FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
11hr ago
Space mining may become advantageous if we have significant material demands in orbit.
FeepingCreature
12hr ago
The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory. Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware, or F9 launches are profitable and more launches are more profitable, which would explain why SpaceX literally started a separate company to justify being able to make more launches.
If you reuse your rocket, that last bit will be necessary to bring your rocket back.
The trick is that you split the rocket in two halves, and then you end up on the good side of the rocket equation because you mostly only need to brake your engines and your landing fuel, and also you can use a lot of air friction. Now, I refuse to watch an hour long video with that title, lol, but any video that doesn't at least account for these two factors is bullshitting you. (How about link the actual spreadsheet instead of the video, and I'll try to fix it?)
The Shuttle wasn't exactly due to NASA incompetence, because by the time the final plans were drawn up the damage was already done. However, the Shuttle was an still an unusually bad example of a reusable rocket.
Also the fuel costs are basically a nonfactor. SpaceX have an issue in that their F9 rockets are overbuilt and undersized, to the point where they've literally started making their engines worse as a cost-cutting measure by saving on material. Landing is an unusually good value proposition for them, because they already have isp overhang. The rocket equation is simply not a relevant limiting factor for their market.
FeepingCreature
14hr ago
Sure but if a rocket is worth launching and throwing away, then it stands to reason that getting it back in one piece will be financially positive for you unless you are spending a LOT on refurbishing. The case is very intuitive imo.
The thing is, from the outside view (also partially as an Elon stan) I remember all these arguments about landing rockets - from Arianespace, half a decade ago. It always had an undertone of desperation - "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even possible", then "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even financially beneficial" - with the unstated "of course, if it is, we're just dead, so let's not think about that."
Somebody who's currently taking your lunch money has no need to document their balance sheet. The default assumption, IMO, is that reuseability is very profitable, and so is Starlink. I did some math on it a few years ago, and there's basically no half-way on that service; it's either ruinously cash negative or deliriously cash positive. Given that SpaceX is happily running a hardware-rich experimental launch program right now, I suspect the latter.
(I have no opinion on Tesla.)
FeepingCreature
11d ago
I mean, to put the greatest possible stress on this policy... returning escaped German Jews to Nazi Germany: moral? I mean, sure you have to say that "actually, the Holocaust is morally wrong --" but then you get into hot water along the lines of - well, is killing pirates morally wrong? If yes, what's the difference? If no, why not do it yourself? I guess one would have to say that killing criminals is wrong, but it's the sort of wrong that states may disagree about, as opposed to genociding innocents?
FeepingCreature
11d ago
I think a place is different than a purpose because it's a lot harder to disagree about a place. I mean, what is a mall? What if you're sitting in a tram wearing a funny hat and a cop says that the tram is actually a mall so you have to pay a fee? And what if a judge agrees? This scenario is not worrying because in this world sanity has clearly broken down. But replace the mall with "intent to conceal" and it starts looking a lot more plausible.
FeepingCreature
11d ago
I mean, it's funny but it makes no sense; if you swap genders, you still don't actually benefit. And once I realize that, I remember that people just don't raise children for "the benefit." I mean, I guess your progeny can look after you in your old age, but a daughter can do that just as well as a son. I guess the joke is entirely the subtext that women are only valuable sexually.
FeepingCreature
12d ago
Yeah and as an additional factor, moral obligations and state actions are fundamentally different in kind because moral obligations are individual whereas state actions are collective. You have a moral obligation to save the drowning child even if you are surrounded on all sides by callous assholes; standing in a group of bystanders does not morally relieve you of failure to render aid. Conversely, if your society has decided on a tax rate that is erroneously, ruinously low, you do not have a moral or legal obligation to pay regardless, because in that situation we acknowledge that uneven enforcement is even more corrosive than wrong policy.
FeepingCreature
12d ago
The point is: report, don't engage. The rules explicitly do not support defensive/retributive rules violations.
