SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 with 48 Starlink satellites aboard to low Earth orbit Wednesday. During the countdown, a SpaceX controller during a satellite launch said "Time to let the American broomstick fly and hear the sound of freedom," in a jab at Russia.

The comment was in reference to a recent statement by the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, who claimed that a ban on Russian exports of rocket engines would force the U.S. to rely on "brooms" to get to space.

Starlink is a space-based system that SpaceX has been building for years to bring internet access to underserved areas of the world.

If we’re only going by what’s in the video, kid with pointy finger “struck” first. He’s committing attempted battery seconds after the video starts.
Battery-a physical act that results in harmful or offensive contact with another person without that person's consent

Entering someone’s personal space…finger pointing under 1 ft from their face in a threatening or aggressive way certainly counts, pointing your finger in their face and yelling certainly counts as aggressive, this allows the other party to defend themselves and they may remove you physically by pushing the offending appendage away.
Retaliation for your hand being removed from someone’s personal space is another battery. That’s what happened IMO.

If youre a normal country you are always living on credit, if for no other reason, then because it is super easy and cheap to borrow. Also you have to, to make it to the next pay check (tax collection). First your subjects have to produce and sell, then you can collect taxes.

You dont base the value of the dollar on anything. You offer it as a commodity to the market. If your economy sucks or you print too much money the dollar goes down, which can help the economy. Printing money doesnt automatically help the economy though, it just creates space and time to make it possible for the economy to improve.

Improving the economy means creating more or better products and services that are in demand at a competitive cost. Governments in non-dictatorial countries cant really do that directly, they can only create the conditions for this to happen.

Moderate inflation hardly plays a part, except as a moderator (is that a pun?) of shocks. Deflation (and a strong gold standard in a developing economy IS deflation) is deadly, it makes the economy less flexible, less able to adjust.

If you never improve your ecomomy, all you will have left will be to bitch about inflation.

What is too much debt, too much inflation, too much intervention? I wish economics was a science.

Theoretically the economy can get to be so bad that the structure collapses, there are countries which have notoriously bad historical records, and yet every time they restart they have to borrow money to get things going again. Reserves in general are useless. Production, services and a functioning market, recursive production of valuable goods and services which freely and easily find customers is the only thing you can consider a reliable pillar of civilization. Currency is one of those goods and services.

If for any reason yor currency cant freely circulate (see China or the USSR errr... Russia) you can hardly be a superpower, at least not in the economic sense.

Adopting a gold standard so strong that it would destroy the international dollar standard has no advantage for the USofA or for any developed first world country. Even just having the Euro wreaks havoc in weaker European countries economies, but that is another can of worms.

A lot of what is wrong about the gold standard would apply if a country decided to adopt bitcoin as its sole currency btw.

I feel a sudden urge to play Kerbal Space Program.

The cars compared were as I described. There are no truly comparable electric vehicles available today. Somehow you think that’s a dig at Tesla? It’s a compliment, and a lament.

Not at all. I would love one. They have made missteps however.
Not a fan of Musk.
What should be clear is I’m not a fan of bullshit.

I’m also not a fan of monopolies.
I’m also not a fan of successful companies bargaining away their tax liabilities for little in return for the public.
I’m not really a fan of space tourism for billionaires either, not while poverty exists. What a waste of resources for no return.

Chip shortages are the only real obstacle, the rest are speed bumps.

It’s a problem if you don’t want to pay $60k for a $25k car…I thought inflation was bad. Now you love it?

Tesla made deals to not pay taxes. You can pretend that’s patriotic, it’s not. I didn’t say they ignored or committed fraud to escape taxes, I said they don’t pay them. That kind of agreement shouldn’t be acceptable for any company, especially one as profitable as Tesla. Yes, it’s a “the governor and/or legislature can waive taxes for companies he likes” policy issue, I find it abhorrent no matter which party does it, they both do.

If you backroom deal with right wing governors/legislatures to avoid taxes, you are far right, at least economically. I thought he came out as a Trump guy too, but might be wrong.

Competition? Seriously what competition is there?

2 things are clear
Clearly your anti Tesla.
Clearly you truly dont know much about the EV market.

Tesla is dominating the EV space.
Tesla has 8 quarters of growth.
Growing roughly 20% per quarter and about 70% YoY
2021 seen 84% growth in car sales.
Demand is a 6 month wait.
Tesla has sold 930K vehicles in 2021.
2022 Fremont and shanghai will make 1.2Mvehicles alone.
Giga TX and Berlin coming on line soon should add 500K vehicles.

Ford / GM do not have the capitol to make EV and ICE.
Layers of management and union demands will keep from a rapid necessary to EV.
Ford / GM have each have over 100 Billion in debt
Factory closing and chip shortages causing more Ford /GM losses
Ford / GM probably go under unless bailed out.
Ford/ Gm lost sales and Tesla grew sales.

Toyota also dragging their feet.
VW is the only company seems to be moving to EV in a substantial manor.


As you say high demand / low supply is some how bad. This is good place to be. Its a supply issue . Tesla is addressing that.

Saying Tesla doesn't pay taxes. false argument. Every company pays their taxes. If you don't like the amount then that's a government tax policy issue.

FSD is still in beta form. It is not a final product. It is pretty fuckign good as is.


Elon being pro corporate anti tax is what you would expect.
Im sure Apple, Facebook, Google are all in this same camp.
Far right? I dont know about that.

impressive sound engineering... mix is just so good, you can hear everything in it's own space.

You're absolutely right, my comment should have targeted the live launch, sorry.
Still, that covers about 20 (shaky cam) seconds of the launch before they switch to an animation (!) of the launch.
Which brings me back to my original gripe: The Ariane 5 is an old vehicle which doesn't have onboard cameras. Private rocket launch companies have eclipsed it. And I think The European Space Agency is not keeping up.
As to cameras on the JWST itself, it looks like they didn't attach any for a reason: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-no-cameras-reason
Didn't know that...

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Some (private) rocketeers provide live views of their space endeavors, while other (government) rocketeers give you animations.
The times we live in...

Space aliens I tell ya!!

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Nah I dont see a bait and switch. I see people thinking electricity goes down wires while the underlying real world is fields propagating through space.

It really is a difference if you have the lightbulb 1 meter away or 1 light second away. We have a tendency to think abstractly of these situations, freely giving things ideal properties that they dont have and taking away the properties we dont like to use in our petty examples.

If you had enough voltage to overcome the drop in "ideal" 1 light second long cables they sure as hell would induce enough current in parallel cables 1 m away to light a bulb :-)

All that said people do under-appreciate how fast the speed of light is, just as they under appreciate how much a billion of anything, especially money, is.

The speed of light is getting to your destination instantly from your own point of view.

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