Ohhhh, sorry! A patsy (watch the spelling!) is someone who takes the fall for, or is otherwise manipulated by someone else.

“Dr. Blakeley is not a patsy for the previous government, according to that report”, would be my guess?

Well there is no way to settle that bet, otherwise I would absolutely take it.

What? You think every single teenager universally disobeys their parents? I know for a fact this isn’t true. There exist responsible teenagers. Brides, even if a teenager is disobedient, the placement of boundaries changes their behaviour.

Peer pressure is real. Kids get social media accounts way too early because it’s difficult to justify holding off when all of their classmates have them. It causes actual social issues for kids when they are the only one without something. They get bullied etc, so parents are effectively forced to accede. Making it illegal gives parents a reason to say no, which might slow down the uptake.

Two things. First, I’m not pro-communist. I’m anti capitalist. There’s a subtle but really important difference. I can be against one system without being for another.

Secondly, I am able to apply the failings of capitalism to the system as a whole, by looking at its roots. I’m not from the USA and I’m not only looking at US capitalism. Capitalism is inherently exploitative, favouring people who own interest-accruing property over people who work. It favours the amassing of wealth, which necessarily comes at the cost of other people’s well-being and success. We see the outcome of this is that the people who are most rewarded by the system are the most inhumane, to the point where the top earners are outright sociopaths. The people who suffer are those who just try to get along. All of this is universal across all countries and interpretations of capitalism. The system rewards greed and unscrupulousness, and punishes compassion. It’s destructive at this stage because it is being allowed to run rampant, unchecked by any common sense. It’s ok in small doses, but the neoliberal consensus is global.

Lol, right. So let’s break down this down since Communism has miserably failed every test and attempt it’s attempt at being used …

Interesting you should bring this up, because capitalism has failed every time, too. Communism has been tried, what three times? And capitalism about 300. So communism is winning on this front, in fact it’s 100 times more successful by comparison.

Yes, because capitalism is the dominant power structure in the world, and communism is one of its anathemas, communism has been suppressed and demonised at every opportunity. This is a historical fact. I don’t know if communism would work under different circumstances, but I’m certain it can’t work under the circumstances in which we have found ourselves since the second world war, circumstances which are hostile to communism. There’s a good chance that had it gone the other way, I would be here claiming communism is the root cause of most societal problems.
Capitalism is not intrinsically better than communism when you count oppression and unnecessary suffering and death as the metric.
Stanning for the status quo while we descend into late stage capitalism and people are being stripped of their economic and social freedoms like never before is a pretty awful stance. Look around you, the world is fucked. And the world is capitalist. The system does not work. Unless you’re a billionaire, you should have quite a lot to complain about.

Capitalism is the root cause of a whole heap of major problems. Almost all of them in fact. I suppose you could go one further and settle on greed as the cause. But since capitalism is institutionalised greed, it still wouldn’t excuse capitalism even if you did.

Liberal tears are already known to be the most expensive commodity in the known universe, cf. Brexit.

Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it’s impossible and I’m definitely not saying it’s not preferable!

Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.

High radiation, toxic (to us) atmosphere and tidal lock don’t preclude life, though. Besides, we can’t detect such details at those distances.

If a civilization existed and wanted to be discovered at that range, we could detect their signals. Now I’m not trying to argue that life does exist, I’m arguing that the Fermi paradox still poses an interesting question. So, since we could detect a signal coming from a few hundred to a few thousand nearby planets, why don’t we? Is life rare? Is life quiet? Is there no life? Each of the possible reasons we have zero evidence for extraterrestrial life raises incredibly interesting questions that bear thinking about. Why would life be rare? Why would life be quiet? Why would extraterrestrial life have died out, etc.
The argument that the Fermi paradox just isn’t interesting is quite frankly bonkers.

There are habitable planets orbiting about one in five stars. So a few hundred habitable worlds in that range. Why do none of them transmit?

Jesus. That’s worrying.

The distances don’t account for the complete, total lack of evidence, though. Our civilization is detectable to dozens of light years at least, if you’re looking. And we are looking. So, the others… Where are they?

They raided journalists’ homes? I am not as wired in to the news as I have been so I must’ve missed this, what happened?

Don’t forget ESA’s ATV and the NASA RRM for refuelling the ISS. As was the case with launchers for a while, the Europeans and the Americans have beautiful, expensive and awesome solutions, while the Russians just get the job done (often by waiving safety standards)

Anyway, the ISS is a different beast, it’s in LEO and it didn’t need to be launched in one go, so you can send up heavy equipment and integrate it on-orbit, activities which require Gantt charts so autistic that my eyes bleed when I think about them. Starship-to-Starship refuelling would mean sending a single spacecraft up with all the necessary equipment to do propellant transfer, which is what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment, as you say.

It’s easier to store. Aside from it being the single most hazardous chemical substance known to man, that is

I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required. Remotely docking is akin to self-driving in complexity; don’t forget to factor in the signal delay if you’re in a lunar or translunar orbit. If you make this a crewed activity only, then the problem becomes one of pneumatics. A pressure system that can reliably contain and transfer pressure up to the levels of spacecraft fuel (around 300 psi for liquid, 3000 for gas) repeatedly, in both directions is very, very heavy. The valves are heavy, the tanks are heavy, the control systems are heavy. Too heavy to be considered viable for spaceflight. Even less so for a mission whose payload is “as much transfer fuel as we can possibly get up there”. A huge amount of innovation has to take place before this can become real. As of 2022, when I last worked on this, none of the technology was even being researched, that is to say it was not even at TRL 3. Typically these things take on the order of a decade or so to get to TRL 9, if they are successful and quick.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying I’ll be fascinated to see which solutions they come up with, and that I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.

And step six is “Profit”