bell-cot

If a young Korean woman wants to have a few kids, without living in grueling poverty - is that possible with a husband who's not in the top 1% of earners? If not - then ignoring the 99% may be a want-to-be-mom's least bad strategy. :(

How might things look if a couple has 3+ kids, and perhaps only one parent working outside the home? Because if Singapore actually wants to reach break-even from where their numbers are now, that needs to be a realistic scenario for a whole lotta people.

For the vast majority of SpaceX's wanna-be competitors, it's an opportunity to demonstrate that they still can't do what SpaceX has very reliably done, about 700 times, over the past 15 years - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

Letting them prove their incompetence may be part of Elon's business strategy here. Plus this old trick - "Well, if you offered us that much more money, I guess we might still be able to launch one Falcon for your critical satellite..."

Not my area of expertise - but a deserted flat stretch of bedrock sounds perfect for building a major pipeline. Nobody living there means no issues with locals. Build it elevated (like the US's Alaska Pipeline) - so no issues with excavation. Surface bedrock makes support footings trivial (vs. Alaska has to deal with frost heaves and other soil issues). Road building is also pretty trivial.

Google Maps says it's <1000km. Easy enough for Canada to put out a RFP, noting "don't bother us if you think it'll be over C$25 billion". That's C$1M for each 40 meters of pipeline, at scale. Maybe you want 6 pairs of footings per 40m? Sounds like it could go up darn fast, with the footing crews working a week or two in front of the pipe crews. (And building it fast also minimizes the supplies you have to haul in & out in an area where, as you noted, you can't lean on local water & sewer & electrical service, and the corner hardware store for a odd-sized wrench you just realized you needed:) Meanwhile, a few Nordic shipyards are building the icebreakers, and another firm is digging the new harbor and channel on Hudson's Bay.

Vs. in mountains - yeah, roads are a big issue there. Because the roads themselves can take years to construct. And still, being a mere 1/2 km from the road isn't much comfort if that is up and down sharp slopes - which will mean soil stability and erosion and pipeline pressure issues, every meter of the way.

From a few comments in the article and here, I'm wondering how viable Singapore is as a country for typical residents (vs. the 1%) to have children.

If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.

Anyone here familiar, to comment?

Almost a year, on their hoped-for timeline, just to complete the review process. No mention of how many years to build it.

Building across the mountain ranges of BC won't be easy. And being a pipeline, not a drop of oil can flow 'till it's done.

Vs. how much quicker & cheaper might it be to build a pipeline over flat ground to Hudson's Bay, then use icebreakers to keep the tankers moving in winter? Yes, it's further to Asian markets from there. But tankers sailing around Africa are still far faster and cheaper than pipeline construction through mountains.

Interesting - but the headline is clickbait. (The new fee is still under US$1,300. Most of the world would need to pay that much just for a quick round-trip visit to Japan.)

Point on being snarky.

OTOH - having the exact opposite meaning, in the opening sentence, is getting into real "why should a human bother reading this?" territory.

> France was gripped by widespread protests and public sector strikes on Tuesday, as hundreds of thousands of workers and students took to the streets to protest austerity measures and a collapsing cost of living.

Is that a Brit figure of speech that I don't know? Or should the phrase be "a collapsing standard of living"?

Or perhaps the tyranny of a copy editor would violate the spirit of Freedom's "Anarchist press, bookstore and news"? ;)

Dr. Bret Devereaux's (ancient/classical history professor) summary of the collapse, FWIW -

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...

Where it mattered, I'm guessing that Chinese intel is bright enough to "warm up" their fronts with a year or few of legit-looking activity.

And is there some reason for an operative courting western academics to mention more than the one or two fronts he's actively using? Blabbing that there's 100+ of 'em sounds like he's switch sides, and needs to be liquidated.

How 'bout accepting their $50/battery/month deal for only some of your batteries?

While I'm connected neither to UK academia nor to UK counter-intel - the article feels like a wall of blather, written by spies to dim to realize that China could spin up a hundred new front companies in the time it takes them to type "CGTRI". Let alone consider that on many sensitive topics, accepting Chinese research funding might be the least bad option still available to the "sun set long, long ago" British Empire.

I suspect the original author's copyright had expired, so the gene was public domain.

> Speaking of Japan, ...

IIR, Japan was a pretty xenophobic, unified, and militarized place when the Europeans showed up. And without either reputed or obvious Tier 1 riches - such as Central & South America's precious metals - to motivate a hard-fought conquest. Especially when 'most everywhere else in South & East Asia was comparatively easy pickings.

> Why do people still believe ...

Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was. And picking those metrics feels pretty good, if you identify uncomfortably closely with that sort of capitalism.

> It baffles me that...

While the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company was, as a broad generality, not nearly so vile as (say) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Am..., it certainly didn't leave many Indians with a favorable impression of European-style capitalism.

Loads of women in the workforce in WWII. Was there anything like HR? (Not counting the recruiting departments, which were focused on finding & retaining workers in a very tight labor market.)

Instead of "women in the workforce", I'd say it was changing society and social norms. A century-ish ago, in quite a few sorts of places, workspace disputes might well be settled with fists. (Yes, there were many norms and unwritten rules about that.) Post-WWII, there was a long trend of gentrifying social mores, which discouraged such things. New laws and legal norms encouraged lawsuits over things previously tolerated, or settled informally. And more than just women, civil rights laws and norms pushed into the workplace. Bring in the lawyers, reporters, new public ideals - and a business really needed an HR Dept., to prevent disasters.

(Yes, this pretty is US-specific.)

In one sense, yes. But Elon's PoV is "I have a big Booster factory, I'm a trillionaire, and my unit cost is under $50M." Vs. fixing a smashed Tower (and surrounding launch infrastructure) would likely cost him months.

At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.

And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.

Towers are expensive. Boosters are cheap. And the reliability metrics on low-serial-number Raptor 3's don't make the modest benefits worth the risk.

Because no-other-God-before-profit capitalism is optimizing away all human-to-human social connections.

If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

> Fallingwater, the legendary architectural masterpiece of Frank Lloyd Wright, famously includes elements of its natural surroundings...

Fallingwater is also legendary for its rejection of basic structural integrity, and other bourgeoisie ideals for home ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater

> a single state called Black Hole.

Quibble: A black hole still has a charge, mass, momentum vector, and spin vector. Which, yes, still vastly reduces the number of states needed on the surface of the enclosing container.

From the description of their massive debt load, I'd retitle it -

"Private equity-knife-in-the-backed Florida railway company Brightline files for inevitable bankruptcy"

That I've heard, on the street, the Mafia is a credible alternative state power in a fair fraction of Italy. Just one not claiming Democratic ideals, nor much desire to become a nation state or adopt a political agenda.

Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Theory:

Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.

> Critics also note that many staple crops such as wheat, rice, and corn remain difficult and economically impractical to grow vertically at scale. For now, vertical farming is best suited to leafy greens, herbs, microgreens, strawberries, medicinal plants, and specialty crops with high nutritional or economic value.

Among other massively downplayed disclaimers.

Or look at her top-of-article photo. If it took just the visible infrastructure (building, shelves, lights) to grow food for at-scale human consumption, could we afford to keep more than 1 or 2 percent of the earth's current population alive?

Try a browser that makes it easier to disable js.

Back in the late Vietnam (War) days, you might not score with the ladies by talking about your highly-paid job at a munitions company, or making Agent Orange.

And the leaders of those industries really weren't in the same league as many of today's top tech zillionaires, for public perception of being alpha sociopaths.