100%

Personally I take it to be a sign that NYT has no ethics. They will hire people who are poor journalists as long as they can produce results. I don't think there was a serious ideological consideration of her views about that stuff.

Wow, I agree with Obi_Kwiet




I hate when that happens

It's not really "and you should tear them down" though. Not the middle class at least?

The "unjust advantage" of white privilege isn't prosperity, I think. White people have it easier to some extent because they are white. That doesn't mean they're prosperous, but it's easier for them to avoid trouble (or whatever).

The tearing down that needs to be done is for people like Jeff Bezos who exploits workers and only wants to spend money on space. Or this administration who barely helped Puerto Rico and seemingly refuses to help Flint.

To be fair, we do need to tear down wealthy people like all of us here. Mitigating climate change at this point would require a near complete sacrifice of quality of life on the part of developed nations along with some spooky breakthroughs in physics.

there should be no billionaires

everyone should be a billionaire

then they can buy all the healthcare and water they need

sounds p. good and then the CEO of Nestle can be the first Quadrillionaire

agreed

Here's a hot take: as a species, we will eventually need to fund space exploration. Space exploration serves the greater good human good, and it will eventually create jobs and entire industries and subindustries that could potentially create more broad-based economic prosperity. Since, as a species, we'll eventually need to spend money on space exploration and related industries, what difference does it make if the money comes directly out of the pocket of the wealthiest man on earth, or if we tax him, and then use that money to fund a public space program?

Supposedly she's quite good at journalism. Even many conservative pundits have acknowledged this.

In fairness, I haven't posted regularly in nearly ten years. You probably don't have a super accurate assessment of where I'm coming from anymore.

Here’s another hot take:

1.) The money isn’t coming “directly out of [Musk and Bezos’] pocket[s]”, it’s actually coming out of yours. Musk and Bezos contributed seed capital but the actual day to day funding comes from strategic grants and defense procurement, things that you pay for because you pay taxes and they don’t.

2.) If the government directly invests in space exploration, then the proceeds of space exploration become a public good. If Ol’ Musky and Dread Pirate Bezos control space exploration, then they... control space exploration. I dunno how else to say it. The scale of accessible resources in the asteroid belt alone is mind-boggling, and until or unless a government intervened to break their control that kind of resource access would completely distort the global economy. Whoever monopolizes the asteroid belt has basically infinite money. If we want to keep doing capitalism in the future then we need that access to be broken up as much as possible, and ideally the infrastructure wouldn’t be privately owned at all.

3.) Bezos and Musk basically want to create a Martian billionaire space paradise / guillotine escape plan / Galt’s Gulch / Space North Korea with slaves and bomb collars. So if Musk and Bezos spend “their” money and control space and Mars and move there with their billionaire friends, the necessary next step will be sending our entire nuclear arsenal on the next rocket after them, because otherwise in a few hundred years they WILL be back.

flint & peurto rico need help right now but okay

Why not do both?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe

that's, like, just one example, man

And to be fair, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe probably means you won't be getting the healthcare you need...

Wow, leave it to the good Reverend to make himself as a racist by standing up for Rhodesia

Eh, maybe Bezos and Musk would love to "control space exploration", but they won't be able to whether they want to or not. Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin are well poised to have monopolies in space exploration. In the US markets, Boeing (which may have an edge on SpaceX) and Lockheed Martin are both domestic competitors (and then there's also Virgin Galactic, which isn't a US company but has its HQ in California), but they have plenty of international competition too. There are over 70 countries that host either publicly funded space programs of private space industries, and as space exploration matures, space will be an important arena of international competition.

There's no reason to think that just because Amazon has monopolistic tendencies, that Blue Origin has any significant advantage over, say, the Chinese or Indian governments. Space exploration is actually a fairly crowded industry. There are certain services that governments will provide and which will be funded by tax dollars, but it's also a matter of which government will be providing them, but there's no guarantee that it'll be the US, or that the US will have any kind of "monopoly" (in the more figurative sense) over space infrastructure.

Space wars are entirely feasible in the medium term.

Bezos claims he sells off $1 billion in Amazon stock per year that he spends on Blue Origin. Maybe there are various ways that tax dollars are funding it too, but, if Bezos can be believed, it's not untrue that money's coming directly out of his pockets (in fact, it'd be true).

