GamingChairModel

Thread is a bit more power efficient, which matters for battery powered devices that aren't connected to permanent power and don't need to transmit significant data, like door locks, temperature/humidity sensors, things like that. A full wifi networking chip would consume a lot more power for an always-on device.

As I understand it, MacOS's desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven't been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can't run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

If this passes for the military, then that will mandate the creation of a parts supply chain, as well as documentation and manuals for maintenance and repair, for whatever the military buys. Once that stuff is created, it'll be a lot easier to mandate that the existing stuff be made available to the public, too.

That might not make much of a difference for a guided bomb, but it'll make a huge difference for the huge amount of commercial off the shelf stuff that the military buys: laptops, routers, tablets, phones, civilian vehicles, tools, other basic equipment.

Netflix used to be too good to be true as well.

So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn't going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.

The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they're in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn't mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.

And while information itself can be a "product" or be provided as a service, in most cases, it's not.

Sure, but my point is that the same is true of physical machines. People don't want working machines for the sake of working machines. They want working machines to actually do something else, to output a "product" of that machine's operation.

And viewed in that way, information services are as much a standalone "product" as maintenance/repair services. Information services account for trillions of dollars of economic activity for a reason.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn't an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn't special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I'm not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

The Walkman and other tape players were so much superior to CD players for portability and convenience. Batteries lasted a lot longer for portable tape players than for CD players. Tapes could be remixed easily so you could bring a specific playlist (or 2 or 3) with you. Tapes were much more resilient than CDs. The superior audio quality of CDs didn't matter as much when you were using 1980's era headphones. Or, even if you were using a boombox, the spinning of a disc was still susceptible to bumps or movement causing skips, and the higher speed motor and more complex audio processing drained batteries much faster. And back then, rechargeable batteries weren't really a thing, so people were just burning through regular single use alkaline batteries.

It wasn't until the 90's that decent skip protection, a few generations of miniaturization and improved battery life, and improved headphones made portable CDs competitive with portable tapes.

At the same time, cars started to get CD players, but a typical person doesn't buy a new car every year, so it took a few years for the overall number of cars to start having a decent number of CD players.

A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.

NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It's still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

But ultimately it's still just contracting.

NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.

That's the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.

The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I'm not sure how to make that feasible.

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you're relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Your original comment said 2050, which is a long way off. SpaceX's first launch attempt was in 2006, their first successful launch was in 2008, their first successful recovery of a rocket in reusable condition was in 2015, and first reused a rocket in 2017. If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn't someone else be able to?