We all love to hate an Elon, but Starlink is a real product you can use today. The Falcon rockets are real rockets used to launch satellites. Obviously, space based data centers won't individually be the same scale as land based data centers. The point isn't large scale compute, but rather to take advantage of being in orbit whatever they may be. Cooling and scale are clearly not the advantage.
Space data centers currently exist. But, they aren't used like terrestrial data centers. They're used for processing surveillance data at the point of observation. They're the equivalent of Flock cameras that are running machine learning models to detect anomalies, only when an anomaly is detected does it send the data to a ground based data center. That allows them to hunt for missiles and stealth planes optically from multiple points to develop a 3D mapping from optical video feeds. Starlink and Starshield are the Golden Dome.
What SpaceX is selling is a time slice when their satellites are flying over the ocean or areas the military isn't interested in. They'll offer the product at a discount, because The capacity and energy to run it is already paid for through defense contracts. For SpaceX that means every penny collected is profit. Their network becomes critical defense infrastructure until space is so full of debris that they can't utilize it anymore.
I didn't understand the TOCTOU issues or the licensing issues. I will simply stop using Ubuntu because of the licensing issue. My experience with Rust developers is that they are so convinced of their correctness that they will break the world and tell you that any problem you're having is a skill issue. Right now they're just trying, and failing, to replicate coreutils. Sooner or later they'll start changing flags and behavior and telling everyone who opposes that it's a skill issue, "just do X or Y". If too many corporate distros use them, then we'll see the democratic process for coreutils fall apart and Linux distributions will start to fragment.
Just look into qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture. The police think they can get away with this kind of thing, because they can get away with this kind of thing in a police state.
They're looking for cash withdrawals and gold purchases. This is related to civil asset forfeiture and they're looking to improve their profit margins. The argument will be that they suspect people who carry large stores of physical value are involved in trading drugs, guns, tax evasion or terrorism. Won't you all think of the children?
The experiment's subjects are not the drivers, it's the people who live on once quiet streets that aren't equipped for excessive traffic. It's families who's children can no longer toss a baseball, football, skateboard or learn to ride a bike on their once quiet street.
While this does utilize existing roads, this terrorizes neighborhoods. Quiet streets where children play become highways. Cities avoid improving infrastructure, like public transportation, for longer. People will buy additional cars instead of using public transportation. Overall, while this is a technocratic dream, it abuses the public in unintentional ways while sounding very smart.
You have no foundational knowledge in actual history. Try studying the history of China and the USSR from both capitalist and non-capitalist sources, then make an assessment which narrative fits reality better.