Good news? I mean, I’m glad that the baby-eating machine was stopped for a day, but I don’t think this story is good news, just not-bad news.

You’re just avoiding the question. Declaring it so does not make it so.

Guys, we’re talking about the ultra wealthy here. I’m not convinced that they can’t afford it. And besides, valuations aren’t based on nothing. The interested parties are valuating based on what they think would be acceptable compensation, should the loan, or whatever, default. Simplest solution? If the government values your assets at a rate where you can’t find a buyer, then the go government would have to purchase at the established rate.

I want to emphasize here that we are talking about a level of wealth that you will never achieve; A level of wealth that indicates a sickness in society.

Cuba never flew a plane into a building.

Uh, this has already been answered. Every developed nation with strict gun control is safer.

we could colonize the entire galaxy in 200 million years

This is just extrapolating based on math, while ignoring the reality of the actual situation.

Even if we have an amazing breakthrough tomorrow, the reality of interstellar colonization is that you would necessarily be creating two different species by doing so. They would have very little reason to cooperate after a relatively short time. Space is huge, y’all. Communication would be cumbersome at first, and rapidly get worse as the two different species diverged, first culturally, then physically.

And that’s even assuming that we would do it. You’re basically asking a large group of people to sacrifice enormously for, at best, a marginal benefit. We can’t even convince people to stop burning coal, and that’s for our own enormous benifit.

Well, three orders of magnitude more actually. Pop! Pop!