domain:dynomight.net
ChickenOverlord
4m ago
Do your older siblings tell you you were adopted because they hate orphans, or do they do it because it gets to you in a way that other insults and teasing don't?
sliders1234
4m ago
The smartphone is probably the early 20th century innovation but it was going to occur with or without Steve Jobs.
Which I think is the big fundamental difference between Musks and Jobs. Rockets and electric cars did not have any meaningful innovation before Musks.
zeke5123a
5m ago
Well I think most people expect Twitter not to be that valuable.
Tesla is still one of the largest valued companies in the world. It is profitable car company. The latest FSD is amazing. The big question there is whether Elon will still be there if they try to screw him on his earned comp (after a terrible ruling by a Delaware judge).
Also it isn’t as sexy as talking about literally space travel.
sliders1234
10m ago
The product was stickier than people expected. Turns out 50-60 year olds who are often the boss now don’t feel like saving $100 to learn how to use google sheets. Which means everyone else has to use excel. Even though the products are incredibly similar. But the learning curve was enough to prevent switchability. The product would have obviously been toast if it operated on pure value creation like if it was Coke versus Pepsi and Pepsi was free and Coke costs a $1.
Shrike
11m ago
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
RegularlyExpressed
13m ago
Maybe when their AI beat a Go champion?
That was DeepMind (not sure if they were already owned by Google at that point).
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
14m ago
Chrome Android user here. Maybe ai didn't do it right but nothing changed for me.
roystgnr
18m ago
You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.
But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.
Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.
I very strongly disagree. There were smartphones before the iPhone, including with all sorts of applications and stylus interface over finger interface. The iPhone was the most popular smartphone and it will deserve a note on history for representing the moment that they spread, and represented an advance. But a small enough which was inevitable. As far as technological innovation goes, I am not that impressed. Still deserving praise for capturing the market though and some innovation on some features. But I wouldn't consider it sufficiently innovative to represent the definitive innovation of the 21st century. More representing the point of time that smartphones spread.
ETA: Apparently a different smartphone was available in stores a month before the iPhone with a finger touchscreen interface. https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26m ago
Are there any estimates from relatively unbiased sources that give a much higher number?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
31m ago
his progressive detractors will have no other choice but to quietly seethe.
Not necessarily; they could block it through legal and regulatory mechanisms.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
33m ago
In the heydays of reddit, usernames like /u/niggerkiller etc were not uncommon, and were almost always seemingly just meant to be inflammatory for its own sake. Some people never grow out of this, of course. You could check the post history of such people and not find anything remotely murderous or seriously racist.
SteveKirk
39m ago
trying to bring .
Unfinished sentence there.
I'll come back and try to read this later when I can go through all the blue links to piece together the context.
2rafa
40m ago
Yeah, they figured out how to tax every white collar job in the developed world like $100 per year, indefinitely.
KMC
42m ago
Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
The law has been on the books for plenty of time. I think this is a good reminder that the basic unit of the United States of America is the State, not the political party. I think the Democrats really thought the state would simply roll over and accommodate them, and that expectation is frankly cause enough to remind them of the proper place of the party.
Fauci et All Foiling FOIA
This really boils my blood. Nobody wants to repeal FOIA because it stinks of corruption, so when you're vigorously avoiding it, you look corrupt. This shit should land Fauci, and others, in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison. The only reason nobody will pay for this is because the entire fedgov is corrupt, and the deep state always protects its own. I don't believe Trump will actually fix this, but at least he's saying the right things. Plus, if there's something we've learned form the J6 prosecutions it's that the "Justice" department can and will find the crime if you show them the man.
Title VII Religious Freedom in California
There's only so much I can say about the Civil Rights Act. Its text forbids discrimination in a myriad of ways, its implementation ensures discrimination against straight white Christain men. If only it were honestly applied, but that was never the point.
An Appeal to Heaven
This is why you never link to Wikipedia, for anything, ever. If you're going to bother, at least go to the talk page, and search the major revisions. Still, what else is there to say? Wikipedia is a tool of the uniparty. That's why the wikimedia foundation was run by a spook.
The Cloud is Someone Else's (Broken) Computer
LOL. LMAO, even.
I lost my phone after my honeymoon, and did not have cloud backup turned on. Now all my photos are sent straight to Google's servers. It makes me feel icky, but it's better than explaining why I don't have any pictures of my family.
gattsuru
42m ago
Even contemporaneously with the release of the story, Yudkowsky was complaining at length that people read both Harry and Quirrel as both far more correct and far more competent than they actually were, whether not noticing their failures or overstating their accomplishments. Reality ended up pushing that even further, for Harry -- the first twenty chapters are filled with a lot of pop social science that was iffy to start with and didn't really survive the replication crisis -- but there are other errors that I think were intentional, even fairly early on.
gattsuru
49m ago
One argument is dimensions. The difference between Falcon9 and a Starship to launch a cubesat is just economics, but the difference between the two to launch a fuckoff big mirror, not having to fold it up into a million pieces pretty much allows an entirely different and better design philosophy.