According to Naomi Wu, not entirely ethical. I'm not surprised NYT likes her and doesn't care much about that.

More journalists should be like Amy Goodman.

Blue Origin is still in seed stage. They don’t have a working product yet. Their goal is military launches, same as SpaceX.

Agreed. If it becomes economically viable, this is way too big a venture for private firms to realistically tackle, let along monopolize. State level actors will get involved if there is that much at stake. No one "owns" asteroids, and it'll be tough for a state actor to get everyone else to recognize a claim. There's no chance of anyone recognizing the claims of a private company. At best they could own critical infrastructure, but if space mining turns out to be that big, no major economy is going to suffer the strategic weakness of letting a corporation in another country monopolize their access to it.

There's also a massive fiscal outlay and a ton of risk. Private companies are pretty much going to be stuck as contractors, because they aren't going to want to risk that much money.

The 1910s called, they want their arguments against natural monopolies back.

Oh, is that why there is a monopoly on the deep sea fishing industry? Or oil and gas? Or international cargo shipping?

Obviously natural monopolies exist, but not every market is susceptible. In this case, there are strong non-market forces that would certainly have a strong impact. World powers aren't going to give up control over access to the most important strategic reserves of natural resources available to humanity just because it's a bit cheaper.

Look at energy in the EU. Gas prices in the EU aren't controlled by a single private interest. They are controlled by a number of Russian state operated companies, because it's too useful as a political tool to allow a single private interest to control the market purely for profit. If the EU could make an equivalent infrastructure investment to remove that political leverage, they would, even if it wasn't as financially efficient.

Monopolies (even government-granted monopolies) almost never literally control their entire market. When people talk about monopolies or winner-take-all, what they're actually talking about is a firm at the top of a Pareto distribution, or a power law distribution: firms with relatively few noteworthy competitors who are able to extract monopoly rents (and optionally a long tail of very small ones who can't).

I don't know anything about fishing. The oil and gas industries are shaped like this. So is international sea freight, where the top 4 firms control more than 50% of the market (and is actually a cartel headed by Maersk, per recent EU and Russian regulatory actions - not exactly a good example of a healthy, competitive industry).

Now, I just point this out because I think it's pretty funny that 2/3rds of the examples you gave off the top of your head are actually the exact sorts of companies we ought to be worried about getting into space. Given enough time I'm sure you can come up with some better examples. If you can't, I'd be happy to do it for you. Obviously not every market exhibits this sort of distribution, and I never suggested that all markets will. Space resource extraction, however, is one of them.



World powers gave up control over access to oil, steel, aviation grade aluminum....

Yes, yes, world powers will do exactly this, because it's exactly what they've been doing forever. Yes, it's a strategic blunder. Yes, some of them won't fall for it, and they'll force their way into space anyway. Then space will be monopolized by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the Chinese state. This is not better.



lol

Just so everybody is on the same page, here's a geophysical factoid: When the earth was hot, all of the heavy stuff (i.e. the stuff we want) sunk to our core. The crust is all of the light stuff (i.e. junk that's useless like silicon and oxygen) plus some scant traces of the heavy stuff. Asteroids have the same bulk composition as earth but the heavy stuff is entirely accessible. They're basically 50% iron ore.

This is what will happen:

Eventually, the price of steel (or aluminum, or something else) gets high enough that it's worth building the infrastructure to mine an asteroid. This will cost a fortune. They will mine exactly one tiny asteroid, and come back with many times more iron than the human species has used in its entire history. The cost of steel will collapse to essentially zero. Other than exceptionally paranoid governments, nobody will possibly be able to justify spending that much money to mine something that's now worthless practically overnight.

so why dont we just reuse what we have

Because everything has a finite useful lifespan. It's also not necessarily less wasteful to make things that are designed to last longer.

Metal recycling rates need to improve, but aren't terrible. US iron/steel is around 50%, and aluminum is between 67% and 90% depending on the source. I've heard the US is behind the curve in metal recycling but I haven't verified that for myself. Aluminum recycling is much cheaper than refining bauxite so it's obviously something that should be close to 100% if people aren't being stupid about it. Recycling rare earths is pointless.

