In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.

Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.

No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.

LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.

I don't think these ideas are as toxic to the current political climate as you think they are. We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists integrating ideas like "children are useless eaters that are your property to command, make them give back from all that you gave to them" and "work safety and environmental regulations are an emasculating evil, real men want to breathe poison and take risks" right into the core of their platforms.

On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.

On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.

To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?

American libertarians often imagine some kind of wonderland capitalism where everyone agrees to play by the rules that aren't enforced by anyone. To my knowledge this has never existed as a long-term equilibrium and it can't exist. I've yet to meet anyone who can tell me how their imaginary ideas go up against claims like

1. Encouraging infinite growth with no controls or limits will always lead to monopolism and is a one-way ratchet

2. Power vacuums are always filled (no public government leads to private companies stepping in and taking the dictatorial role, this time without any of the democracy)

3. Power always corrupts

But let's also come back to the individuals misusing drones argument - something that's a lot more immediate and perceptible. Whenever there's arguments about expanding police powers, proponents always hand-wave these concerns by suggesting that some systematic or technological changes be made. But neither the police nor the government above them have an incentive to do these things beyond the shallowed need for good PR. Police would like the least restrictions and oversight on their actions to 'increase efficiency', governments would like the same to squash 100% of crime. There's no mechanism that moves the ratchet back. You know these measures will not be implemented. The only method to prevent this that seems powerful enough seems to be denying them the power altogether.

Most importantly, it frustrates me that in these arguments, it's always presented as a two-choice space. Either you get the status quo, or the incredibly dangerous new mass surveillance tech. Crime waves have existed in the past. How did cops manage to deal with them without a thousand eyes quietly recording everyone doing everything? In many places, crime has been going down well before any mass surveillance doodads could even have existed. Don't you think there's other actions that can be taken to improve things outside of just allowing them whatever they want?

I'm sure none of that matters though. You've already shown what really matters, the only thing that's valuable in the world - money. Maybe if those naysayers just shut up and got into the slurry pit like the rest of us normal people, they'd be convinced not to care about silly things that aren't money. After all, using a computer is 'artificial' or something. Even if you used those screens to connect with real people or do things for someone, the computeriness means that you might as well forego everything and everyone now. It was on a screen after all. So stop caring and play along with my numbers going up party. I may not be striving to do anything but value extraction, but at least it's going to make the most important number really big.

But in all other cases, or even many of the ones where it is 'necessary', the presence of a subscription is a red flag for predatory pricing. Minor ongoing work or maintenance really doesn't cost as much as the author thinks it does. Keeping the lights on and updating API calls can be covered by new sales of permanent licenses as long as the app continues to sell. But if they had to go with a subscription, the real per-user cost would probably be measured in cents per month. Maybe add a bit more for their profit margin and charge a nice $1/mo. Do you see that anywhere except the rare app by a small developer that doesn't want to price gouge? No, all software businesses want at LEAST $5/10 a month because they've run the numbers and figured out all the tricks to human psychology, and they know they can trick someone into spending 'just $5' without them internalizing that the company is charging them a ridiculous $50-100 per user per year for even the most trivial service, leaving with almost pure profit. This is why investors love anything with a subscription service.

The author just inflates the prices and adds zeros to numbers to make permanent purchasing seem dead in the water, ignoring that we had multiple decades of software development before the advent of subscription services, where those prices were reserved for big professional suites and not your everyday app or a minor service. It's not that expensive, companies charging insane prices has just shifted your perception of what's going on behind the curtain. We even had one-time purchase mobile apps briefly, and they weren't doing it for charity either. Video games that don't require external services are still overwhelmingly priced for a single purchase, and somehow they're making bank despite also having to release updates and bugfixes.

You have a valid point about ecosystems though - that is a rare exception where first movers can keep holding onto their advantage that I hadn't thought of. However, it's not really applicable when talking about a commodity like space launches.