because the assumption is that he wanted the child baptized by a Polish priest.
Could it be he just wanted the child baptized, no matter if it was Spanish or Polish priest? Then, starting with Latin is the way to get a priest's attention.
Best path for Amazon would be to unlock and maybe even "open source" ways to flash with third party firmware publicly (I am aware there are methods to do this already). It would gain good will with the techno crowd (important for hire, dev, sec, etc.), and with general fans & consumers (increased likelihood of switching to newer version).
I am just delighted that SpaceX continues with the "good enough" pace of development here, at least at these phases. Rapid iteration of build, test, learn, and improve rather than wait for perfection.
They are willing to have "negative outcome learning experiences" to gather data quickly. and, of course, data, data, data.
I like it because I know what insane amount of red tape has built up to do anything similar in a Gov (any Gov).
Shame they're risking that ability with the IPO. We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Even scrubbed launches cause the price to dip.
> We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies.
Absolutely true, but ignorant stock traders making irrational trades only matters if company management pays attention to them. Musk will maintain complete control of SpaceX even after the IPO, so he can focus on long-term value rather than short-term ups and downs.
Of course, over time, if more shares are issued, this may change.
At this point in time, Musk can afford to ignore the stock price since he will retain sufficient shares (with 10x voting rights if I am understanding correctly) to outvote any board.
However, some projections I have seen suggest even the public raise won't be enough for the entire vision (which includes LEO data centers AND trips to the Moon and Mars). That means he will either have to find the revenue or eventually sell even more shares. It will only be at that point he will care about stock price.
That's the thing, why does everyone seem convinced that the guy who has been making up pie in the sky projects and breaking his promises, won't find himself wanting more money?
Have IPOs ever been about just a one time cash infusion?
He'll be able to raise debt against the massively inflated valuation of the company. SpaceX will have access to far more capital after this than before.
As I understand it he will retain control of the company in a similar arrangement to the one Zuckerberg has at Meta. Anyone who buys SpaceX stock is just along for the ride.
In an article from the Financial Times [1], Elon Musk will hold "more than 80 per cent of the voting power". This is pretty similar to Mark Zuckerburg's control over Meta. I don't see any risk of SpaceX losing control of their destiny due to short term demands by stockholders.
I asked about this in previous HN discussions. The old rule: You had to wait three months. Is there a meaningful economic difference between waiting 15 days or ~90 days? I don't see it. (For transparency: I own ETFs that track the S&P 500, which has lots of overlap with Nasdaq 100.) To be clear: OpenAI and Anthropic will sure IPO this year or next and have a similar effect -- they will be (or nearly) trillion dollar market caps upon listing.
If you short the company during the first 15 days, your short will get wiped out by the passive index buying. Nobody is going to short the stock to protect passive investors. The short will happen after the bag holders entered the market.
> SpaceX has successfully lobbied the Nasdaq stock exchange to loosen rules governing how and when it adds companies to its Nasdaq 100 index – a group of large-cap companies that it bills as “fundamentally sound and innovative.”
Can we take a step back and review the article and the underlying information? I am very much against any arbitrary and often unnecessary government interference. I also publish.
Lot's of weasel words.
This is not unprecedented. Restrictions tied to foreign collaboration are not new, NIH has done this as far back as 2018 if I recall. Yes, foreign research restrictions have escalated recently.
We have no official statement for either agencies. Collaborating on sensitive or classified material with identified FOCI coauthors is and always have been highly scrutinized activity. Title 32 CFR 117.11 is old. It goes back as far as DoD 5220.22-M in the '90s.
NISPM-33 Office of Science and Technology Policy efforts have been around since 2018 too or so (i am sooo old :/).
This appears to be a continuation of escalation of research-security, rather than a wholly unprecedented break from prior policy.
When the "good Samaritan" do not go to the vendor, they go to the client (i.e., they do not contact the DIB company, they contact the Gov agency).
I have seen government contractors getting pilloried, losing their livelihood when this happened. And, yes there is always a "quick fix offer" by the "good Samaritan" to the vendor and promised re-assurance to the Gov agency, only if this misguided vendor would go with their solution.
It is also not unusual to find out later on, that the identification or even the resource reported on was wrong - but by this time the Gov agency already punished the contractor and the reporting "good Samaritan" is laughing (sometimes to the bank).
they can get away with unethical vulnerability disclosure because think of the children, the threat to the nation, grandma off the cliff, and <insert your favorite cliche justification of malfeasance>.
do not yell at me, but... this is where genAI may be useful.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
To be fair, this article is partially true. Now, allow me to pour some gasoline/petrol/benzine around this thread.
Have you purchased a college course required book recently?
There is a market monopoly by Pearson, Wiley,Cengage, and McGraw.
Buy the eBook, or the actual book with a CD in the back, but cannot access the pictures because the code can be use only once! (often the codes do not work at all)
Updated every 2 to 3 years, minor changes sufficient enough the break the previous versions. e.g., randomized tests, samples and alike.
Captive audience. If Jacky teaches the course, bet your bippy it is Jacky's book you will be buying, no ifs or buts about it.
I can do the same for certification. Have you seen the PMP certification book? Grey paper with gray text republished annually, meaning of words and descriptions are changes and tests are adjusted specifically to confuse on wording. Or, have you tried to by an international standard like ISO? $300 spiral binder, assigned to you, cannot be transferred.
So, are books not too expensive? Depends on the type of book.
Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this!
I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.
It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.
It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.
I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.
More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.
Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
First, the authors make very little money on most textbooks. You would be shocked. The money is staying with the book publishers.
Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.
And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.
> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.
I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book (it was an ebook so it couldn’t be resold, and also super expensive, and the class homework was all linked to from the book itself). The class was also somewhat useless, which lead to a lot of students surmising that the professor’s deal was basically just <pay book price> = free A / course requirement lol
Where I studied in the UK the university provided all books. Which meant they had a lot more negotiating power, because they wouldn't pay £300 a book nor allow a professor to have a £300 book as a requirement for the course. So companies had to make sure their material was within the price range that universities were willing to pay for it.
In Germany I spent exactly 0 dollars/euros on books in university. We got access to a huge amounts of ebooks through the university network and profs never required a specific one and would just recommend a few. One of these was always available. This free access was of course covered by the 250 euros per semester tuition…
But yes, standards and certifications are horrible.
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.
The article is correct that recreational books are below for cumulative CPI. College textbooks on the other hand are at ~ 3 times the rate of general inflation.
Source:
BLS CPI-U (FRED: CPIAUCSL)
BLS "Educational Books and Supplies" (FRED: CUSR0000SEEA, ~767 in Mar 2026, base 1982-84=100)
BLS "Recreational Books" (FRED: CUUR0000SERG02, base Dec 1997=100, recently ~96-100
I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.
> the author is wrong about textbooks.
The author didn't write an article about college textbooks, he wrote a response to an article about mass market books and affordability.
The forces which have made college textbooks (and college educations in general) unprecedentedly expensive, real though they are, have little to do with this article.
Edit: I re-read my original comment and I probably wasn't clear enough. The external distorting factor is the higher education system absolutely exploding costs of everything to do with higher education, from predatory professors and textbook companies to the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of higher education institutions. College textbooks got incredibly expensive for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the actual costs associated with making books, which are arguably cheaper than they've ever been.
Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.
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