An article on the legal state of asteroid mining. This isn’t true, though: “Much like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the United States has not signed the Moon Agreement but by custom it adheres to the treaty — at least until Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which explicitly rejects the idea that such agreements are binding to the USA.”
The US has never adhered in any way to the Moon Agreement. Up until now, it has just ignored it. The executive order simply makes explicit our non-recognition of it, to pre-empt those who've been recently claiming that it is customary international law.
Meanwhile, Michael Listner writes that we must return to the moon to preserve the rule of law in space. Well, that’s certainly a reason, but not the only (or even best) one.
Unpopular opinion (which I’ve probably expressed here before): Dune is the most overrated book in SF. And the sequels were terrible.
On a sad note, I recently decided to finally pick up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which has been on the bookshelf for decades (paperback), and read it. I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. Heinlein really needed an editor in his later years.
Yes, get rid of it. Take it behind the barn and kill it with an ax. It was always stupid, but in a time of possible food shortages, and oil at historic lows, it’s an insane policy. We had stopped using food for transportation at the turn of the 20th century, but these morons decided to bring the notion back.
We have suffered the most from lack of knowledge of who has it, or has had it. We won’t be able to get back to anything resembling pre-virus normal until we can do extensive testing.
The long hard road to decoupling from China. We cannot have globalization with countries that do not share our values of liberty and individualism. But we should more strongly embrace the China that works: Taiwan.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A bipartisan call for WHO to make Taiwan a member. That of course begs the question that WHO is an organization even worthy of our funding.