Yeah OK, it's obvious at this point that you care more about "winning" a discussion, whatever that means, than about anything actually substantive or meaningful, and that your position on this topic has devolved into being dismissive and casting everything into convenient left-vs-right catchphrases. ("Rent-seeking", BTW, has existed as an economic term for decades, long before the current political nonsense, which since you claim to have read the article, you should know - and your opinion of it as a term is obviously motivated by your obviously MAGA-infested politico-economics.) So rather than waste any more time on this, I'll simply invite you to F off.

I was responding to your comment about renting out property being a good thing (and how sometimes it isn't)... but that's not actually what "rent-seeking" means, anyway. See here: Rent-seeking FTFA: "Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth." Clearly this is easier to do if you have the kinds of access and connections in government that extreme wealth brings.

And are you really suggesting that the "military-industrial complex" doesn't exist? Was Eisenhower wrong?

Owning a house and renting it out to help finance your retirement, is one thing. Buying all the available property in an area, thus driving up prices so no one can buy a home of their own and so that you can charge whatever the hell you want, is predatory, and the kind of thing that the extremely wealthy can do. I mean, hell, even Orange Man has been talking about preventing corporations from buying up residences, so you know it's got to be bad. Meanwhile, when business gets in bed with government, it creates situations that are only good for the business and very often bad for the people. The military-industrial complex, for instance. Elon Musk, or Palantir, etc.

I don't begrudge anyone simply having more money than me. That is, if they earned it by providing something of genuine value to a market for a fair but profitable price, as opposed to rent-seeking, monopolizing, and leveraging involvement and incest with government to magnify and perpetuate their advantage. And once you get above a certain level of wealth, there are exceedingly few people/corporations, if any, that don't tick at least a couple of those boxes.

Isn't why "the ruling class" does anything? (The money part, at the very least?)

...that I bought refurbished in 2016 for $179. It was a huge upgrade from the 30" 720p TV I had for about 10 years before that, which itself was a huge upgrade from the 20" CRT I had before that. The only reason I'd see myself upgrading would be if my current TV breaks...

...what's the chance of it hitting Earth? We're not that far apart...?

...can it do the job? Have they tried giving it real work assignments of the sort they would actually give to human engineers, and see how it does?

I don't understand why water is so expensive, in some places where it's not scarce. In Suffolk County NY where I live, I pay $33 for water. Per quarter, so $8.25 a month. Meanwhile, next door in Nassau County, some folks pay over $100 a month. I just don't get it.

"and will learn from witnessing the experiment" - but what would they learn? That "pitch is very very thick"?

...or maybe *it* hallucinated that *he* was great.

You know you can text from your computer for either Android or iPhone, right? That's how I do most of my texting...

admits long-distance friendships have become "nearly impossible to maintain."

I guess nobody owns those "computer" things anymore...?

Oops, yeah. And IIRC the Chinese put a lander at the south pole a while back, so they may be having thoughts along those lines...?

Actually, I would think there would be good reasons to put moon bases near the terminator, based on exactly that, i.e. having access to both sunlight (for heating/receiving power) and darkness (for shedding heat) - it would be easier to moderate energy, temperature, etc. if the base were at the terminator. See Roger Zelazny's Jack of Shadows ...