That is very high. Not sure who they are using for processing, but I know Stripe will give registered charities a (very small) cut on their fees, I'm not sure about non-profits. But even with market rates, the average fees through Stripe would be well below 10%, IME.

So, if Thunderbird instead asked for users to sign up for an annual software subscription, it'd be fine?

If Thunderbird required users to sign up for an annual subscription, then that specific problem -- not being able to tell what good one's payment would do -- would go away. There would be a very specific reason to pay the money.

(In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least not effectively, because the code is open source and someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay them.)

That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them. There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird development, which would be good. The overall result might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.

Aside, they should. This thread is a good example of how groveling for donations distorts what should be a simple transaction.

Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.

How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m?

A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?

How many private earth observation satellites?

The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.

The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.

> The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9

What does that even mean? Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower. A very small segment who have payloads that are exactly Falcon 9 sized and want a very particular orbit might still be better served by F9, but maybe not.

Beyond that, much lower cost unlocks previously untenable opportunities that you have not sufficiently imagined, as stated earlier.

It may not even be cheaper when it works; upper stage reuse still isn't there.

(I'd like it to be, but until it is, it isn't).

The argument was "why do you even need Starship?", not "will it be fully re-usable at the end of the day?"

> Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower

Cost reduction depends on it being fully reusable.

Not actually sure that is true. Entirely possible that just by re-using Superheavy and expending Starship they could get to a price point lower than F9 (which also has an expendable upper stage).

Perhaps. But until it is demonstrated, unfortunately because Musk has been overstating future costs of a lot of things for a while now, we can't rely on his optimistic statements for forecasts of our own.

I'm only saying your previous "will be" is too strong a claim, not that it's completely unthinkable that it may come to be.

That said, it's not like other billionaires aren't working on the same basic idea, even if they're copying what was already proven with the Falcon 9, which is great for people who want to go to space but not so much for SpaceX investors.

> novel path

Reusing Apollo-style stack, reusing Shuttle engines, reusing Shuttle-style SRBs. Novel?

Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.

This leads to paid certifications from limited experts leading to political payoffs controlling the certifiers

Literally what they wrote: service members.

Art is often only appreciated in retrospect, so it is typically undervalued at the time of its creation.

> equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return

This seems incredibly shortsighted.

Kinda like the ones they are already burning in Starship to put these in space in the first place.

Anywhere on earth is better than space for this application.

> mostly to religious sights [sic]

Don't be so sure.

Sightseers see sights at sites? So perhaps not sic in this case?

Hopefully getting a true UX practitioner in as Head of Design will help avoid these incredibly obvious usability issues.

Ref: https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job