MarkEthan

I'm not surprised - Amazon successfully managed to get the Pentagon to drop a $10 Billion USD contract with Microsoft by "applying lawyers" to the matter [1]! Why not do the same here. When you are at the scale of ambition that Bezos et al. play in then why shouldn't you push your legal execs to deliver the same way you push your engineering execs to deliver...

That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure.

[1.1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc...

[1.2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/

How do people justify Hyperloop as a particularly green option when my initial thought would be that it uses a similar amount of energy as a normal train - which we already have as a popular option? Or is the energy cost of maintaining the vacuum & associated processes far less than energy cost of air resistance for a normal train?

My presumption is that the vacuum matter is no trivial undertaking considering the proposals in this article for extremely long tubes all the way across Europe. Not trying to be snarky - I'm not that familiar with the details of Hyperloop and genuinely intrigued by how one would create so much vacuum!

I'd imagine he has an impressively comprehensive team around him ensuring he doesn't need to focus on anything other than his work.

That said, working over 14 hours per day 7 days a week is implausible to me. Maybe in short bursts but I doubt he does that for any stretch of time.

The Elon Musk PR machine & cult of public enthusiasm is a massive business asset. When you're in the business of selling dreams to investors and employees pushing themselves to the limit this type of 'fact' is going to get thrown around.

In a couple decades people are going to look back at the 1990's/2000's as a savage time - large tracts of the earth desperately poisoning themselves daily and being totally unconcerned by it.

According to the CDC[1] Diabetes incidence in the US has increased from roughly 2.5% to 7% since 1990.

The numbers are:

* 1980 - 2.54%

* 1990 - 2.52%

* 2000 - 4.40%

* 2010 - 6.95%

Unless legislation similar to that applied to cigarettes is introduced this train is going keep speeding further out of control. At least there are now increasing numbers of advocacy groups trying to make progress on the legislative side of things[2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/slides/long_term_tre... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/upshot/soda-tax-passes-in...

The fact that their website fails to clearly explain anything that I would say is particularly new to the world of cryptocurrencies I'd guess the value proposition is the marketing strategy...

Or even just a better pump & dump strategy - take a look at the historical price chart here: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash/

I imagine it's a combination of this and wanting Vine users to use the native Twitter video functionality rather than be owned by another company.

https://about.twitter.com/videos-on-twitter

The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize.

As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.