I was originally concerned with the cost of the Starship failures.

Why concerned? (Not trolling; I'm genuinely curious.) If each of these fireworks displays costs $10M or $1B, what does it matter to you? If I was the CFO of SpaceX, sure, I'd be concerned. But why should the average person out in the world care? It's a privately-held company, backed by the wealthiest person on the planet. They've gotten taxpayer money, but the development of Starship (specifically, the variants associated with Artemis) is not a cost-plus contract.

I have not kept more than 2 months worth of cash in my bank for 15 years.

By and large, neither do I. But there are plenty of small-to-medium sized businesses that keep several months' to a year's worth of operating expenses, in cash, in bank accounts. This is to ensure that they can always make payroll, office lease payments, etc. It's not the only way to structure such things, but it does get used.

It became quite an issue when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed a few years back. Some businesses lost huge piles of cash; nearly all had it tied up and inaccessible for long stretches. [1] [2] In its wake, I know that some businesses now make a point to spread their cash across multiple banks, either to keep each account close to the FDIC-insured limit, or to ensure that they have redundant ways to accessing funds.

What if Trump and heritage foundation goons propping him up let them collapse so they can use stable coins to create a new banking system for themselves and only themselves?

In the event of large bank collapses, it's hard to see stablecoins being all that useful. Although theoretically stablecoins are backed by stable and highly liquid assets, it's not like they have a stack of dollar bills (one for every coin they issue) sitting in a vault. Instead, their stablecoins are a stack of IOUs - chits for the deposits that they've since lent out (or deposited in said banks, who in turn lent it out). Bank collapses will take a lot of stablecoins down with them.

Everyone is "super happy to be here" and "excited about this opportunity", and after a while it all starts to feel fake.

Sounds a lot like a Trump cabinet meeting.

Easily prevented by not going under water.

Do... do... do you know anything about sunlight on the Moon?

Most of the mission profiles for the Moon these days focus on the south lunar pole, where there's likely to be water in permanently shadowed craters. Nearby there are also ridges that receive near-continuous sunlight. By deploying solar at several sites, you can reduce the worst-case blackout period to less than 2 Earth days.

And they flew people to the moon in 1967 but cant launch a satellite today. Sure.

Your snark would hit harder if you could get the dates right.

Apollo 8 was the first human mission to the moon. It flew in December 1968. The first landing (Apollo 11) was July 1969.

Turn in your nerd card. Or at least fact-check yourself before ranting.

And it is hardly limited to Fuji. Nikon, Canon, Sony, Leica, and Sigma have implemented price increases, too.

This was a motivating factor for me making a quit browsing and commit to a large camera equipment purchase in April: I could see this coming down the line. Comparing MSRPs before and after, making that purchase in April has saved me 17%.

many who have daughters who are suffering under the tyranny of men dominating their daughters sports

I know it is en vogue to trash on trans youth in organized sports. But how many actual, concrete examples of "men dominating their daughters sports" can you actually produce? I know it is not zero, but is it even as many as 10 trans girls below Division I NCAA level that are affecting outcomes in competition? And even if it was more than 10, I don't see how that qualifies as "suffering under the tyranny".

And bear in mind that, for every case you can cough up, there are probably 10x cases of trans youth committing suicide. And there are probably at least as many cases of male coaches taking advantage of young women athletes. I don't see anyone flipping their votes because of that.

If you are willing to give T. Boone the time of day, may I suggest you read Bill McKibben's latest book: Here Comes the Sun. Although it'd be understandable that someone like McKibben would be utterly depressed at how un-serious most folks are about climate change, he is very optimistic about solar power, because in his view it is a technology that is 1) affordable, and so 2) scalable enough to make a real dent in the problem. The book gets into the present-day economics of solar, which are indeed profitable. (5-10 years ago it was marginal, or required subsidies. 10-20 years ago it seemed a pipe dream. Tomorrow it'll be a no-brainer.) The economics aren't the 7-10% ROI profitable that the oil industry is, but companies are indeed making money. People like to say that China is building one new coal fired plant per week (an outdated statistic in any event), but they are also putting up 2-3 GW of new solar every day.

Let's at least hope they improve upon his CGI likeness from The Scorpion King.

I did not mean to imply that NOAA's annual budget gets us weather data for all time. I specifically meant that the value of NOAA's data and services, each year, well exceeds the annual cost to taxpayers. (One could argue that some of the money spent on research - developing weather models - is a one-time cost, because now that we have them they don't need to be re-invented every time we use them.)

Taxpayers have historically been willing to pay the costs for all the new data, but they have cut the budgets going forward, so obviously taxpayers are not willing to pay anymore for what they are getting

To be pedantic: taxpayers didn't cut the budget, their representatives in Congress did. It is not at all obvious to me that this is what taxpayers want. I suspect that if you were to ask taxpayers across the country, and present them with the numbers, the majority would say that NOAA's budget is not actually that large, and that cuts to the premier weather service in the country seems like a bad idea. In an ideal world, the representatives would be expressing the will of their constituents in each and every vote. In practice, that is only sometimes the case, because democracy is the worst form of government (except for all the others). And at the moment, Congress appears to be particularly pliant to the whims and demands of the Executive, with a particular animus against science and expertise, even when Congress ought to know how penny-wise-and-pound-foolish it is.

Top income brackets are ten times more likely to be audited than people at the bottom.

Mostly correct, but subtly wrong on the details. Top brackets are 10x more likely than the national average of individual taxpayers. Report from the GAO, 2022

But curiously, folks at the bottom are nearly 2x more likely to be audited than the national average. Claim the Earned Income Tax Credit? 3x more likely.

It makes sense to audit the very highest earners, though: that's where the money is, where the most...creative...filings occur, and thus the greatest gap between tax owed and tax reported/paid. In other words: auditing those folks recoups the most. GAO-24-106112.

Best to take a look at those reports now, before the Ministry of Truth makes them disappear.

You don't get to have the biggest GDP in the world without having a system that props up entire industries that most civilized nations don't require.

I contribute to increasing GDP by randomly smashing windows.

After enduring price hikes (well in excess of inflation) for the exact same service for several years, I jumped ship to an MVNO. My daily experience of making calls and accessing cellular data is no different, but I'm now paying 1/3 what I used to. Given the structure of the MVNO and local geography, half the time I'm using the exact same Verizon cell towers.