It was the NIF two years ago but it's also not going to be generating power ever, it was just a demonstration/proof of concept.

Yes, Boeing made the first stage of the Saturn V.

'Defense contractor' and 'small' are oxymorons. The old guard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocketdyne, etc. all got used to cost-plus contracts and so geared their production assuming they'd always have them. Now they're big mad that SpaceX and others are upstaging them in cost, performance and scale because, surprise surprise, decades of no accountability doesn't foster competence.

Rocket production has always been a public/private partnership, the only difference is SpaceX takes commercial customers too, not just governments (or companies who basically are part of their government).

I think the growth vs. degrowth framing is really poorly defined, there's not a clear distinction between capitalist growth (basically GDP) and development of the productive forces and any discussion of the topic easily devolves into people talking past each other because they're using different definitions for the same terms.

A lot of GDP growth today is in things that manipulate the market and can be gotten rid of entirely like advertising, which is nearly 20% of US GDP by itself. This makes it relatively easy to get rid of but is a double edged sword. This focus on financial growth over the 'actual' economy over the past ~50 years has left it neglected and so the (re)development of the productive forces of North America (not just the US since the economy is already quite integrated) will require massive investment and thus 'growth'. It will obviously be a different sort of growth than has been done before (yes, even than the Soviets) so it is hard to say how exactly it will look but it won't happen unless the economy is under the control of the mass of people who make it up.

Fossil fuel extraction will continue probably for a very long time (we use it for nearly everything) but at a greatly reduced scale as alternatives are developed. Modern agriculture is actually fairly space (and thus calorie per hectare) inefficient because it's easier to automate and thus reduce labor costs. Likely there will be many more people who work in agriculture but still on the order of single digit percentages of the population (just more than the ~2% it is now). Enhanced weathering has the potential to be a sort of Hail Mary for CO2 sequestration, it can also be used on cropfields as fertilizer though it probably can't replace all nitrogen fertilizer but I don't know enough about it to really say either way. I think other forms of CO2 sequestration are mostly in the realm of fantasy so hopefully enhanced weathering doesn't have too many detrimental side-effects.

As for resource extraction more generally, it will also have to continue for a long time in all likelihood. Perhaps deep sea mining of those naturally occurring polymetallic nodules will be less impactful than traditional mining, perhaps not. Asteroid mining could genuinely be revolutionary in this aspect but the investment involved to get it a necessary scale would probably take too long for it to be a viable short-term solution even if there was a revolution tomorrow. Things can be done to make traditional mining less impactful that aren't currently because they aren't profitable, but it will likely be the worst thing that continues in any transition. Rewilding other areas to compensate will ease the damage.

It will be a difficult transition. Go too slow and you risk the environment degrading to the point of the collapse of production entirely. Go too fast and you risk the same by not having the inputs necessary to sustain it. The market is too slow and passive to handle the situation and so it will only be overcome if the (real) economy can be steered by society as a whole.

Guild Wars 1 had a lot of unique and weird weapons but the Fiery Dragon Sword is one of those rule of cool weapons even though it makes no sense practically.

Yeah, his name is Stafford Beer.

Jared Leto's character was originally going to be played by David Bowie which would have been better because then Jared Leto wouldn't be in it.

The bigger problem is what it doesn't say, like about anything about the board of directors or shareholders. I don't think it would help much unless they're also familiar with Chinese labor law.

If you have enough emails from your job you could fine-tune one of the models on them and it would probably do pretty okay. It'd be really cheap cus it's not that much data, assuming you don't have the hardware to do it yourself.

Oh sorry, to clarify: The 5m one in the article is almost certainly Long March 10. They seem to have decided to make the first stage reusable, contrary to previous statements. It's not clear if that means just the boosters or the boosters and the core but I would guess all three like falcon heavy does. It's also, at least for now, the rocket they plan on sending people to the moon with before 2030 with an Apollo-style lander.

The smaller 4 meter one seems to be for a commercial rocket.

Long March 9 last I saw was still not planned to be reusable until the 2040's but if this recent space push actually turns into a race I'm sure they'll accelerate that.

Long March 10 (the 5m one in the article) isn't a Starship/Super Heavy competitor, it's a Falcon Heavy competitor. I.e. it's only barely considered a super-heavy and depending on the reuse penalties, it might only be one if it's launched as expendable. I'm guessing most of the specs on Wikipedia are very out of date so it's hard to tell exactly.

They'll probably go through the same process of getting the core and boosters reusable but not bothering with the second stage and just push Long March 9 development instead. Obviously they have to walk before they can run but at this rate they're still about ~8-10 years behind.

The biggest problem with all the various techno-neofeudalism theses is they treat the internet like its a free gift of nature and not as the extremely expensive and energy intensive infrastructure that it is. Aside from the historical illiteracy of course.

Also I haven't seen a version that deals with food production. You can't eat data. And can we please stop paying attention to these (literal) losers, Varoufakis, Corbin, Sanders, etc. they're only useful to know what not to do.

Edit: After skimming the article ... he clearly does not keep up with tech at all. The 'cloud' is dying and has been for awhile. Companies are increasingly self-hosting instead of using cloud platforms because surprise surprise, the 'cloud' is owned by capitalists who have to keep extracting more and more profit and since their market share isn't going up anymore they have to squeeze it out in other ways, increased ads, slower speeds or just raising rates, etc.

This is good actually

You're kind of right, it will (hopefully) force JPL to get its shit together when it comes to project management but more importantly, JPL doesn't make rockets.

Sorry to burst your bubble but unless something major happens, the US is going to be the only one capable of projecting any power into space. China is good at playing catch-up but even their plans talk about a having a domestic fully reusable superheavy lift rocket in the 2040's, which could obviously be accelerated somewhat if circumstances demand but we're not talking about a Moon race type situation here. SpaceX/NASA are the only players here right now.