As well, the end result of the “yes or no” answer style “democracy” is that you’re given two options and have to choose between those options.

I was wondering when someone would start discriminating based on what instance you made your account on…

The energy required to get out of Earth’s orbit is exactly the problem. You can run fifty missions to the asteroid belt from Earth. Or you can send one big mission to Mars, including all the advanced hardware that’s needed for them to run asteroid missions. They can then produce the rough equipment, including fuel (CO/O₂ fuel can be produced on Mars quite easily, and once a source of water can be found, so can CH₄/O₂, and the color comes from all the iron) and then they can send fifty missions to the asteroid belt. What you’re saving is the effort it would require to get all that rough material out of Earth’s gravity.

You’re probably not wrong about that. But one of the great values of Mars from a capitalist perspective is that it’s really easy to get to the Asteroid Belt from there and easy to send mined materials home from there. IMO, Mars will be an outpost from which to mine asteroids before anything else.

I had paragraphs in when I was writing it. I guess I need to double-space them? One moment… there we go.

GreenAndPleasant managed this by creating a breakaway sub, GreenAndExtreme - the idea being that it was a pipeline, get the libs interested in Pleasant and radicalized in Extreme. Didn’t really work, then they managed a proper crackdown on libs in the main sub.