There’s loads of people who prefer iPhone and would sideload if allowed but it’s not a deal-breaker. I prefer iOS and Apple hardware but refuse to buy one without sideloading.

My S24 Ultra is arriving tomorrow, but I’ll likely be buying the iPhone 16 if it comes with sideloading.

So Apple is gaining a customer, I’ve been eyeing the MacBooks too ever since the M1 came out so might end up pulling the trigger on one of those as well.

He sounds similar to those insufferable effective altruists. Most of these people have a genuine skill in something narrow, and the willingness to walk all over everyone in pursuit of the ‘highest score’ achievement on their ‘net worth’.

Yet they’ve convinced themselves that only they can save the world, so they have to make as much money as possible by any means necessary in order to fund misguided charities. They’ll burn down the planet and anyone necessary to make money so they can save it.

Sir Chris is still in control of his charity, so really all that money he gave them is still in pursuit of his own goals, the charity is only spending money it makes through its investments. So whilst it sounds so generous to donate billions to charity and I’m sure it brought him great publicity, it’s little more than a tax-efficient way to attempt to bring about societal changes that society didn’t ask for.

I’m sure it was also nice that whilst he ‘donated’ billions to the charity, when it came to his divorce settlement, that was taken out of his ‘personal fortune’ which amounted to less than a billion.

So don’t give him that much credit.

So then… continue using exclusively Apple’s store then?

If you consider Apple to be the gold standard for security, you have just keep going as you are.

I don’t see how giving other people the freedom to choose infringes on your security.

Remember these are people who know what it’s like to go through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

South Africa today is largely governed by the people who fought and won against apartheid, so it’s understandable that they feel a level of solidarity with the people of Palestine.

(in this context I’m choosing to gloss over the real and present issues with the ANC, because they are not relevant to Israel’s genocide)

Probably to continue getting ‘Gulf Region’-rich off the back of the oil it found in an area that is internationally recognised as their territory.

Even Venezuela recognised it as part of Guyana’s EEZ until very recently.

After Maduro mismanaged one of the most resource rich countries into basically a failed state, he’s now trying to cling to power the tried and true way: stoking a pointless war with its neighbour.

Best case he’s trying to rally support for a 2025 election, or use the threat of as an excuse to say the election. Worst case he’s gonna do a Putin and actually start a war. Not a bad time for it either, whilst the world is already distracted with Ukraine and and Gaza.

Here’s a decent video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7fTSirNDs

It would make sense for SpaceX to offer lower prices for Africa for example.

They already cover the area, and it will be close to free to provide Internet there - they don’t need any extra fuel for station-keeping, power comes from the sun anyway, they’re not using bandwidth they could otherwise sell to richer customers. Maybe ground station use will cost a bit.

If it’s even mildly affordable, communities will come together to buy a terminal they can share. If you don’t have terrestrial connections, Starlink will be far more economical than conventional satellite Internet.

Plus they can sell internet to companies doing mineral exploration. That should bring boatloads of money.

I’m already seeing people whose jobs takes them out and about a lot starting to use Starlink as an integral part of their job.

I think that the hope is they’ll be able to increase the launch cadence once they’re managing to take off without doing significant damage to their pad and surroundings.

And once it’s proven enough to take off from Florida or Vandenbudg they’ll be able to launch more freely. At the moment they’re moving too fast to risk the other launch infrastructure present there.

This is a really hot take, but I reckon if it manages to make if to stage separation in one piece, and the hot staging works, the ship should fly trouble-free.

It’s the one part of the system that they have done significant testing on, not that many engines etc. If they once again don’t make it past staging that would be very concerning for the Starship timeline, Artemis, and so on…

It’ll be so cool to see the booster soft splash.

Biggest hope is that they manage to get away without sandblasting Boca Chica so the FAA don’t ground them for 6 months again.

I’m not sure how they got to that conclusion, but we can kinda guess.

The tongue is PACKED with blood vessels, so in case of any damage it can get tons of nutrients to fix itself. But this takes a very energy-intensive.

So if the rest of the body would have the same density of blood vessels, we’d need drastically more energy to feed all of that.

And I guess they’re asserting that all else being the same we wouldn’t be able to ingest or process sufficient food to keep that going.

It’s a bit of a strange argument though, I’m going far outside of my physiology understanding, but you’d have to imagine that had we evolved such advanced healing capabilities, we’d have also evolved the means to feed them. And OP underestimates just how much food someone can eat. As someone dealing with an ED, I can tell you that you can easily triple your calorie intake (though whether that’s sufficient I wouldn’t be able to say…).

All in I’d look forward to OP defending their assertion.