Even if metal recycling reaches 100%, presumably the population will keep increasing (here or elsewhere) and our species-wide iron demand will eventually exceed exploitable deposits on earth.

You should say "factlet" here instead of "factoid", since the definition of the term factoid being used here is fake news spread by CNN, and is hence itself a factoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

factule

i have pedantic factitis

It sounds like you are just modifying the standard definition of a monopoly so that you can apply it to almost any market. If you are talking about a single actors controlling most of the market, or all all of the market for a particular subgroup, then sure. But if you want to expand that to call ten or twelve competing firms and state actors a monopoly, then you are just moving the goal posts.




The top three oil companies in the world are state run.



That doesn't fit the definition you gave of a monopoly, and the only figure I could find for Maersk's and it's subsidiary's market share was 20%, in 2015.



World powers did not give up control over access to oil. Oil, you'll notice, can be extracted from the ocean, which, like space, isn't really owned by anyone. There are a lot of squabbles over whether a nation might have exclusive control over ocean oil patches, but there is still a great deal left up for grabs. We are also consuming a pretty significant fraction of what we can reasonably extract, so the oil market is approaching a zero sum game.

Steel and Aluminum are well distributed, and production can be increased reasonably easily in friendly countries to make up for supply restrictions from less friendly countries. There also isn't any neutral ground to obtain these resources from, so there aren't a whole lot of strategic options if you don't have access to them. You could try to quickly win a war to capture those resources, just like Japan, but that's really risky. Space, on the other hand, is totally neutral ground, so the amount of resources a political power can extract can be directly increased with public spending. Political entities know this, and they'll step in to avoid losing political leverage if domestic private firms can't keep up. Plus, at least right now, it's a very high risk and expensive venture. I don't see any fully private asteroid mining operations occurring any time soon.



Our 700 billion dollar defense budget has no economic value. States actors would spend the money to prevent another state actor from being able to control the worlds supply of a critical resource, because something like that would carry enormous political power with it. They would essentially have a world wide hydraulic empire.

What I’m doing is not splitting hairs over monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels. There isn’t as much difference between those things as you think.

Read my original post again: I wrote about SpaceX and Blue Origin monopolizing. Clearly I didn’t mean monopoly in such a pedantic sense since I was talking about two companies splitting the market, instead of one.

And the top headed a cartel that let it set global prices for most of the last century. I don’t actually know what you’re arguing here — that the oil industry is competitive? It certainly hasn’t been in recent history.

2018, top four have >50% market share, and colluded to fix prices:

https://shippingwatch.com/carriers/Container/article8263973.ece

https://www.maerskline.com/en/news/2017/03/27/ml-and-the-russian-antimonopoly-authority-reaches-agreement-on-competition-case

Russian and EU regulators called Maersk et al a “monopoly”, strangely enough.

Allowing OPEC to fix prices to drive out domestic competition did that. The only reason it worked out in the end is because oil companies don’t add value so it was relatively easy for you (and us) to restore domestic production.

The same can’t be said of high value add industries like technical alloys, aerospace, semiconductor IP, software, medical isotopes, even relatively low value industries like steel. The US hasn’t ceded these strategically important industries, at least not entirely. Most countries in the US sphere of influence absolutely ****ing have, even those you might consider powers.

Some would. A lot wouldn’t. Liberal countries wouldn’t.

is that a gender?

A factia (plural factiae; adjective factial) is a band or sheet of connective facts, primarily collagen, beneath the skull that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates beliefs and other internal thoughts. Factia is classified by layer, as superficial factia (the factoidal glands), deep factia (the factual glands), and visceral or parietal factia, or by its function and anatomical location.

Factitis refers to inflammation of the factia. Symptoms include the pedantic spewing of facts. Call 911 if the patient mentions Friedrich Nietzsche.

And I just realized that this works both literally when read silently according to the meaning of the suffice '-ule' to mean diminutive, and as a pun when read aloud. Bravo.

To answer your question, if you can find the right surgeon, you can probably have a factectomy perfomed, which removes all traces of facts from your brain by cutting out all of your factiae. You could say you're now trans-fact gendered, but I would just call you a Fox News viewer.