What happens when you throw an ant out of the window of a skyscraper? Eh, they do just fine actually. These little creatures are surprisingly resilient.

It’s because when you scale things down, the ratio of mechanical strength to body mass gets much better. That’s why beetles can carry like 10x their own weight and stuff, while humans can’t.

It’s not small, it’s comfy sized.

If these creatures existed, they would rule the Earth.

It will be boring eventually like a toy that you’ve played with too much for most people.

i’d rather have him chicken out than continue a pointless war though

and fall asleep afterwards and get a nasty sunburn?

It’s difficult to describe how much Trump is doing for the climate here.

The economics of space settlements are tricky.

When you open a bakery, who do you sell the bread to? To the people in the city. That’s how you make money.

When you build rockets that can reach Mars, who do you sell to? And for what reason would anybody buy that product?

I believe this is where religion comes in. Ironically, religion (despite its very antique air about it) can aid capitalism to create a narrative around “human destiny is to reach for the stars” and “that was god’s plan for us all along” to nourish public sentiment towards spaceflight. This in turn creates a movement that is independent from short-term return-on-investments. Space settlements don’t have to return value as long as you can convince the public that you’re fulfilling the human destiny to spread throughout the cosmos that way.

well written analysis overall. a few comments though:

No, the capitalists can’t consume the surplus product. This has been considered and it has been proved not to work (eg by Luxemburg). The reason is, that capitalists are in competition with each other and are thus forced to invest in constant capital (machines etc) expanding circulation and making the problem worse. Capitalists who only consume the surplus are outcompeted and cease to be capitalists.

Yes, i agree with this. Capitalists typically don’t actually spend money on consumption themselves so they don’t increase consumption. Relying on capitalists’ consumption alone does not work at all.

One real way that this contradiction is (temporarily) dealt with, is to expand to markets who are not yet fully under the capitalist mode of production (colonialism/imperialism). […] There aren’t many white spots left on the globe though so this “solution” is starting to run into problems.

You are seriously underestimating how important the concept of settlements in outer space / other planets is to capitalists precisely for this reason. Capitalism is well aware that it has to continuously expand just to stay alive itself. And that is why outer space will be settled, whether it appears profitable at first glance or not. The state will literally just throw money in the form of subsidies at the problem until it happens. Much better than throwing money at the military, because it causes less public outrage, so it is politically “cheaper” because it costs you fewer votes. Consider that war is not profitable at first glance either, because it doesn’t create stuff, only destroys stuff. So it is not economically cheap but rather expensive and pointless; and yet we can already observe today that it still happens just to keep capitalism alive as a whole. You have even written this in your own comment! So it is not absurd to assume that the state will be willing to throw the same amount of money on outer space settlements just to keep capitalism running as a whole.

I believe that the “falling rate of profit” is actually a real phenomenon, but it is not only caused by workers not being able to afford stuff.

It’s also partially caused by other companies learning to produce the same products, which drives up competition, reduces monopolies and therefore reduces profits. Like consider medicine.

When you develop a new medicine, the first 20 years you have a patent right and therefore nobody else can produce the stuff. So you can set arbitrary prices and as long as people pay for it, you profit. But after your patent runs out, every company can produce it, which leads to cheap generica, and the rate of profit reduces significantly.

yeah well it’s all about who carries the risks i’d say. i think that if you’re willing to take the risk yourself, you should be allowed to install a banking app on any device. just beware the risk, and you need to be warned about those.

interesting.

yeah that makes sense actually

And who guarantees that your PC doesn’t have malware?

Microsoft is legally responsible if the software they provide is found to actually contain malware.

hmm do you have a link to the product?

It’s in the article:

The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.

Gas that does not leak is gas that can be sold.

sure we can, the only question is who’s legally liable if things go wrong

The problem will solve itself once fewer fossil fuels are consumed overall, there’s less fuels to transport around and therefore fewer leaks … also the companies are losing money on the leaks so they already have an incentive to fix shit today.

I should be able to tell my bank to only trust devices running an OS signed by the grapheneos key, and more importantly I should be able to tell them to trust an OS signed by my key.

How do you know that your OS installation doesn’t include malware? Like there have been many cases in the last few years where npm modules were found to contain malware. Who says that’s not also the case in some modules that are a part of your OS?

And more importantly, who is legally liable if malware actually does cause harm? E.g. malware acts on your behalf and sends your money to some criminal organization. Not only did you lose money, but now you’re a suspect of supporting a criminal organization!

Of course that issue might be alleviated if you simply don’t have any money to send anywhere in the first place. That might be a viable alternative, but it only works for some people, i’d say. Or you could also set a daily transaction limit of say $100 that you can use to buy groceries; to limit your losses that way. The limit ofc cannot be changed from your phone alone, you need to go to a bank physically to change it or sth. Otherwise malware could again change it on your behalf.

I’d say if you have more alternative gatekeepers, that means you have more options and that gives the user more power (to choose).