It gives me hope for reversing climate change, though the scale and scope of the projects are absurdly different. 1000 gigatons of CO2 is a lot, but we'll have to start somewhere.
Edit: it's this one https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889805/the-james-webb-tele...
This could still turn out to be a big disappointment if it goes offline within the year.
I wonder how hard it is to launch a shield to protect it.
Even if this continues at roughly the same rate, the telescope will continue to function within the initial design specification for at least another year or two, and will be far from "offline within a year".
You can't extrapolate anything from a single event. It could have just been bad luck. If another one happens this year - then it's worth some concern.
The JWST performance report[1] says on page 18/19: "It is not yet clear whether the May 2022 hit to segment C3 was a rare event (i.e. an unlucky early strike by a high kinetic energy micrometeoroid that statistically might occur only once in several years), or whether the telescope may be more susceptible to damage by micrometeoroids than pre-launch modeling predicted."
[1]: https://www.stsci.edu/files/live/sites/www/files/home/jwst/d...
We'll know more in a few months.
This would be a >95% reduction in lifespan. I'm really curious what source suggests anything close to such a colossal failure in the predicted meteoroid environment.
> he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half of the people.
and ability to think technically/rationally
> He earned a bachelor’s in math from Virginia Union and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Howard.
...to be able to carefully reason through what's required for a technical project, and get stakeholders on board.
You don’t really have to do that anymore once you are a program director. There are people under you who do.
You need a lot of experience with how projects are managed and how work packages interact however and I don’t really see how you can get that if you didn’t do a job where you actually had to carefully reason through what’s required before.
He regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan, and they were no slouches.
It would be a different, and strange, world where people typically got to be professional drivers by taking out loans at 18 to buy brand new 500 hp sports cars and majoring in "Race Car Driving" at universities.
“ Biaggi was more interested in football as a child. But in 1989, after he was given a motorcycle for his seventeenth birthday, he began his racing career in the 125cc class at age eighteen.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Biaggi
Definitely not “typical”, but you don’t _have_ to be a child prodigy to be a world champion (motorcycle) racer.
(Sadly, I suspect the one guaranteed indicator of world champion potential in motor racing is being a “rich kid”. )
But "racing in the 125cc class" vs. the sort of person who begins on a liter bike sort of amounts to the same kind of dichotomy I was thinking of.
People who have a career in one sport, may grow up playing a different sport, but they were still likely doing something that demanded endurance, strength, and coordination.
I would suggest though, that the jump from “500hp sports car” to F1 is quite a lot bigger than 125cc GP bike (or Moto3 these days) to a premier class MotoGP (or 500cc GP) bike.
Those things were tiny little jewels of pure race bike, a world apart from even my Cagiva Mito (125cc sports street bike).
I’ve ridden a friends late 90s vintage Honda RS125 at a track day, and it’s such a joy to ride, beautifully precise - and way way more capable that I’ll ever be on a racetrack. I could match my own personal best lap times on my 900cc Ducati, but the club level racers could do 10 seconds a lap or so faster than me on their 125GP bikes, and the GP riders from 5 or 6 years earlier when the World Championship ran on the same track were almost 10 seconds faster in races than the club guys.
"the jump from “500hp sports car” to F1 is quite a lot bigger..." is what I was trying to say; someone imagining a career pipeline might point out that the power level is numerically closer, but in fact, that doesn't capture the proximity.
He ended up building an open source app in a few months that attracted a bunch of attention and moved into a big FANG type company doing development.
This is what put projects on track again.
“Everybody has selfish instincts“, but the magnitude of “selfishness” required to amass a wealth of a billion dollars is way way beyond “normal”. Whether that guarantees sociopathy or not is not a simple question I guess.
It’s a very different and more extreme example, but I remember being really struck by this when I first visited the US Holocaust Museum: even if some at the top were true sociopaths, many of the major perpetrators who were profiled at the museum were seemingly psychologically “normal” people who committed unthinkable acts (often because that was the way to climb the ladder in the hierarchy) and rationalized them somehow so they could sleep at night. To me that was just terrifying: I’d always sort of thought that the people who did these things must have been so abnormal as to be barely recognizable as human, but if they weren’t, what then? Then it could happen anywhere and to anybody if we don’t get serious about teaching moral courage. The Germans today know this very well, but I’m not sure Americans (and presumably others) absorbed the lesson.
