This mission is representative of what JPL has become. Leadership there increased the cost of the program to $11B and would not bring the samples back until 2040, they also designed the mission around legacy rockets like Ariane 64 instead of working to lower costs and increase capacity by working with industry and designing around Starship or New Glenn. The moon missions brought back 842 pounds of rocks and MSL would bring back 1.1 pounds. It’s directionally better to wait for manned missions to Mars so we can bring back tons of rocks or even do the research on Mars itself. It seems like the JPL mission is maximized to provide jobs to researchers and maximized for mission complexity rather than just buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time.
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
This is so cool. For instance the asset FBI SEPTEMBER 2023 SIGHTING - COMPOSITE SKETCH indicated that “Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.”
I wonder if there’s satellite imagery of this event, or maybe if in the near future we’ll have greater satellite coverage so we can corroborate these claims with imagery.
I’m 99-100% a car user now after living in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Here’s why - I gave up my car for a bike when I lived in Portland, however when people openly smoked fentanyl on the trains the train operators had to stop the train during my morning/afternoon commute for ~15 minutes (this happened often). Also the last straw for me was getting my place broken into and having my bike stolen. Therefore I moved to cars because I didn’t have to inhale secondhand fentanyl smoke or deal with unscheduled delays. As a man in Los Angeles I had to deal with a drunk man on a bus touching my thigh and hitting on me and people trying to sell me drugs/solicit me for money/phone calls/etc. As a regular hiker I’m also not sure public transit would service trailheads in the Cascades or the Sierra Nevadas. As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy, so I think this problem will likely go away.
I welcome Waymo in Portland, I’m just concerned for the well being of the vehicles!
I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them. In the same vein, reporters and journalists are a very small subset of American population that are very vocal about AI because it probably threatens their hegemony.
I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.
I totally am paying a massive amount of capital gains taxes! I’m also saving up for a house which means every dollar I don’t contribute to a down payment becomes principal and interest on a mortgage which equals even more money out of my pocket. For instance if I pay $37k in capital gains one year (which I did) and if my principal on a $500k house is $200k at 6% and $1500 monthly payments I’ll have to pay $33k in interest on just the $37k I didn’t pay up front!
I’m hopeful for driver assist so I don’t have to pay attention while driving, also this helps disabled people get around (particularly in rural areas with less/no public transit). I’m also hopeful for humanoid robots so they can do all my chores like sweeping, laundry and cooking. In general the idea that me, my family/friends and my country is progressing makes me hopeful.
I’d argue that NASA should not have ever got into studying climate science, it should be a responsibility of NOAA. NASA should be focusing on NEP, atmospheric satellites, better aircraft, making life interplanetary and astronomy.
The US already has “shoot the archer” doctrine which strategizes to target the site(s) launching cheap drones rather than the drones themselves. With US air superiority this seems feasible.
Does the offshore wind energy costs include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping, installing, maintaining and decommissioning the turbines? Does it also include bird losses and whale harms?
This seems like a good thing considering the “TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity" in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants.”
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Bottom line up front it’s probably better to address the root cause of this situation with the general solution — making government drastically smaller and less pervasive in people’s lives and businesses. I remember not too long ago during the last administration very heavy handed unforgivable and traumatizing rhetoric and executive orders that intruded into the bodily autonomy of millions of Americans and threatened millions of American’s jobs. This happened to me and I personally received threats that my livelihood would be taken away from me which were directly a result of the Executive branch. This isn’t a problem where Congress has ceded powers to the Executive branch, it’s a problem that so much power to legislate and tax is in the hands of the government at all! Every election cycle that results in a transfer of power to the other party inevitably results in handwringing and panic but this wouldn’t be the case if citizens voted their powers back and government wasn’t so consequential.
I think an adversarial foreign power would push to expand rather than diminish state funded media like CPS, PBS and NPR. They’d probably also try to reduce the right to keep and bear arms and would increase regulation and taxes to damage domestic industrial capacity and reduce competitiveness. I don’t think our leadership at the executive level is doing this. I don’t think an adversarial power would invest $100B into TSMC Arizona or push Japanese car manufacturers and European pharmaceutical companies to build domestically. Thank you for sparking this thought experiment I actually did enjoy doing some research on this topic.
This isn’t very big news. Issues occur during bring-up often. Linde’s processes are possibly so power intensive that failing over to generator power is not possible. TSMC is right to put Linde on notice since Linde should have a PFMEA and control plan to eliminate any root causes for downtime. I suspect in the long term TSMC has plans to insource this if the issue persists. Scrap happens sometimes during manufacturing, if the writer only has journalism experience and no manufacturing experience then they may not have a conceptual understanding of acceptable first pass yield. After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!