FeepingCreature
20d ago
Problem is that there's not enough counterweight then to keep that president from messing with the legislation or even just enforcement around voting. Eight years you're out is legible enough to create a Schelling point to unite the country around enforcement. Look at the drama in the last election around single-digit percentages of votes. That is a healthy thing, I like seeing that. I think it'd be too easy to suppress that with near-absolute power.
Not at all; it's an implication that you consider other subsections vulnerable to rape, that is, desirable. "Unrapeable" says "not even with zero effort or consequences would she get any".
If you're rating on a spectrum, you get "I would put effort into getting laid with this person" as the higher tier, but then there's a tier of "sure, would fuck if an opportunity arose". That's the "rape" tier; it's not saying you want to engage in rape, but that rape is the obvious-to-come-to-mind situation in which their attractiveness would overcome the thus-lowered effort barrier. If there was a rapist in the room, they would rape this person. They would not rape the lower tier - unrapeable - because it would be actively unenjoyable, net negative even if free. "Thanks, I'd rather masturbate."
A less edgy schoolyard way to phrase the same thing is "would pay to fuck", "would fuck if you paid me" and "not even if you paid me."
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Though that may throw you into a weird equilibrium where enemies don't attack unless they're certain of your total destruction. Ie. fine, fine, dead.
So that's the sort of thing you can only do if you have a reliable second-strike/dead-hand system. And even then you can get pushed into a situation where your opponent will be so pissed off they just eat the loss. It only works against causal decision theories.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I think Skyrim is a great game, but not for its writing. Try to just play the main quest, not too much of it is actually good, and it's a very short story.
GTA5 is the only game that ever actively convinced me to stop playing it. If the developers had any balls, they'd put the torture mission inside the Steam refund window.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
It's not like other European states are more good and wise, these days. For goodness sake, look at France. Generally, the bigger, the more ruinous: scale creates margin, margin creates weirdness. We just happen to be the one in a position to ruin things.
(At least, the contemporary level of ruin. WW2 was its own level.)
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Eh, at that scale, if you don't isolate the cells properly you deserve what happens.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
I suspect the answer is going to turn out to be a combination of centralized storage, personal storage and dynamically scaling industrial demand. There won't be one big battery but the same volume distributed over lots of households.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Eh, our problems are hardly an inherent aspect of green energy, but more that we did it ass-backwards.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
About halfway through, I completely lost track of what the comment was advocating or even saying.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Brings to mind Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality: "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." So it seems this is hardly directional.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Iunno, I just feel like a society that talks like that is going to get critical investments very wrong. But also - the thing about strength is that once you have an army, you have to use it - or else you'll be outcompeted by the countries that didn't invest so much into strength as a terminal. Strength doesn't just allow you to defend, it requires you to attack. "If we didn't have this strength, we'd be invaded" is usually an excuse used by those countries that tend to do the invading. Meanwhile, hypothetically, your enemies have a five-country alliance of which one doesn't have an army at all, but just focuses on production. Why can they get away with that? Cause the other countries don't have to worry about that country feeling compelled to backstab them due to having invested so much into strength.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
If you told me, there were two societies, one values strength over weakness, and the other weakness over strength, and asked me to choose, I would conclude two things:
- probably someone from the first society told you this
- probably the second one was better.
I mean, come on! Who talks like that? Do you think that first society is going to have solid investment in research, developed logistics, good infrastructure? Or a dictator and a big army? You couldn't set up a better stereotype if you tried.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I think man operates as a floating signifier covering a dozen axes that are all more or less correlated, which is why it causes debate.
I think the leftist view is that tg depends on gender being arbitrary, which is why they've spent years disclaiming any claims it actually makes.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."
I could be very wrong about this, but as I understand it, Falcon Heavy is designed for high-mass launches. F9 launches are usually volume limited; being able to put more Starlink sats in orbit won't help you if you physically cannot fit more of them in the fairing.
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