Yes and no. The entire history of china is about unifying and breaking apart.

They have been unified 1 million times already.

Really cool. Does this mean the death of DMs or are they still going to be useful?

In other words, is this new method pareto superior?

I believe that all 3 are compatible.

Companies look for profit and that produces a lot of externalities. Some good, some bad.

I believe that the bad ones can be solved by regulation and enforcement.

Stricter regulations level the playing field for the entire industry and prevent atrocities from being made.

I find it funny that neoliberals view regulations as poison when, in fact, companies get benefited by them and some of them actually lobby the government to put in more regulations.

I know, it might seem counterproductive and weird for companies to do this, but let’s imagine a scenario:

Company A uses slave labor and wants to do so. Company B doesn’t want to for ethical reasons or whatever other reason it might be.

Because company A uses slave labor, it can produce stuff at lower prices. This means that company B is forced to either use slave labor as well, or to go bankrupt and exit the market.

By government regulation (in this case abolishing slavery), no company has this advantage and company B can, therefore, still make profits and operate in a more ethical way.

Point is: Companies can’t afford to be eco-friendly, defend human rights, and other basic stuff that is crucial for society. It’s not their role, to be honest. They are profit seeking institutions and they must fight against other companies for market relevance and survival.

The government, however, has the power to align companies’ interests with those of society by regulating the market. This is what industrial economists do for a living. Finding the society welfare maximizing regulations that aim at erasing the negative externalities whilst keeping the positive ones.

I agree. My country (Portugal) also uses a system like the one on the UK or France.

Yes, every country does it a slightly different way. Which is great because, winning systems (be them political systems, economic systems, etc.) tend to converge over time to the most successful one.

So, in a few decades, we might know if the German system (health insurance) is superior to the French one (government services), or vice versa.

No idea. But they’re not the only ones.

As far as I know, spacex and a company in luxembourg are also working on it.

Anyway, why would you want to short it?

Due to the lower gravitational pull of the moon compared to earth, launching rockets there consumes a lot less energy.

In other words, it is cheaper and easier to have rockets flying around. It also means that rockets can carry more cargo for the same amount of fuel.

So, this all means that mining for resources in asteroids, planets, etc. can be much more easily done.

This is great because we do need resources. Some of them are scarce on earth. Others require us to destroy ecosystems to get them (like diamonds, lithium, etc.).