I attended an objectively good public school system in California. There was very little political slant pushed by teachers except a far left slant in my journalism class. Thankfully we had many AP and honors classes which allowed motivated and competent students to thrive. I personally found myself disliking most normal classes because some students seemed unmotivated or incompetent and I didn’t like to be around those types of people. In scouting I met many homeschooled boys who didn’t seem very well socialized but their parents were always affluent, intelligent, mature and stable people who supported their boys. On one occasion a homeschooled kid didn’t want to be so he ran away for a few days and all the parents grilled us for clues as to where he may have gone. He ended up going to public high school with me the last two years and I think he made friends there. Another boy was homeschooled because he never managed to make friends and was quite annoying and quick to anger. He left out scout troop because he failed to adapt to the group and threw a knife at me! In college I met kids who went to ineffective public schools and they were very obviously much less competent than the people in my high school and heavily at a disadvantage. Based on my observations all children raised under homeschool were socially awkward but far more intelligent than the average public school kid.
After moving out of state I observed that public schools make a really big difference in outcomes, I found that the people that came out of Portland Public Schools (PPS) were palpably less intelligent and also learned that group exams were sometimes taken! Also there were always needles, homeless camps, public drug use and fires around Portland schools. In these cases I think homeschooling (or groupschooling) would provide better outcomes.
I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.
I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocides against the genocide article then a more uniform interpretation of genocide across the entire site would be possible. I think the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency, to cover every viewpoint in a topic with rationale and to do so truthfully with associated references.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow. The model would write the article using all publicly available information. This would enable the article to feature all perspectives on the issue to avoid “lying by omission”. Articles would instead be overviews and about a topic rather than appearing biased to a particular set of talking points and coverage. Summary is much more approachable and benefits people who want to learn all about a topic rather than those who seek confirmation reinforcement. I think the end result of this would be that people would be equally happy/unhappy with Wikipedia because the rules would be applied to every article equally and would be a place to go when users didn’t know what to prompt while apps like Grok/ChatGPT are resources used when people already have a question prepared. I agree with Jimmy’s opinion that Wikipedia is not a place to adjudicate disagreements.
"We need to see was someone living in there permanently?" Canepa said. "These are taxpayer dollars and so we need to make sure that what's taking place in those facilities really is for the good of the taxpayer. That means people aren't living there." - this quote doesn’t follow logically since the chief living in the office may actually be better for response time. This article makes me feel like all critics involved are like crabs in a bucket that are frustrated that someone managed to supercommute. I worry that someone in city government directed the fire inspector to the station as a political move more than in the actual interest of safety! If this guy faces any response to his living situation I would hope he gets the same treatment that those living on the street (whose habitation poses a fire risk to the public and burden to taxpayers) do - support from the community and no repercussions at all.
I think I’ll just being empathetic here, maybe his heart is just in Idaho? If he is the chief if may be within his authority to built out infrastructure within the station. Presumably he can react much faster during weekdays since he’s already in the station and delegate authority during weekends when he’s away and cannot respond quickly. It would be in family for a police department to have redundancy and response plans for his brief absences. Flights from Boise to SF are relatively cheap and short so his commute could even be shorter than if he went snowboarding in Mammoth or backpacking in the nearby Sierra Nevadas over the weekend. Is he required to never vacation so he’s always available on short notice? Maybe we should look at the rules he allegedly broke and see if they need changing?
I think the bigger story here is that there are many talented people who are drawn to California because of the opportunity but would rather live elsewhere. Some people in tech have the benefit of working from home and can be digital nomads but there are many of us who have to live where we work and often that’s not where we really want to be. If he had the same rights and cost of living as Idahoans do I’m sure he’d he’d live in the Bay Area. I would rather live in Seattle and so would my coworker, I know a very talented engineer who sits across from me who commutes every weekend from Los Angeles to Bellevue because he doesn’t want to live here. My boss is looking for land in Spokane to settle down and another coworker lives in Nevada but commutes to work here and stays in hotels. When I lived in Portland the police and firefighters did nothing about the tents and RVs that caught fire next to where I lived. Having lived in Los Angeles the firefighters here do nothing about tents which become molten plastic fissures in the ground so I think they need to get their priorities straight since they have finite time and resources.
I don’t mind this at all as somebody who is currently living in California. Idaho is very safe and a working person can purchase a very nice home. California is very expensive and relatively unsafe in many of the major cities although not as unsafe as cities like Portland. Boise, Idaho also has better human rights like less unconstitutional firearm ownership intrusions. I’m making enough money to be firmly middle class but if I was making $200,000 a year I would live out of state as well. I have lived in Los Angeles, Boise, Seattle, Portland, and Texas and I know that Boise is very safe and a pleasant place to live, which I’m sure the police chief in the Bay really appreciates after dealing with the violence that he experiences while working. I wish this man the best.
