To soften this a little bit, and I mean a very little.

The youth unemployment numbers are hard to judge, could be right but it is hard to tell on the outside.

The fertility figures are a long term issue, China is not alone in that but something to keep an eye on.

Those import/export figures... now that is the the most telling of how the economy is fairing nowadays. For all the speculation I have heard for decades, that is the most alarming stat I have seen. That is where the rubber meets the road for an economy that is so depended on those things to keep society function vaguely well. Stay tuned...

This is the asymmetric nature of people. The needs/wants of today out rule those of tomorrow even if it means making tomorrow worse.

It is not set in stone but it is very prevalent in our societies nowadays.

This is the asymmetric nature of modern western people. This has not always been the way of people - many people at many places over many times had cultures whose decision making time horizons extended beyond their noses. It’s all we’ve known, and our grandparents and great grandparents pushed it on everyone else at the barrel of a gun so we think it’s all anyone’s ever known, but an awful lot of people lived in cultures that were aware the future existed and they were going to live there some day.

Exactly, this is an atribute that comes out of societies not inherant nature.

China has been tipped to fail any time now for the last 25 years. They have long term issues but they will play out over long term results. A whimper rather than a boom!

US economic crash has been forecasted perennially all the way up to 2007, none of them turned out true, until...

It's difficult to predict a dramatic crash, but it's much easier to detect an economy not doing well.

Their problems always seem to look worse than it should be but functions better than expected.

I will offer somewhat opposite. My father had 4 kids and at my age looks roughly the same. That is look like we where/are in our late 20's at age 40. Genetics goes a long way.

Are you both rich? Being poor can really help assist in looking old. Stress is a killer and being poor is nothing but stressful.

Right on. Just because a company provides a lot of apparent value doesn't mean they should be exempt from these kinds of regulations.

Bingo! Now that they are a key part of the industrial complex, good money can be thrown at bad and it will all still work out.

Not saying that is what they are doing but they are now in a key position that big mistakes are not necessarily fatal to the company.

1 to 2 orders of magnitude? ... Falcon Heavy launches nowadays run at approximately $40-70 million each. So you are implying that others cost minimum $400 to $4 billion per launch! I mean that is still 1/100th the Saturn V but SpaceX hasn't improved the overall costs that much. An improvement, yes, but no where near what they claim.

This is really my only complaint about Space X. I wish they would stop trying to be this somewhat unrealistic hype machine. What they are doing nowadays is amazing - that should be enough!

Falcon Heavy launches are not sold that cheap, though Delta IV Heavy, on the expensive end of commercial launch, did in fact sell around $400m.

Like we have. Moved a lot from radio over to the internet. Highly focused communication.

Still that uses a lot of radio signals (Wi-Fi)

Good luck detecting a Wi-Fi access point from orbit, let alone the next starsystem over.