that someone says “could we do BLOCKCHAIN for this, it’ll make it way more modern” and the subset of people that want to look really forward-leaning and cool say “YEAH”. If that subset of people is loud enough, a lot of money gets spent and a bunch of implementers have to figure out how to jam in something they can say is blockchainy… leading to a proliferation of definitions.

The results have been universally more expensive applications with fewer helpful features. I don’t like “blockchain” because everything that touches it gets worse.

It’s the odds-on favorite for the next generation of radiation-hardened space computers (HPSC). Potential to be a 25x improvement over current capabilities. Guessing most of the use cases will be niche like that, but who knows.

The Starship concept of operations requires 11 launches for each mission to the moon - one for the vehicle, another 10 to refuel it once it get into earth orbit. Each of these missions have to autonomously dock and perform a cryogenic fuel transfer.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has shown an operationally-viable in-space cryo transfer. Even doing it on Earth is a fussy thing - cryo transfer was behind two of the Artemis I scrubs, and NASA’s been doing it since Apollo.

Getting one Starship into orbit is an interesting milestone but it’s a long way from what they promised the world they could do… and the clock is ticking.

Eric Burger has been against SLS for like 15 years, it’s his whole schtick. Loves making points about how expensive it is, about how late it was, and that it means NASA can’t design rockets anymore. Never talks the other side - how Congress hamstrung the design, how it was consistently under-funded, and how it was shackled to Boeing at the same time that the entire company hit the skids.

SLS was forced to be a Frankenstein rocket slash jobs program by legislative fiat. Of course it’s not sustainable in a financially-constrained environment - it was designed to spread money and jobs just as much as it was designed to deliver payloads.

It’s still the only thing that can put an Orion vehicle in orbit, and Orion is the only vehicle we’ve got today that can get crew off the earth and to lunar orbit, and Artemis I was a masterpiece launch of a first-build rocket.

Another SLS hit piece from Ars Technica isn’t news, it’s just noise.

I call shenanigans. A fully autonomous space vehicle is three miracles away - we need a revolution in avionics to get systems capable of running computationally-expensive models, a revolution in sensor technology to allow for dense state knowledge of satellite systems without blowing mass and volume budgets, and we need a revolution in AI/ML that makes onboard collision avoidance and system upkeep viable.

I do believe that someone has pre-trained a model on vegetation and terrain features, has put that model up on a cube sat, and is using it to “autonomously” identify features of interest. I do believe someone has duct-taped a LLM to the ground systems to allow for voice interaction. I do not agree that those features indicate a high level of autonomy on the spacecraft.

At the heart of the OC’s question there’s a valid and useful impulse. We should, as a society, always be asking whether we’re putting our resources in the right places. I just think that the case for space exploration dovetails pretty nicely into where OC wants to focus. Folks that want to shift funding into environmental reclamation are the natural allies of us space exploration nerds. It’s all science, it’s all toward improving humanity. Just need to get us all on the same side of the ball. :)

Every big program is appropriated annually; this isn’t a death knell, it’s just a vote of no confidence in the way things are. Proposed budget Is probably enough to keep the lights on during a reorg and rethink of the current mission scope, it’s just not enough to make forward progress. If they can get back in the box, I’d expect future appropriations to match the cost challenge Congress gave.

Of all the stupid things that Congress does, this feels…less stupid than usual. Usually they’d just cancel it outright.

This isn’t a particularly hot take. It’s been a steady drumbeat since at least the instantiation of NASA… and it’s probably traceable all the way back to the folks standing around eating raw meat and laughing about the fool trying to tame fire.

The two biggest drivers for innovation are exploration and war. Exploration is the useful force in your proposed endeavor, teaching us how to survive in hostile environments and giving us insights about other resources or natural systems that we can adapt to our own. Exploration keeps the human race learning, thinking, and working together. You need those things.

What isn’t going to help you is the piddling handful of spare change that is spent across the world on space exploration. If your goals look inward, I respect that - you’ll have better returns by reforming the health and education mafias that siphon cash and stifle innovation. You’ll find more money and progress by far if you can divert funds and engineering focus from the military to environmental renewal.

What you shouldn’t want is to stifle any existing area of peaceful collaboration and innovation; this isn’t an either-or, it’s a yes-and. The target should be any societal aberration that makes it harder for people to get higher on Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got valid goals, but bad aim.