There's also some reliability arguments in favor of Starship's liquid methane fueling approach over the Falcon9's kerosene-fueled approach, especially given recent instability in fuel markets.
WhiningCoil
56m ago
RE: Google, whatever shine they used to have that they were a smart company full of smart people doing smart things is gone for me. The first cracks were when they ham fistedly censored their search algorithm to remove results for "gun" in their marketplace after one mass shooting or another. And then suddenly nobody could find gundam model kits anymore. That was probably 10+ years ago now, and I can't recall the last "smart" thing Google did. Maybe when their AI beat a Go champion? Since then it's just one public embarrassment after another, and their clown world AI training is just the most politically salient cherry on top of a company that seems to be at total war with competence.
I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony.
Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.
There's some subset of the population who have a different (arguably, defective?) risk calculus/tolerance when it comes to tackling new frontiers. It seems likely that >1% of the population is willing to sign on for such a trip with relatively dubious reward.
The tricky part, from my view, is that we'd need some of the best, brightest, and most adaptable, and they might be in shorter supply.
The cheap and easy answer is to what would motivate such action is to assume we send automated drones ahead to make things habitable and reasonably pleasant before the average biological human travels there.
In my mind, a probable option is the creation of O'Neil cylinders that are very directly optimized for some particularized environment which would make them extremely appealing for long-term habitation. One thing humans have consistently been willing to uproot and relocate for is desirable places to live.
Instead of retiring down to Florida or going on nonstop cruises, for example, I could imagine a dedicated "retirement orbital" which can house millions upon millions of septuagenarians while guaranteeing they all get to live on waterfront property, have sunshine and temperate climate year-round, and have minimal risk of crime or external diseases sweeping in.
You say this is an overly ambitious project which would require an obscene amount of resources and labor to construct, and you're right. I counter by pointing out that mankind has already built The Villages and similar communities across the state of Florida and elsewhere at great economic cost, so really I'm just proposing we scale up a model that has already been proven.
This partially solves the issue of who would be willing to risk it. Older people who have lived their life might not mind a risky trip to the place of endless bliss, even if it does make it nigh-impossible for the grandkids to visit.
My tongue is in cheek when I say this, but my larger point is that starship is a necessary step if we want to figure out what viable business models might be available in space.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
Colonization is very very expensive and the kind of groups that would take that deal are not very popular.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
57m ago
As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration.
This is your brain on relentless negative partisanship. "The enemy is agreeing with me!?! It must be a trap!!!"
Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties? Many issues aren't black and white, where one party supports 0 and the other party supports infinity. If both sides support some finite number, with one side's number simply being less than the other side's, then there's no contradiction if the status quo's number is far higher than what both would prefer, that both sides would agree to bring it down. For a more pessimistic take, it's possible that the side supporting a higher amount realizes that the status quo is too high and is thus costing them politically. In other words, they might prefer the status quo if they could have it for free, but they judge that the ongoing cost isn't worthwhile. That's what was going on back in February with the compromise deal. It's how the Democrats got to supporting much more stringent immigration restrictions without supporting any sort of amnesty, which had been a feature of basically every immigration compromise prior.
The resurrected bill could be another attempt by Democrats to defray the costs, or it could simply be grandstanding if they know Republicans will shoot it down again. Then they can say they tried to crack down on the border multiple times but Republicans (Trump) wouldn't let them.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
58m ago
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
The brilliant innovation was in Azure and especially Office 365, in leveraging their dominance in Office desktop application software to provide a superior and indispensable cloud-based service even as desktops starting becoming less relevant. This made them well-positioned to tax not just computer industry growth, but some fraction of all economic growth, basically the new IBM.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
How many people absolutely need to low latencies
It's not about need, it's about want, and even when it is about need HughesNet can't meet the need and paying $100 a month for Starlink sounds a hell of a lot better than your suggestion of... buying a different house in a less rural location?
I don't know how things are in the US
Clearly. Look up population density for the US compared to most European countries and you'll understand, maybe. You also might understand (one of the many reasons) why public transit in the US is so much more difficult.
I don't understand the "cloud is someone else's computer" argument at all to be honest. How many companies of Unisuper's size had catastrophic data failures before "the cloud"? Probably more than one!
And as to the application of the question to the personal data storage level, it seems beyond question that for the vast majority of people, their data is more secure (in the sense of preserved from accidental loss) in Google/Microsoft/Apple's hands than if they had to manage their own backups. Maybe a cloud provider loses data for one in a thousand customers, but I suspect that every single person who managed significant amounts of personal data in the days before the cloud lost data at some point due to negligence or mishap.
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