86 karma · joined September 15, 2019
As for RMS, every interaction I have had with him.has been rough at best. I mean he is definetly right about the issues of software but him as a person can be very difficult at the best of times.
It simply blows out any useful payload volume and costings because of the amount of water required. Last estimate I have seen is they would need 1,500 tons of water to make Starship radiation resistant (80% decrease in exposure). Even at $300 per Kg, about 1/8th the cost of current launches, that is still approaching a half billion dollars per ship with a significant lost of internal space.
Technical viability and economic viability are two very different things as well. This is going to be the thing that I feel will eventually limit our travel outside of the earth system.
I suspect we will see rampant use of Starship in orbit, the occasional run to the moon and maybe once or twice to Mars but beyond that. It will be just another technological lead that ends up in civilizations recycling bin.
The thing is there are many folks out there that were the nay-sayers and were completely wrong but also many that were completely correct. They are typically not remembered. It is one thing to make bold claims, it is another to out right deny the realities of the universe because they get in the way of a vision.
And $30 per Kg would be nice, the last figure for SpaceX is $2,720 per kg. That is a very big difference.
I have nothing against revolutionary technology. The thing is, when it comes to the reusable rockets and near earth orbital stuff - I have never had much doubts that SpaceX would achieve this outside of earth based political issues. I worry that they are pushing an image of what they want rather than what they will achieve.
Look at Blue Origin, I actually don't have a problem with them as they seem to be taking the more cautious approach. It could be a Turtle and the Hare situation going on here.
Personally I would love nothing more that to see the doubters get shown up by the likes of SpaceX actually going out there and making it all actually happen.
It is when legitimate issues are being brought up but arent being actively addressed by the likes of SpaceX that is when one has to wonder about how the upper ends of the business is skewing the marketing/output of the company.
I am reminded about the slogan of r/realtesla - revolutionary technology, awful company. I fear that, what if a company like SpaceX over promises and under deliv ers and causes more damage to the field long term than if they had not done anything at all?
One of the reasons I posted that channel was because they seem to have really done their research far beyond the typical "it wont work, just because". It is biased still but at least they arent just firing blind.
This is the YouTube channel Common sense skeptic, that seems to be doing a good job if trying to test Musks/SpaceX claims, typically it is not positive at all.
It is clear they have an axe to grind with Musk but they seem to doing a very good job of backing up their criticism s.
I am interested to see were the bottleneck could be.
It sees Google credentials and then auto creates an account that you can change the name on. I keep deleting them but reddit keeps making them. I just gave up and kept u/redditisastupidhead as my minor protest.
It was the final straw, I now just avoid the place altogether. It is like having a preappreoved credit card turn up in the mail, it is trying to suck you in. No thanks!
https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/issues/696
The forks from it however keep it living for now.
Im waiting for the day when Reddit kills the version 1 API.
To dismiss ideas outright on age alone is just stupid.
Wish it was more an opennly organized even with safety regulation, safety provisions and road closures rather than acting like road thieves, ignoring the rules for glory.
Instead of 5 years it only took about 6 months. Your mileage will vary.
An impressive feat for sure but it is just using brute force to increase performance nowadays.
I recall him in 2012 saying that the aviation industry would be history by 2018... that clearly didnt pan out. The theory was reasonable but the time frame was wildly out of whack.
Hopefully it is just the first steps towards a clean grid and not an example of a Concorde like moon shot failure.
Unfortunately, Kai OS is such a huge departure in terms of interface so it doesn't really hit the sweet spot in terms of developer ease and user desires.
Truth be told, Scomo was barely a figure anyone would have recognized until he was suddenly PM. He was there in the shadows but few would have picked him to be our next PM.
The re-election however I get the feeling that was a bit down to people starting to feel the pressure from a slowing economy. With that many were voting to ensure a system they knew even if not ideal. Better the devil you know than to try their hand on an nearly unknown candidate.
I don't really know, there is so much noise in the political space nowadays that it is difficult to get much signal out of it.
Peak oil didn't so much disappear as its ideas matured into a much more realistic depiction of it. Dr Hagans said that naming it peak oil was a bit silly and that it should have been called "Peak benefit of oil to society", that something that I can get behind.
The current idea is that the second peak will occur somewhere in the mid 20's as the debt load on fracking slows down additional drilling locations, this will raise prices and thus bring on even more newer more costly supplies as ultra-deep sea drilling, coal liquefaction becomes viable. Wheather this leads to a new increase in supply of just sustaining a plateau is anyone guess. Hopefully demand decreases and we move to alternative energy sources in time.
Some of the more reserved writers in the field did predict the production rebound and the higher prices that came with it, the idea that the issues of peak oil would be something that is a rocky road type of event that happens and fluctuates over a century not a sudden event. Folks like John Michael Greer and Dr Nate Hagans seem to be the most realistic folks in this area nowadays talking about the limits of oil production while focusing on possible future energy solutions.
John Michael Greer is a staggeringly convincing writer that has a fairly solid concept of the future of western industrial society. Essentially the idea that due to a wide degree of economic, social and environmental factors that we are in a situation that cannot be recovered from. He writes things that I don't want to agree with but they appear to hold water at least on the short term. I would recommend his books 'The Long Decent' and 'Dark Age America'.
The other reason why I mention his work is that his predictions are fairly in line with yours, the idea that the environmental movement is about to go quiet again because of the extreme message being pushed. That we are still learning how the climate reacts and that we do not have all the information. Climate blowback is going to be extreme but it will be a slow moving event.