100beep

Yes, it's expensive. First, it's a pride thing. Billionaires like nothing better than massive projects to feed their ego and show off how rich they are. Second, capitalists so often lack long-term vision. They'll see there's X amount of gold or platinum in an asteroid, they'll try and mine it based on it's current value. Third, building anything in space would create another resource sink, which drives up demand to meet the increase in supply. And fourth, we're currently in a resource crisis. There is not enough rare earth metals, say lithium, for the increase in demand that comes with the increase of electric cars.

It's a bit counterintuitive, but it's actually cheaper on energy to get to the Moon from Mars than it is from Earth.

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/O~2~ fuel can be produced on Mars quite easily, and once a source of water can be found, so can CH~4~/O~2~, 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.

Any already-made posters you have handy that could be useful?

They might. I have been rather active about talking about it, after all. But the posters are not going to be personalized (the email on them is one I created just for this purpose). And besides, this is Canada - we don't often fire people for unionizing.

That said, I'm not too attached to this job.

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

Currently work retail. My exact job is meat clerk, which means I'm in charge of serving meat from the case and keeping the cooler wall full, then cleaning the backroom after the butchers are done. Strawpolling indicates a 9-1 lead in favour of unionizing after they've learned what exactly it is (which was needed in 7/10 cases). Planning to put up a bunch of posters to raise awareness, but can't find any good ones (and I'm not really a graphic designer, although I might have to pretend).

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.