Seems like just a matter of time until this logic extends to mandatory HGH and anabolic steroids for all soldiers or something.

Traditionally the story was that almost no one paid the sticker price, but still that’s an eye watering sum even discounted.

I’m sure in the next few years we’ll have stories of people 500k in debt or more for their schooling.

It reads to me more as ‘tepid’. He’s obviously trying to be as apolitical as possible, but I don’t think that’s going to help.

That’s pretty funny.

"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles,"

> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.

> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.

So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.

> In 2022, California became the first of a half dozen or so states to offer free school meals to all students, regardless of family income. Dillard supports free meals for all students with an emphatic, “Yes, yes, yes!” Food should not be based on income, she says: “It should be part of the school day. Your transportation is of no charge to students. School books are no charge to students. School lunch should be of no charge to students. … It’s just the right thing to do.”

On one hand, that seems like an excellent argument to use for free school lunches. On the other hand, it feels like school busses are like libraries, accidents of history out of step with the modern world. If this became a rallying cry there'd probably be a strong pushback to start charging kids to be taken to school.