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Comment by ArizonaJoe | Hacker News Reader

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Do you have any evidence that bridges, planes, trains, etc are failing at a higher rate?

I suspect you have it backwards, and these events are less frequent than ever which is what makes them newsworthy.

A false door fell off a plane and nobody died and now planes are "failing at a higher rate" but if you look at the actual statistics flying has never been safer.

"I only lost all my data once in one year, so my data is generally safe"

Boeing MAX 8 crashed twice, but not in the US. Those hundreds of deaths will optically disperse into the generally worse air safety record of the Third World, but the mechanism had nothing to do with the usual Third World problems; it was a software error made by Boeing.

A ton of bridges around the country are near their end of life and are in disrepair; something like a third of all bridges. This is mostly because so many bridges were built in the mid 20th century. The good news is states are starting to pay attention to this and are allocating more funds to address it.

The presence of social media means you hear of a lot more attempts than before. Russia used to only announce its successes and none of their failures in space. In making anything new, the only way to truly make it is to try a lot and the failures tell you the US tries at scale. Decline comes when you stop trying.

What ever you may think of the US, it is also home to SpaceX which is doing some amazing things wrt to "space". Producing a successful privately funded "space" company, to me, sounds like success as in, the economic model is, at least in some regards, a success. Sure, in come the socialists, and I agree with them and like living in Europe... Still, Europe is not fertile ground for companies like SpaceX. Please don't take this comment as Europa or the US is superior. I'm just saying they're different.

Not sure any large government contractor can really be described as privately funded. If Europe had the same level of defense funding it might look very different there, too.

You can't throw a stone in America without hitting a government contractor. Doing work for the government and getting paid for it doesn't disqualify them as being a private company. The government isn't an investor, they've paid the company for services.

Or do you think that if I pay a plumber to install a toilet, I've now invested in his plumbing business?

Exactly my point - a lot of funding from there for a lot of things. SpaceX derives a lot of revenues from government and defense business and there is way less of that in Europe to go around.

But SpaceX is a private company. Sure, we can argue the environment of America produces more such companies than anywhere else but at the end of the day it's a man with billions of dollars dragging a country to space.

It makes no sense that the government equivalent is NASA and each launch is expensive and slow. The US govt is seeking contracts with a private entity because NASA simply does not have the ability to go to space quick and cheaply.

NASA isn't the government equivalent of SpaceX, NASA just commissions launch vehicles from the private sector and does the missions that use those launch vehicles.

Space Shuttle? United Space Alliance, Thiokol/Alliant Techsystems (for the SRBs), Lockheed Martin/Martin Marietta (for the external tank), Boeing/Rockwell (for the orbiter).

Apollo? Boeing (first stage), North American Aviation (second stage), Douglas (third stage), North American Rockwell (CSM), Grumman (LM).

IIRC, NASA have never made their own complete launch vehicle in-house.

Governments send people to space more as a matter of national pride than serious technological or human progress. That was why we stopped moon landings after Apollo, and the Shuttle was hamstrung. And it's why the Chinese have put on only token efforts.

If it's finally profitable to do space, it's up to a private company to do it. NASA's version is just more flag waving. The best it can hope for is to be a jobs program for technologists. Which is awesome and undoubtedly has benefits, but it's no surprise that it isn't profitable or gutsy.

> And it's why the Chinese have put on only token efforts.

China's got two rovers up there, returned 1.7kg of moon rocks in 2020, has another sample return scheduled this year, and another rover in 2026.

> at the end of the day it's a man with billions of dollars dragging a country to space.

SpaceX was originally funded, and still is funded, by tens of billions of dollars worth of NASA contracts. It's not a billionaire dragging the country to space, it's the people of the country paying for a service.

It's not hard to find out this isn't true. Wikipedia might help

> the change in the world over the last few years

Can you expand more on what you interpret them to be thinking here? Who is on the rise in their minds?

> just how rapidly it has lost its perception of being a dominant superpower

This is probably a good thing. Hard to stay focused on improvement when one is dominant. When just as many people from the US go outside for education and/or immigration as people from outside go to the US, we will know that things outside the US are in better condition.

There's a ton of jingoism in this country and those suffering from it pretend "we're #1" without wanting to do the things that made/make it possible.

may be too much focus on "first world problems"?

We have done amazing space missions over the last couple decades with mind-blowing discoveries; they just weren't manned. As far as manned spaceflight, Artemis 1 was a complete success two years ago. Artemis 2 will launch with people at the end of this year or early next year. We are waiting on multiple companies to complete their part of what will become Artemis 3, when we actually land. I'm not sure that the average person even knows that SpaceX is part of Artemis 3, and the entire project is being drowned out by Elon's nonsense.

I think you are just seeing more noise, but not less signal. There is so much work being produced now, and so much of it is worthless that it can appear as though we no longer know what we are doing.

In the modern digital age, countries all over the world are catching up at incredible speeds. One thing the US has is a moat on existing prebuilt technologies and supply chain lines, i.e. military equipment and gas but new technology threatens that at any time.

For example, look at the frivolous spending of the US on it's superior military budget and its belief it is the strongest military in the world. Meanwhile there are a growing number of people highly concerned that in a modern war with drones and technology, the expensive US technology would be quickly overwhelmed and defeated by cheaper technology that were not accounted for in the last few decades i.e. UAVs + AI.

> For example, look at the frivolous spending of the US on it's superior military budget and its belief it is the strongest military in the world.

One can just look at the Ukraine vs. Russia war to see there is an immense technological gap between the US and Russia. Everyone thought Russia was the #2 military in the world before the war, but nowadays might be at best #3. Ukraine is holding Russia back and/or inflicting horrendous casualties on Russian forces using only a couple percent fraction of the US defense budget, and largely with old/leftover/unused equipment. Reminder too that Ukraine doesn't have the backing of the US Air Force or the US Navy, which the US would absolutely use in the event of conflict with Russia.

Granted, this war has exposed a lot of shortfalls with the US Military with respects to advanced weapons procurement, artillery shell production, and drone warfare, but it's also been an intelligence goldmine for western militaries that is already starting to produce changes in strategy.

> the expensive US technology would be quickly overwhelmed and defeated by cheaper technology that were not accounted for in the last few decades i.e. UAVs + AI.

Russia has failed to destroy a single Patriot battery or HIMARS system, despite those being in-conflict for a while now. If drones were such a wunderwaffe that made advanced tech useless, then all of that tech would have been destroyed by now.

China is likely #2 now with an impressive on-paper military, but they also have not been battle tested in decades with lots of unproven tech.

Drones don't make advanced tech useless, but sure as hell they make land attacks extremely bloody.

The Ukrainians are skilled soldiers, at that moment with a lot more practice than anyone else in the Western world; yet they cannot flush the mobiks out of their dugouts. Same in the opposite direction.

The Houthis are now holding world trade hostage with similar drones and rockets. I would certainly like to see them defeated by the US military might, if only as a reassurance that a tribal army in sandals cannot dictate conditions to the rest of the world. But I am far from certain if it is possible. Air Force is a huge hammer and such drone teams are small midgets in a desert.

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