About a decade ago some guy thought I was taking a picture of him and his girlfriend, they were very uninteresting subjects and I didn’t take any pictures of them but he followed me and sucker punched me. He was caught quickly and I pressed charges and since he had priors he didn’t make bail and was sentenced to 2 years in prison which I don’t think was enough because even a soft punch could kill someone. After that I began carrying non-lethal and lethal tools for self defense and stopped worrying about hurting people’s feelings when I take pictures. If people tell me off I tell them off because ultimately our conflict is based off of differing arbitrary opinions. I concluded that art is a human right and I should never feel guilty or bad about making it. Art is noble and it’s a high pleasure and part of being human. I have a short time in this life to create art so I should just do what I feel is pure and what I want. I’ve also concluded that if I did what everyone told me to do (or what they told me not to do) I’d be eating ten pounds of spinach a day, waking up a 5 AM, drinking a gallon of milk a day, buying timeshares and joining the Marines! Obviously I wouldn’t be doing what I want, my point is that artists need to listen to their inner voice and follow wherever that takes them.
Yep, I make many pictures but don’t feel like I need to share them with others. Sometimes I show my girlfriend and sometimes I frame them or put them on my fridge. I actually don’t really want to show strangers my work because I make photographs for myself and I’m not looking for critique because I’m developing my own style and exploring what interests me. I don’t need to prove my photographs are authentic because I know I took them!
I genuinely believe NASA funding should be reduced to 0% then ramped back up to eliminate the old blood and introduce people with new ideas and ways of thinking. NASA is also incredibly inefficient with their quantity of centers and conflicting specifications. People forget that NASA has been so mismanaged since Apollo that they designed the deadliest spacecraft ever - the Space Shuttle. If there’s a synergy between NASA and industry I don’t know about it and I don’t benefit from it! All the models and theories I use in my daily life were pioneered by IBM, DoW/AF and universities. I can’t actually think of a single model I use that came from NASA. Near-future I see Lunar Gateway as a debacle, distraction and money pit, likewise with SLS. In recent memory incumbent milaero companies flubbed Orion heat shield tiles (NASA could have prevented this if they actually had institutional know of this old technology), Starliner thrusters and SLS solid rocket boosters. They also binned nuclear thermal propulsion.
Heavy disagree with the point of this article. Their concern is that departures result in institutional memory loss. I think that rapid iteration >> institutional knowledge. Unfortunately NASA is at a point where private companies have to develop hardware independent of NASA and then sell it to NASA because their requirements are too dumb. I wanted to work at NASA/JPL for years but all the people I’ve met there have become paper subject matter experts by making 10 satellites and rovers while people at Nvidia, Apple and SpaceX ship millions of products and get to see hardware fail at scale. From what I have heard, NASA and legacy milaero contractors are where you go to get your new ideas crushed by incumbents. I think science is ripe for disruption where we privatize the process of doing science and publish the process and results publicly. NASA keeps much of their institutional knowledge to themselves from what I have experienced, I work in aerospace, and none of their data is readily available to me. Also, years ago JPL was criticized for significant delays in programs due to their policies. https://spacenews.com/psyche-review-finds-institutional-prob...
I personally feel like I have done net good for society through my work and and how I’ve treated people and it felt like a slap in the face when Joe Biden personally said that I would be getting fired from my job at a federal contractor because I disagreed with him. I won’t ever forget what he did to me and I feel like people should be talking about this just as much as they talk about DOGE. I won’t speak too much about DOGE but I feel that it’s important to say my truth about the matter and that I feel a form of catharsis and justice in the dismantling of bureaucracy that infringed on my rights as a human being. I welcome anyone who would like to discuss this with me because I have much more to say on the topic.
I understand your position, it is terrible that adults and children die by the hands of others. Genocides have happened all over the world and have led to tens of millions of people dying. These events aren’t hypothetical they’re historical but happen in big chunks rather than uniformly distributed and frequent but comparatively small events. I would suggest the statistics indicate that a person is likelier to die from a genocide than from a mass shooting by a factor of >100 and that small arms ownership and competence is more helpful rather than harmful since these tools can enable individuals to defend themselves against state actors or violent groups, or by their existence prevent groups with malicious intent from acting out on their genocidal or authoritarian desires. Something I agree with is the FBI’s assessment that people don’t commit crimes if they thinks it’s likely that they’ll be caught. I think that the collective individuals in our government (these United States of America) wouldn’t want to mandate concentration camps or a genocide because of the concentration of citizens with diverse mindsets who would provide feedback through resistance. There are of course other factors like recency bias that come into play.