It says something interesting about the economics if, even with the massive penalty of the exponential rocket equation, just paying more crew and shipping more stuff by boat comes out as not worth it.

You’re not wrong. The same is true for Russia’s economy, though - they’ve been burning the economic furniture to keep consumer prices in the same place and expand their military. The regime doesn’t look like they’re confident they can survive actual austerity when it hits.

The US is more likely to survive giving up, at least in the short term. As broken and ossified as their system of power is, it’s also well-defined and has over two centuries of ontological momentum behind it. Edit: And they haven’t lost nearly as much as Russia to date.

I guess “terminal forever war” is a bit of an oxymoron, even if people get what I mean.

Oh shit, I didn’t consider how old the post is. Okay, yes, closer to 0 weeks, so days.

(probably…maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction)

The income distribution would get you closer. The typical way to measure it would be amount earned minus amount saved, right?

Besides being fewer, richer people are able to save a bigger percentage of their earnings. That puts the middle class in kind of a consumption sweet spot - which is why the big businesses mostly target them.

If you want to measure less tangible things like carbon emissions or social opportunities it gets much more complicated, although I have no reason to think the overall story would change.

but us living in the ‘core’ are the 1% of the world

I should point out the international picture is nuanced in a similar way. There’s middle income countries, there’s very rich people in poor countries, and there’s countries like Dubai that kind of defy categorisation. The basic picture that the West is rich holds, but not that it’s all the wealth, and developing economies are quickly catching up because it’s just easier for them to grow. (Developed countries also account for a bit more than 10% of world population)

Yeah, that’s definitely fair.

It’s a non-market way of doing things, so sure it fits the definition, but labels are dumb, and the people who really like labels are worse.

You’ll also notice that you still have to pay for whatever device Linux goes on, which is a strong hint about the economics at play.

TBF bears are pretty great. Bears probably win over women, too.

So what ever happened to floating launchpads? Did they really work that poorly?

Necessary, no. Better, yes.

The more delta-v you require (so plus or minus that 500km/h) and the more payload you have, the more rocket you need. If you have fixed rocket size and/or a fixed budget, launching at high latitude translates into either less delta-v left over to go places or less payload.

There are partial or full exceptions if you’re launching into certain orbits. For a mapping satellite that goes straight north/south as the Earth rotates below I would guess you might even prefer a higher-latitude launch.

Yes, and you just posted it. Did you think I was arguing?

If they’re on Lemmy there’s little chance they’re on the wrong side of the class war, rich or not. Class war might be the wrong name for it, even, since the left is now richer on average. War against classes, maybe?

Geez China. So much for lifting a billion out of poverty.

I mean, conditions have gotten better, but clearly there’s gaps.

This is the one, if she’s really into the guy. Maximum allure with a relatively thin chance of coming across as weird and invasive.

Edit: Although I do have to wonder whether he’s objectively worth all that. She’s known him a week.

Alternate suggestion: skip soup, rob apartment, buy an even better man. /s

Ever moving, right? People in the top 0.9% all call themselves middle class, maybe “upper middle class” to shut down any contradictions. That’s because there’s a stigma to being a rich fatcat. For more complicated reasons, politicians like to sweep up most of the bottom 50% that owns basically nothing, as well. The only people who consistently get stuck into the lower class are basically people so powerless they might as well be a thing.

That being said, do be careful that income distribution is quite different from wealth distribution.

Lemmy tends rich and educated. So it would be my guess more than 50% are in the top 19%. Probably by both, since it seems to tend older than Reddit did. What you call that is another matter entirely; wealth and income levels all flow together smoothly in the raw data.

Here’s the fed’s up-to-date numbers. So yeah, that’s a decent summary.

Doesn’t it show exactly what I said? Lemmy has a whole lot of top 10% people - I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s the majority. Nobody here is thinking of them when they say “ruling class”. The top 1% also contains a lot of kinda-rich people, who maybe own a couple of car dealerships, but could never afford a jet. If they do something in IT instead of cars, they again might be on Lemmy.

The total is about 170 trillion. For reference, Forbes billionaires, including the non-American ones, add up to 16.1 trillion.

I don’t have hard data, but it seems self-evident just from my personal experience. And going back to the original point, it’s a nation of 400 million.

Yeah, occasionally. Honestly that’s fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.

Yep. Not being fascist was an option. In theory, anyway. In practice that stuff always has an audience everywhere.

Except the middle class actually does own most stuff, and consumes the most. The ultra-rich are rich, but there’s just so few of them.