I think it’s tempting to try to explain terrible people as being fundamentally different from oneself, because then we don’t have to worry about how not to become like them. It’s rather scary to think that they’re not so different, but if they’re not, we have to ask ourselves what we’d do different if we found ourselves in their position, whether that’s running a little startup that turned into a big corporation or serving in the Dutch state bureaucracy in 1940.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disor...
"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
Somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 25 CEOs "exhibit psychopathic traits". I'd guess there's a very strong overlap between those CEOs and billionaires.
When you're talking about billionaires, I think statistics from the general population aren't really relevant.
Out of the blue, I'm thinking that everyone on earth would have to use 20%-30% less energy on a daily basis to effectively slow or reverse the process of climate change. Technological improvement seems much more realistic, to me.
Rather than trying to change the habits of everyone on earth, a more realistic goal would be to change a fraction of these corporate polluters.
Efforts to place the responsibility of climate change on individuals is mostly corporate propaganda. Not that altering our habits wouldn't be an improvement, but it's not addressing the main cause of the problem.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Furthermore, as long as fossil fuels exist as a mainstream energy sources, fossil fuel companies, whether a great many small ones, or a few huge ones, will represent a very large proportion of the emissions. You can't change them, that's just literally what they are. You have to either stop them (e.g. make fossil fuel extraction illegal) or change everyone else to remove the market (e.g. encourage use of sustainables, including nuclear, everywhere).
If you start something to benefit other people, you run a charity or a non profit.
Companies are started and run by people who want to make money for themselves and their investors. You might be using “benefitting our customers” as a tool in your profit-making, but it’s not why you get out of bed every morning (whether you admit it to yourself or not).
The optimist in me observes that there really has been a “massive change” in renewable energy in the last few decades. Too little and too slow, perhaps, but who would have imagined 20 or 30 years ago that we’d have electricity prices dropping below zero at times because of an over abundance of wind and solar power?
I also believe that _people_ reducing their daily energy use by 30% is totally a realistic thing. Where I am (.au) the energy market is going crazy, with electricity retailers bumping prices by 30-50%, and even publicly advising customers to go elsewhere because their rates are going to jump by so much. Almost everybody I know has had discussions lately about what the best way to reduce energy use is. All these price rises are going to tart hitting peoples bills at the end of this month or quarter, and I’m positive those energy saving discussions are going to ramp up then.
It is, but it will have more or less 0 effect on global warming if nothing else changes. The global shipping industry, manufacturing of trillions of tons of junk no one actually needs are the biggest problems. Cheap fashion, cheap gadgets, cheap toys, cheap home decor, cheap jewelry and many other things which go from resource in the ground to cheap junk back to landfill in less than a year, while directly producing CO2 in chemical refinent processes, and indirectly producing more CO2 in energy costs, and producing more CO2 to be shipped halfway across the globe.
And all propped up by a marketing and advertisement industry that works very hard to find new psychological tricks to manipulate adults and children to buy more of all of these.
Of course, other more useful industries are also massively wasteful - inordinate amounts of food are produced, transported around the world, stored in massive warehouses until they are no longer considered sellable, and then thrown away. Same with cars, furniture, appliances.
And let's not forget the vast amounts of computation being thrown away - most spectacularly by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also by so many advertising AI projects, mobile "games" that are just slot machines without any payout, and just general waste (we've built our backend in JS and run it on a Python interpreter in a container in an x86 VM running on an ARM processor, in a cluster with three master nodes for 1 worker node because we have to be highly available for our 3 customers who open the app once every week).
I think what you mean is the wholesale spot price dropped below zero at some times due to an over production of electricity generated by renewables.
I'm not aware if any retail customers being paid to use electricity.
I'm not as optimistic as you about people reducing electricity consumption here in Australia, much of it is nondiscretionary.
What we need is federal level legislation to protect at least some of our gas and oil production for the local market, like Western Australia has.