Good points! I’m not an expert, so I’ll wait for people who know more to weigh in. But as far as I know: (1) they still need to import basic necessities like food and medicine, and (2) despite heavy investment, they haven’t managed to build an intranet that’s fully isolated from the internet.
Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.
Well, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!
I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange recommendation.
Again, it doesn't matter. You could apply for 100 candidates hoping to get one candidate accepted. For these firms, individual candidates don't matter. They want to get X number of cheap employees into the US per year. And they never file for a green card.
Unfortunately that doesn't work in practice since the consulting firms submit multiple applications for multiple candidates to get one candidate in. I believe charging extra for each application is a good way to discourage this practice but I'm not sure if $100k is the right number or not. To me it seems a bit too high.
>Indeed, the marginal cost per flight could fall to $5m or below, reducing launch costs to the neighborhood of $35/kg, or 1000x less than Shuttle.
The keyword here is "marginal". You can achieve the $35/kg if you only account for the fuel. In other words, the entire rocket must be retrieved intact and launched again with no maintenance whatsoever.
In reality, this will never happen and most likely the cost will be a few hundred dollars per kilogram. For Falcon 9, this number is still above $2000/kg, but even that is way better than other existing launch systems.
Do you know the cost of putting only 1kg at the Sun-Earth L1 point? To give you an idea, the cost of putting a satellite in the geosynchronous orbit is about $30k/kg, and the geosynchronous orbit is only 36,000 km away.
But let's assume somehow miraculously we find a way to put objects at L1 as cheaply as the geosynchronous orbit. Your proposal would still cost $66 trillion. That's roughly the entire world's gdp. Do you really think this is going to be cheaper than reducing carbon emission?
I ignore your first paragraph since it sounds hostile.
As for the rest, obviously, free market has a self-correcting mechanism. Corporations need consumers so they cannot simply "run afoul of basic human rights" as you said or they get a pushback from the populace. But at the same time, western companies send their manufacturing to Asia due to lower costs despite the lax labor and environmental regulations in those countries. I'm not sure what is controversial about what I said.
> They stand for rights and privacy only when it does not interfere with their revenue stream.
I understand the sentiment, but it's a nonstarter. A company that prioritizes human rights at the expense of profit, is a company that has no chance of survival in our political or economic environment, regardless of whether it's in China or the US. The corporate incentives are not fully aligned with the long term interests of humanity. That's why we see companies supporting LGBTQ rights and immigration, but fight to their teeth to prevent labor laws and unions.
[1] https://x.com/netblocks/status/2015695423000756250?s=20