> On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job due to exactly the type of behavior in question, where everyone thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in history and they remained undeterred no matter how many times I said what we were doing is a pile of shit
Perception is reality. If there is one thing more complicated than theoretical physics is predicting human reactions to ideas, theories and events.
Ok so basically the accusation is that they said to the bank they were consultants/service company and did not disclose crypto
Back in the days banks would have meant they were in the cryptography sector or something.
Also why is this US business?
The US should be careful not to weaponize the USD, SWIFT DTCC or the correspondent banks network.
The world entrusted the US with said institutions (as well as the UN, World Bank, IMF) because the US never weaponized them, and never went after thought crimes.
The US can't stand Tether, more specifically it can't stand Crypto....so it is trying the same thing which pulled off with Microsoft in 2000 and with Standard Oil back in the days...only this time the population won't be onboard with it because there is no richer than god man in the high castle to point at .
> The biggest difference to explain that, I would say, is that a scientific/engineering advancement can deliver value magnitudes greater than development cost
Nothing fungible will come out of this Jupiter mission and you know it.
If this was education budget or brain research I'd totally be onboard with it.
> and why should everything be about quality of life? It is an important point, but not the only one.
Because quality of life gets everybody on board. This sort of expeditions are paid for with the money of people who don't agree with the spending.
These people are generally talked some sense into when they disagree with military spending, or infrastructure spending or entitlements spending. The theme is always "even if you don't benefit from it yourself, people around you do and so over time will you!"
A leftist version of trickle down, I call it trickle up or trickle laterally. I can see the point in having a discussion.
The talk doesn't even happen with space, it seems like if you are for containing space spending you hate America or something
And no, hope and hype about Europa being able to sustain life is not quality of life. It's a sugar high you get when you read the news or see the anchor losing it on tv.
People who mention savings are incorrect. They should talk about reduced loss.
This mission is a total financial loss until proved otherwise.
As of today the only people who managed to make money in space are the brokers and lawyers who negotiated private tourism trips to the ISS in the 90s and again this new wave of space tourism.
There's an irrational exhuberance about space in my opinion
And thus it's a bad business by definition, which doesn't merit billions of capital investments.
Even if the investment thesis is that the whole world is rooting for them, and government will turn lots of blind eyes because of the "green mission", and they'd be first in line ESG funds allocation of capital...
Still all those elements don't propel you to SaaS type margins such as Google or Microsoft or Facebook.
Frothy valuations for companies which are building stuff in the real world are driven by the promotional power of said stuff and the CEO marketing ability, in fact people are fascinated by cars, it looks cool and it's out there in front of you.
A startup is a company which faces significant risk of its equity going to zero, which has also never had a period in which the risk of its equity going to zero was negligible.
Tesla is still a startup, so is Rivian
Google is not a startup, Bank of America back in 2009 wasn't a startup although risk of equity going to zero was huge, but it had a darn long spell in which the risk was nonexistent.
And yet , Bezos and Branson are the object of this article, while the nameless beurocrat who decided to put out a press release to specify that the 2 men are not astronauts....well he's just a nameless beurocrat, who is not mentioned and in fact, the subject is a generic "US" instead.
Xi (and every leader for that matter) chances to stay in power are intrinsically linked to one metric:
Quality of life of the population
If you leave quality of life on the table because of geopolitical games you are shooting yourselves in the foot.
Even during massive state sponsored hate campaigns (such as the one promoted by Hitler against the Jews) the population spends just a bunch of minutes per day actually fuming and hating...the rest of the 24 hrs they live their lives.
Quality of life is a much more potent motivator to support the leader/party than hatred.
That's why any sane country and leader would never attack an economically important country intentionally.
Violent wars are relegated to Africa and the economically unimportant areas of the Middle East such as Yemen. With some small outbreaks here and there in ethnically hot areas such as Ukraine
MAD is still going strong. It's not military based, but economical.
It's the reason why theories about intentional release of COVID-19 are bunk.
China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.
Same goes for nukes. If Xi or Putin decide to nuke the US , people will assault their palaces in 3-6 months for food and water. Even if the US somehow fails to respond.
The global economy is interconnected to a degree that makes it impossible for a leader to order a nuclear attack and not have his own people remove him violently
Just because the revisitation didn't include him doesn't mean that he had a bad time in the 90s.
He had it better than anybody