@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is "Veblen goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
"a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure."
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren't getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
@mountainriver Also of note: the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster. (Loaded 737 crashed, everybody killed … because of a locked cockpit door: plane depressurized and pilots' oxygen failed, cabin crew—inc. a pilot—were unable to gain cockpit access in time to save the plane before it ran out of fuel and crashed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522
@Soyweiser You're assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can't and it won't. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don't need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)
Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.
@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues' idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that's not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)
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@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you're almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.
TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.
@froztbyte @techtakes Speaking as a working writer: she's a hobbyist writer. At this point she's so rich she could spend £100K/week of her capital and still be a multimillionaire when she dies aged 100+. A novel typically takes a year to write and even JKR is unlikely to make significantly more than £100K from a book (unless it gets filmed). So she keeps writing for ego/self-esteem but not from necessity (to stop writing would leave a hole in her life).
@V0ldek You missed maintenance and logistics. Military gear is typically amortized over a 30 year period, so a £3M missile might actually cost something like £0.3M to build then a bit under £100K per year to keep in working order (new batteries and motors, regular inspections and refurb, cost of the leak-proof warehouse it's stored in, etc).
@o7___o7 (Checks …) you may like "A Conventional Boy" (coming next January 7th)? And if I ever get "Ghost Engine" (the space opera) done, that has a happy ending.
@grrgyle @techtakes I suspect steady/incremental returns mean dwindling asset value in the current business environment, typified by rapid churn and major tech transitions every decade (to say nothing of climate change and an unstable global political situation). If 10% of your investment portfolio becomes non-viable every decade (eg. no good owning coal fields any more) you have to grow fast or die. At least, that's how the investment funds see it.