In theory Alberta also has a program about orphaned oil wells as well, but they're having trouble keeping up:
> Last year, the OWA estimated it would take until 2036 to clean up all the orphans. That timeline has now been extended, since it will more likely be between 2037 and 2040, said OWA president Lars DePauw in an interview with CBC News.
> As of March 2023, oil and gas companies owe rural municipalities $268 million in unpaid taxes;[17] they owe landowners "tens of millions in unpaid lease payments".[18] Original owners of what are now orphan wells "failed to fulfill their responsibility for costly end-of-life decommissioning and restoration work"; some sold these wells "strategically to insolvent operators".[18] Landowners suffer both "environmental and economic consequences" of having these wells on their property.[18] OWA funding is underfunded by at least several hundred million.[18] The total estimate for cleaning up all existing sites is as much as $260 billion. Remediation is paid for through federal and provincial bailouts, a PPP violation.[18]
They aren't, and as such, deciding to forego short-term profit by making sustainable decisions and practices is of course not illegal whatsoever, nor does any company ever get sued for it.
I’d imagine it’s not so simple, especially without a functional legislative branch, but we could really use a “digital bill of rights” that could provide a comprehensive set of baseline protections and standards for things like this, online privacy, data protection, whatever stops Meta/X/et al from being maximally harmful, etc..
That’s [part of] what regulatory frameworks are supposed to accomplish: minimize and compensate for capitalism’s excesses. A free market can do a lot of very impressive things with surprising efficiency, but it fails on a number of things societies value, FOSS included.
IMHO, there should be more robust publicly funded support for license enforcement, facilitated access to forming charitable/non-profit organizations, subsidized grants/loans, and something akin to the Public Broadcasting Service, but for the internet. Sort of like a national intranet, with federated social media, web archives, public service portals, email, digital asset storage, and software development and distribution resources.
But that’s just my democratic socialist head-canon. No doubt such a system would be incredibly difficult to implement, and come with any number of unintended consequences that, for the purposes of this discussion, I chose to ignore. It’s also worth noting that there are several of those things in the USA’s federal government already: you can find open source software repositories for a number of federal agencies, like NASA and the NSA (which includes several fun projects).
Ego driven and foolish. Starship stacks up a multitude of project risks each of which has to be perfectly solved or the whole project fails. As Elon fans will point out, all of these problems can be solved in KSP. But only a fraction of them will work out in real life.
Elon has been quoted in the media recently proposing preposterous launch cadences. He has to, even though they are preposterous as they appear to be. If he had to admit that launch cadence is never going to be much faster than Falcon, he would also be admitting that getting starship to the moon will never happen.
If he had to admit that Starship isn't up to its payload spec, he would have to admit that no matter the launch cadence, starship will never be refueled in orbit, and therefore never get beyond low Earth orbit.
Apollo is the subject of several books on project management for good reason. Starship will become a case study in how not to do it.
... untill Musk no longer matters. After that, that project is going in the trash faster than you can blink. Its a collosal waste of time, money, and resources, and its never going to work.
I've been anxious about this prospect. Having seen the rightward ideological lurch all over the world caused by immigration in the last 15-years, the relatively extreme mass migration that's likely as the planet gets warmer promises to be an existential threat to any number of societies. In my opinion, we should be looking ahead and tempering our attitudes for what seems increasingly inevitable. It's quite literally the least we can do, since the cessation of oil consumption has yet to make an appearance at the proverbial table.
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