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Comment by asimjalis | Hacker News Reader

Never understood downvotes on questions or on economics. The cost of something affects how well it will scale. This is like downvoting a question about performance specs. Cost is a performance spec that determines scaling.

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Subtle play of the classic HN "but does it scale?" joke. As if someone is concerned about how well martian parachute assembly processes scale :D

Elon cares.

I don't think he plans to use parachutes, but I would not be too surprised if it would be more efficient to get some non-fragile supplies down on parachutes and airbags, but that would be a very long way out.

I personally saw it as a low-effort question, which could also indicate someone trolling, or trying (and failing) to make a joke. When you've spent billions of dollars on something, dyeing the fabric of your parachute in a particular pattern is obviously such a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a percent of your budget that it's entirely irrelevant.

If you were planning on building these for something where the cost of the parachute would actually matter, and need to do so at scale, perhaps you'd switch to a single-color parachute (with simple orientation/tracking markings). This discussion isn't really interesting at all.

When you start adding tiny tiny tiny fractions to a multi-million dollar project because, come on it is a tiny tiny tiny fraction, and everybody in the team starts doing it in their module/subsystem because, it is a tiny tiny tiny fraction, it starts adding up... that is really what my rhetorical question was.

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