You moved the goal posts. It was about comparing stores. DG is one of USA's most successful retailers.

Great point. McDs doesn't sell the most burgers by having the best burger, they do it by having a convenient known item that is reliably standard across the country.

>generally there's less money to be made in cheaper products. Compare a Dollar General to an Apple Store, it's pretty obvious which company is more successful.

Ummm...Dollar Gen will open more stores this year than Apple has in total. You used a Really bad example. See Walmart. There's lots of money to be made in high volume low markup sales.

>The better model would be to attract a lot of customers with cheaper coffee, but also offer premium options.

So you’re smarter about running a coffee biz than Starbucks? Any advice you want to give to astrophysicists about figuring out that whole big bang thingy?

As an illustration of how power and speed relate. My neighbor buried a truck and trailer down to the axles in a mud bog. His truck was 300+ hp. My 70 hp tractor easily pulled them out but at a speed of about 2mph. Another example we've seen lately is Ukrainian 200 - 300 hp tractors towing 800 hp Russian tanks.

You can also get huge discounts for near expiration food from restaurant supply companies. For $25 - 75, I buy a pallet, generally 2000 lbs of food. We don't know what we'll get and the deal is we have to take it all.

We distribute anything human usable thru our network. Anything we can't give away goes to our cattle, pigs, chickens, and a wildlife sanctuary that feeds bears, wolves, tigers, etc.

Mining off Earth only makes sense if you are smelting, manufacturing, and constructing assets off Earth. So the leap into a space economy is going to be dependent on a wide and complex multi pronged push by at least several nations working together. A lot of things will need to happen in a fairly short time line.

Your smart phone is real close to going global. Reconditioned Smart phones in Africa can be bought for <$7. But they've been slow to catch on bc the towers get stolen/destroyed too often. Move the towers into space and suddenly 1B new users have internet access. All the Einsteins and Beethovens that never got a chance to learn anything more than subsistence lvl farming get a better chance to reach their potential. China will find it more difficult to censor info.

Yes, it's going to take time, but good things are coming.

If you are betting the pace of change will slow, I'll take that action. You're really fighting history with that one. Just as soon as we can make fuel outside the g well, everything changes. I've been pitched multiple times with ideas I don't think are ripe, but I do think they will happen.

And we are still a long ways from reaching potential from LEO. I've got multiple active deals trying to improve the human condition. The space economy is going to continue to grow even without going super geo.

What the negative Nellie's replying are missing was demonstrated in a fictionalized version in " The Martian," written in 2011 IIRC, and IRL by NASA's best projections 10 years ago. The pace of change was vastly underestimated by sci-fi authors and our best engineers.

SpaceX is planning 2 launches per week this year. China has become the #2 space power. There's a subtle race to create a long term moon base. Blue origin is saying they can do cheap lunar energy and construction.

I'm a space angel and I'm seeing billions of private capital flow into projects that will support lunar and Martian exploration and services. I was pitched 3 times last year with asteroid mining projects.

I'm not saying I know who will win or what the wins will look like. There will probably be more failures than successes, but a lot of people are putting ever increasing resources and brain power into a space economy that is moving beyond GEO.