"I'm glad you know my intent more than I do."

I know what you wrote -- it's still there. Read it yourself if you don't recall. I know that you moved the goalpost (changing "strong correlation" to the far more benign statement calling it "a component") and called me "presumptuous".

Your full quote: " I said it's a component and silly to pretend otherwise"

Me after pointing out your goalpost re-location: "It's silly to pretend otherwise, to quote some guy on /."

Then you called me rude and suggested I was self-righteous and had a huge ego -- and THEN you played the "victim" card rather than addressing my argument which actually material to back it up!.

This is all kinds of awesome. Thank you for the entertainment.

Just a helpful hint: It's fairly common to get treated as you treat others.

Go ahead and tell me again "how silly it is" again. Please.

"...the sky is ALWAYS FALLING. Always!"

You know that similar warnings play a strong role in other tales, right? Not just chicken little... Remember, the boy who cried wolf was eventually right -- there was a wolf.

"But it appears that the reason for the darkening, especially far away from land is unknown."

Most reasons for "dark waters" is life. A lot of little life. Clear waters would strongly suggest very low nutrients. Like the "crystal clear" waters around some islands? They're mostly missing a LOT of nutrients in the water to support microscopic life, but hey! At least you can see the bottom clearly!

I'd bet dollars to donuts there's a lot of "bloom" going on.

Not until they started working on man-rating. The early development F9 followed the same iterative fail-fast model, though obviously with a lot less global attention. The painstaking detail for SS/SH will have to come, but can and should be deferred until they have platform that has been proven basically reliable.

Compare to Falcon 9, which used the iterative / fail-fast process... and is the safest orbital rocket ever built, as well as the cheapest.

Will they? The rapid iteration / fail fast model is what they used for Falcon 9, and it is the safest orbital rocket ever built. Did they just get lucky?

" I said it's a component and silly to pretend otherwise"

Did you really say that?

"Don't try to pretend there isn't a strong correlation between poverty and race"

Nope. You said something entirely different with "strong" implications. The correlation is meaningless, which is what I claimed, strong or otherwise. It's silly to pretend otherwise, to quote some guy on /.

Now, regarding your citation: Where did I indicate that having a diploma was a key to staying out of poverty?

The nutshell of my list are DO NOT HAVE A KID BEFORE FINISHING YOUR SCHOOLING AND DO NOT HAVE A KID BEFORE MARRIAGE. (caps to make it clear, because you seemed to have missed that). Any education will be helpful in the long run.

Simple stat look up just looking on families in poverty:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fojjdp.ojp.gov%2Fstatisti...

"In 2021, 9.5% of children living with two parents lived below the poverty level, compared to 31.7% of children living with a single parent.
Children living with only their mothers in 2021 were more than twice as likely to live in poverty than those living with only their fathers (35.0% vs. 17.4%)."

Note: Most single families are living with their mothers by a long shot.

Starship development is primarily funded by SpaceX. SpaceX has some money from a NASA moon lander contract, but it's not that much relative to the cost of developing a large orbital rocket system. If/when they meet all of the milestones, they'll be paid $4B. So far they've only received a few hundred million -- probably not enough to pay for even one Starship test flight.

SpaceX is private so we don't know a lot about its finances, but it appears to be quite profitable, between the Falcon9-based launch business and (especially) Starlink. That is what is paying for the Starship development, and it seems likely that SpaceX can continue funding the development indefinitely -- though obviously if at some point it becomes clear that it's not going to work, they'll cut their losses and try something else.

"Don't try to pretend there isn't a strong correlation between poverty and race"

I'll "pretend" that's it's far less about race than you seem to suspect. Measure "choices", not skin color of the end result.

Example: Measure those who:
o finished high school
o didn't have a kid while in school
o go to college or a vocational school
o don't have a kid while in school (part II)
o don't have a kid before getting married.

Now, measure the results of those who made those choices. Far, far less poverty along all racial groups. Correlation is truly meaningless and "equity" is about trying to make the results the SAME regardless of what every one puts in to their lives rather than "fix" the social aspect of the problem that appears to be the actual cause.

I know a few rich high school teachers. They got rich doing something else, then took up teaching because they enjoy it and feel like it's a good way to give back.

Monopolies aren't required to follow any particular rules around price hikes or contract re-negotiation -- not unless they're trying to insert provisions restricting use of competing products. It's not illegal to exploit your monopoly to maximize revenue from that product, it's only illegal to use the monopoly position to build or maintain market share in a different product space, or to prevent competitors in that space from competing. On the contrary VMWare's actions are turbocharging competition in the hypervisor space by making all of their customers desperate to find alternatives.

