I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms?

I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).

> You don't buy any of this right?

I actually do. The math is more strained than anything present. But a lot of people are rejecting it out of hand without doing anything back of the envelope. Truth is, barring a seismic shift in how we permit data centers on the ground, it takes a within-the-envelope decreases in launch costs to make space-based data centers profitable. Which is then just a cheat code for building a Dyson sphere.

> Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now?

They all explode all the time. Starship has also been consistently improving its suborbital flight characteristics. I don’t see a good argument for a fundamental design fuckup in the data we have.

> But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour?

This is nonsense. But within ten years? I think so. At least, we don’t have a good reason to reject that with current data. And that would make the cost equation flip to favoring space-based infrastructure. Which, honestly, is not the answer I expected. (I’ve done aerospace stuff for a while. Most of the back-of-the-envelope math fails. It failed for space-based solar power. It failed for asteroid mining. And it currently fails for space-based data centers. But let launch costs dip a bit, or permitting delays and risks rise a bit, and the equation balances sooner than one would think.)

Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.

It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.

The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.

There is nothing unconstitutional about the first paragraph of your criticism. What is unconstitutional is restricting your ability to write this criticism, which is not breached.

You _could_ argue that this is a flaw in the constitution, and that none of the above should be legal, and that people who support those things should be restricted in their speech or ability to hold office. This was the status quo in politics for a while! These things have all existed for a long time but this seems particularly targeted at Trump, who was famously banned from most social media platforms for years.

There are a lot of democracies (most of the EU for example) that take this stance on freedoms and will even overturn elections to prevent those who support those policies. The question is really 'does doing that protect freedom and democracy or infringe it?'

As for the second paragraph, this is just a lie, Congress has not abdicated any type of war powers to the Cabinet. There has not been any type of declaration of war, and if Congress wanted to stop the DoD, they very much could and in fact came very close to doing so. If your Congress representative did not represent your interests (in this case voted nay), you can call email etc. them and their office or vote them out.

> better country that believes in freedom and goodness

I think you're letting your strong feelings here cloud your judgement, you can hold all of these opinions above without needing to fellate China, which is objectively worse on freedoms than the US. It's also important not to conflate "believes in freedom" with "perfectly meets my line of freedom."