I’ll give you an upvote just for knowing what type of gem it was. So many South African diamond mine comments smh.

This is probably the most charitable interpretation of this scenario. Good for you.

I figured his wife put him on a diet and he was having none (or three times) of it.

o7

Nah, I can’t see Teump getting on his knees. Not because of pride but because he probably wouldn’t be able to get back up without help.

Nor should they. Lossless image manipulation doesn’t remove data. Fortunately, a dumb pedophile was caught due to his lack of security awareness.

This is an anecdote, but it is also absolutely not speculation. I won’t install Epic, I avoid most AAA launchers/required accounts, prefer GOG, and get most of my games on Steam. Epic and many other studio launcher apps are hostile to the consumers or just a royal pain to use. I have a couple Sony games. Why should I have to be online to play a 20-year-old single-player game that I bought through Steam? So now I check if they have that garbage before I buy them through Steam.

I think Steam could afford to charge less, but I don’t think most smaller companies could get a basic store up for less than they charge (and the big companies have the tools to determine if thos is saving them money), and that still doesn’t get you everything Steam brings to the table, consumer confidence being the most important.

Then rail the maid of honor on the wedding cake table. Time’s a wasting!

NASA spent more than that on the Shuttle program alone, and we got 135 launches and a dozen dead astronauts, so that is demonstrably false.

NASA is great, and did a lot of great things. We also got a lot of great technology (and some questionable shoes) because of it. But NASA suffers from the same thing Blue Origin does, bureaucracy and a top-down attitude with respect to developing technology. (They also suffered from a lot of government pork.) It’s a good system for developing new things from scratch with a clear goal, but it rarely works well for taking existing technology and wringing the most effectiveness you can out of it.

Besides all this, the shuttle program suffered from ties to the military, which put in expensive requirements that didn’t help the whole thing, either.

If NASA got out of the rocket launching business and contracted out that part of their mandate to others, they would have a lot more money to spend on other things, such as research, both pure and practical.

A little vague, but fair.

Which tools of government are used to maintain power for capitalists that also are of no use to a communist government?

Yeah, so the state is always a problem, from what I can see in your comments. But there can be other bad actors who aren’t government (we see them in every society) and they need to be dealt with one way or another, preferably in a way that the community approves of, and all of a sudden we have laws and government, which is a more general definition of Statehood.

So what I’m seeing here is that people who seem to think everyone will agree on how things should be done use the name for the group that enforces the rules, good or bad, that other people agree with as an epithet, while studiously ignoring that they will need similar bodies to deal with the bad actors within their society, since the only place where an ideal society exists is in the imagination.

Not that I have a problem with ideals, they can help provide a road map to get to where you want to be, and perhaps a achievable interim goals that are also worth striving for.

Given this paradigm, how would you describe anarchy and communism?

If there was no government, and the capitalist organization hosted their means of violence internally or by hiring thugs like the Pinkertons, would it stop being capitalism?

Now go check out how much each launch of the shuttle cost ($1.5 billion per flight) and compare it to the costs by SpaceX. The shuttle was launched 135 times, SpaceX has had more launches than that in the last 3 years. That tiny computer got us to the moon, but it wasn’t enough to make rockets or boosters be able to land or be reusable. And don’t bring up the farce of reusability of the shuttle. The number I recall from back when it was still flying was a 75% overhaul to get it flight ready.

Elon may be an enormous asshole, but SpaceX has taken what they got from NASA and moved it to the point where they’re one of a handful of groups who could get us back to the moon, and doing better than any corporation on that front (China may surpass them, and Artemis only counts as a long-term concern if they can do more than 5 or 6 launches ever, which is not the current plan).

French or standard?

I don’t know, I don’t think I want the best IT person in the world performing an appendectomy.

Just because you’re an expert in one field doesn’t mean you’re an expert in every field.

I’ve never used one in my life, but I feel like it would have more impact in a language with writing rules such as Spanish’s.

And also the sexy agent thing.

Yeah, I’m not sure why so many adults try so desperately to forget what they were like as kids and teenagers. Rather than stop their biological urges, curb them or direct them towards safe release. Letting them figure it out on their own, and how else can they if you don’t actually teach them, is a recipe for disaster.

Two of the best ways to reduce teen pregnancy are sex education and easy access to contraceptives.

This could be the right time to use an interrobang.

You can even do those things without raising the spectre of communism.