It’s seems like every time someone figures out the supply issue, they come along, put in a few road blocks and charge you money to get though to what you had before for free or way less.

I mean yeah, that kind of thing has been the foundation of wealth for like… thousands of years, I think.

1. Acquire thing that lots of people want.
2. Secure it from anyone being able to get any of it for themselves.
3. Require people to give you money/labor/whatever in exchange for it.
4. Set the price as high as people will tolerate.
5. Profit. So, so, so much profit.

The point is not, never has been, and never will be, giving people things they want cheaply, the point is profit. Giving people things cheaply is beneficial when it lets you undercut the competition from other people selling the same or similar things. So much the better if you give what you control to people really cheaply at the start, and then raise the costs once your new livestock customers get settled in. But point is, at the end of the day, this type of behavior is how the profit motive plays out.

I’d love to see simulations of what the inside of such an object would look like. Is it dense all the way down to the black hole, or does it take just a little bit of falling hydrogen to create enough “solar wind” to hold the rest of the gas up like a hollow shell around it?

To quote the actual abstract, not just the headline,

There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO2 levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms. However, directly assessing this in humans is very difficult.

It does not say that they for sure know that atmospheric CO2 levels are going to be toxic within 50 years. It only says that, based on one examination of indirect proxies, it seems like that might be the case. Something which definitely should be studied further, because even the possibility of global atmospheric toxicity is worrying, but not something to jump to conclusions on, because doing so is bad science.

Their study result makes me feel kind of sick to my stomach too, I just want to keep a level head and not jump to “welp I guess we’ll all be paying billionaires for clean oxygen tanks in 50 years”.

If this really does turn out to be a problem we’re heading towards, it’s also premature to conclude that it won’t get fixed. I know that if I learn that this is for real, I’m certainly going to be telling everyone I know about it and looking for ways to spur useful action.