When you're smashing your hand with a hammer you can stop, but healing the broken bones takes a lot of time. Rescinding the executive orders will be easy, sure, but the stuff that's broken won't be repaired quickly or easily, especially because the world sees that we elected Trump not once but twice, and it's going to be tough to convince them we won't elect someone like Trump again. Our allies and trading partners will remain suspicious of us, for good reason. The researchers, once moved, won't easily come back. Repairing the damage DOGE has done will take a decade or more. And so on.

Like many people you look at all the bad that didn't happen during Trump's first term and assume his second will be the same, but that's some combination of ignorance and wishful thinking. It was obvious even before the election that if the Mad King won this time would be different because he would be surrounded by obsequious yes men rather than competent staffers picked by the old guard GOP, and four months in it's absolutely undeniable.

I don't think Trump will destroy the country. I think the system has enough guard rails to prevent him from ending democracy (though he'd clearly like to do exactly that), and as long as we retain democracy the system will eventually be able to error-correct. But that just means we'll stop swinging the hammer, it does not mean that the damage already done will be miraculously repaired.

Calling her "unwitting" seems more like something a lawyer would say to get their client the lowest sentence possible rather than an accurate description of what was going on.

Except they're not.

On the business side, every survey of business leaders as well as every other indicator of capital investment shows that they're hunkering down: deferring or even cancelling any plans to expand, freezing hiring (if not actively working to reduce staff), etc. Good businesspeople can deal with almost any economic and regulatory climate you throw at them, but the one thing they need is predictability. Business is all about planning, and you can't make plans in the fact of chaos.

On the investment side, yeah, Wall Street seems surprisingly optimistic, but if you look at bond markets you see a different story. The most concerning part of it is that normally money floats back and forth between stocks and bonds, depending on the economic conditions. When stocks fall, the money flows into bonds and their prices rise (causing their yields to fall -- which is good when the government needs to borrow, which is always). When stocks rise, the money flows out of bonds and back into stocks. But this isn't happening so much right now. Equity and bond prices are falling together (and bond aren't recovering when stocks do).

How can that happen? It can happen when capital is fleeing the country. Investors are pulling their money out of the US, equities and bonds both, likely sending it overseas.

Indeed.

Unless he keels over soon and Vance proves to be more rational, I doubt it. Actually, I think you're overly optimistic even if that happens today, and even if Vance proves to be an outstanding president.

Trump has already irreparably damaged our economic and military alliances around the world. The world was sort of okay with trusting us again after Trump lost in 2020, but November 2024 proved that America is no longer a trustworthy ally or trade partner. The world's alliances and trade networks are treating us as damage and working to route around us.

DOGE has significantly gutted many US agencies, and it's going to take a very long time to rebuild that lost state capacity. We haven't yet seen the impacts of that foolishness yet, in part because state capacity was already pretty low (on a per capita basis, the federal government had reached a nearly century low), but we will.

Trump's budgetary plans will add $6T+ to the debt, at the same time he's pushing up bond yields, making it more expensive to finance the debt.

I'm slightly more optimistic that we can reverse Trump's kleptocratic moves. SCOTUS has made sure we'll never be able to hold him or any future president accountable for taking massive bribes, but maybe we can keep the rest of the government from following suit. It's not a given by any means, though.

Finally, Trump's actions on immigration and science funding are already causing likely-irreversible damage to our research base. US researchers are applying overseas and foreign researchers are not applying to come to the US. Long-term studies have been shut down. For example, I saw that a large-scale (~190k participants) long-term (~40 years so far) longitudinal study of breast cancer has been shut down. If funding is restored quickly, that can be restarted. If it isn't restored until 2029, there will be a significant gap in the data. But that one at least can probably be restarted. In other cases researchers or facilities may well be gone.

The US' post-WWII global dominance was built on two primary foundations: Technological progress and trade, with foreign aid playing a significant supporting role. Trump has done an incredible amount of damage to all three in just four months in office, enough that we won't recover quickly, and will never recover all of what we've lost. If he gets to continue thrashing about for four years, it's gonna be pretty bad.

Speaking of "completely irrelevant," he wasn't suggesting search strings--in fact, it was quite the opposite. He originally claimed he didn't know what "Uno" was, then, when it was suggested he, you know, RTFA, he whined that it would not have been hard for the submitter to type "a board game, Uno that allegedly everyone is mad about" and further claimed that a game that has sold 151 million copies is "largely unknown."

Then, snarky me came along and corrected his misstatement that Uno was a board game.