You’re both right. We want to protect our servicemen there from Hezzbollah rockets and they shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Yes it’s an anti-missle battery and a crew of 100 to operate it. Presumably this includes 7-day around the clock shift coverage so it sounds like a reasonable number for a large missle array.

Because it’s cheap for them to jam functionality into the circuitry and more expensive to actually add physical buttons. They want to advertise lots of features but deliver them in the cheapest way possible.

That’s interesting. It sounds like people are paying to be in those facilities, where they can get showers and food in addition to a place to be. Almost like everyone is tacitly okay with the arrangement. This is certainly not housing but neither is it exactly homelessness.

I’ll give that a read. There’s also almost no homelessness in San Francisco Chinatown, despite the rest of the city being an open sore. I’ve never heard the whole story about why but I think it’s a combination of active community development organizations offering low cost housing and cultural differences in how families work, how drugs are regarded, and what is permitted out in the open street.

Of course. He’s a jerk and we hate him now therefore everything he does must be utter bullshit.

The WMD were always a false pretext.

And anyway, you can’t cherry pick any one episode or even several from history where the heads of state were wrong or stupid and say that they don’t know more than we do. They literally have everything we have in the public media and enormous intelligence operations working for them. This doesn’t make them honest or infallible, but anyone who sits in their armchair tut tutting about how “gee I hope this president can see it’s an obvious trap” is, in a word, a fool.

I’m seeing a lot of advanced retail in US vending machines - inside airports. Food, electronics, cosmetics, all kinds of stuff.

This hints at the problem. Airports have improved security and you have to spend money on a plane ticket to enter so they don’t suffer the same dystopia as public spaces in the US which are trashed and destroyed by any asshole coming through who doesn’t give a shit, including the extremely impoverished and homeless which as a category includes many drugged up people, congenital criminals, and mentally ill. There are some over generalizations here about Americans all having no respect for others and this isn’t fair. Most are wonderful people. But enough Americans suck that it spoils the party for everyone, and broken window syndrome is a thing.

It’s a shame too because automats used to be a great way for urban poor to get low cost food. I know a vending machine isn’t the same as an automat but they are similar and would be treated similarly.

This is one of those times we should remind ourselves that if we as Redditors can plainly see something so out in the open and obvious, then almost certainly the executive branch can see it too. The odds of them knowing something we don’t know are overwhelmingly greater than the reverse.

It is hugely overvalued. We should scoff at their crazy highs instead of penalizing them for being below them. You can’t necessarily be blamed because at certain points investors wildly overvalued you. A lot of times the stock market punishes success. My employer for example doubled its business during COVID and when that spike eventually cooled off we were still on a good growth trajectory but a couple of quarters came in at negative YoY revenue and of course everyone lost their minds. This is why I always look at the zoomed out graph. It’s so easy to miss the real story looking at any one slice of it.

True, that’s never what you want over the long haul.

I found it boring and overwrought on its own merits. And of course it butchers the Tolkein source material. The way they bend over backwards to get the characters to repeat lines from the Peter Jackson trilogy is embarrassing, and their lame attempts at origin stories like “how Gandalf got his staff” are also embarrassing (and that one was a literal shaggydog story to boot). I liked the actor they got for Tom Bombadil but again, making him into a spirit guide for Gandalf was a cliche and butchers the source material.

There are some interesting efforts in this direction. Not “without” propellants but with much less. There’s Spinlaunch, the company developing a kind of catapult that gets small rockets high into the atmosphere. And there are efforts to launch smaller rockets from the wings of high altitude planes.

We should not be “happy” with the current state of things. Anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program knows what a lousy deal it is launching chemical rockets off the ground. A tiny bit more payload and you need more fuel, more fuel adds more weight and you need more more fuel…

Rocketry is currently a tiny proportion of emissions so I’m not worried about it. But neither am I complacent about current technology.

Yes. I see a consistent trend on the internet where people want to completely jettison their individual consumer behavior from all environmental considerations because big corporations are responsible for more, or because rockets, etc. But I don’t see why this has to be an either/or thing in the first place. Why make people feel like their small contributions are meaningless? Especially in a case like this where the argument isn’t even remotely borne out in the numbers.

Road transport: 25-30% of global emissions

Aviation: 2-3% of global emissions

Space programs: 0.1% of global emissions

Now not all road transportation is consumers, but as you can see it is completely appropriate to have focus on road transportation emissions. A tiny efficiency increase there can offset emissions by as much as completely eliminating all human space programs. And we do rely on space programs for real stuff. It’s not all silly rich boy games.

That was my question. What is the exhaust of this in action?

It was either sacrifice himself or every Russian he knew, loved, worked with.

Here’s their all time stock price graph. Not exactly a death spiral, though that 3y performance number makes it sound so. The 1, 2, and 5 year numbers don’t tell the same story. You might even say it was a bit of a cherry pick.

Disclaimer: I own no TSLA shares. I just know how to manipulate stats for effect, so I know when it’s being done to me :)

There’s little doubt that he squeezes high productivity out of people. He just does so in a combative and oppressive way that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near.

I also believe that he pushes his engineering teams through problem solving challenges (which does not make him an engineer) by ruthlessly interrogating everything. That’s not salesmanship…. But I’m not sure what you’d call it. Product, maybe?