He’s worth $1.7 billion. While that’s an astronomical (pun somewhat intended) amount of money for you or me, that’s not even a very big NASA mission these days. And what you’re describing is maybe similar to the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, which is up to almost $4 billion. Telescopes, especially space…

My guess: building a team to create something new has a higher chance of failure than convening a team to work on something that’s already successful allows him a better chance of piggybacking onto success and jumpstarting his brand as a space billionaire

Adjusted for inflation, Hubble cost about $12 billion before the servicing missions were added to the price tag.  So no, it would not be trivial financing, even for him.  Heck, it wasn’t trivial financing even for NASA.

A lander probe for Triton would be cool...

Hubble cost ~$16B to develop and put up there. Webb was ~$10B.

I like your point, but I wouldn’t call this level of funding ‘trivial’:

I’m guessing that a lack of knowledge about the built in tracking, coupled with a dim understanding that something so uncommon must be proportionally more valuable, led him to take his shot.

I’m honestly having trouble coming up with a worse one and I literally write for a living

Might be the single worst combination of words I’ve ever seen. 

That, was my first thought....what is his substance of choice? Dude is working his way to the 1000 yard stare.

This thing looks awesome. Like it was ripped straight out of a near-future sci-fi film. The Hummer is barf compared to this, aesthetically at least.

When it comes to China it is not “if the other guy is cheating”. It is the blatant IP theft, government assisted industries, spyware, mallware etc, etc, etc.

If China was playing fair then I would be against these tariffs. But they are not. Time and time again their companies and government has been caught stealing IP and trade secrets. And with these EVs their plan is to dump product on different markets at below cost in order to drive out all other competition.

As a technology professional who has been burned by countless knock-offs and garbage products (many sold by Amazon), I mostly support these tariffs. It’s too nuanced and above my pay grade to really dive in, but...

“HAHA You didn’t list everything wrong in the world! Therefore, you don’t actually care about anything wrong! I’ve defeated you with perfect logic, college kids!!!!”

it has to be. Because there is not a corporation in the universe that would spend 150K to sell a 50K car. And there is really no way that the electric motor and batteries cost “looks up number” 113K (regular f-150 is 42K base lightning is 55K) 

That’s exactly what they are doing, and it’s extremely misleading.

“Are they subtracting the total EV sales revenue and subtracting that from *all the R&D spending on EVs*?”

While I do think that US manufacturers have fallen behind the EV shift, I also think they need some protection against cheap Chinese EVs. That being said, I also think the tariffs should tier down each year over the course of 10 years. This gives the US manufacturers the protection they need while also putting limits…