bmcusick

Ugh. He completely misunderstands what PoW (or PoS) are for. The entire point of PoW is deciding between two valid & correct blockchain states.

Alice owns a bitcoin. Alice validly signs a transaction transferring that bitcoin to Bob. Alice also validly signs a transaction transferring that same bitcoin to Charles.

WHICH IS CORRECT? Neither is a forgery. Both signatures are valid. If Dave downloads the blockchain, or receives both transactions, he can't just look at them and determine one of them is fake. Neither is fake. He needs a way of arbitrating who actually has the bitcoin now - Bob or Charles.

PoW is that arbitration process. Dave looks at the competing blockchains (one with Bob having received it, and one with Charles having received it) and can trust that everyone in the world will respect the chain with greater PoW behind it.

Paul's system has no way of addressing this other than "trust the central authority to process transactions in the order they receive them". Thanks, pal, that's called e-cash, and was invented by David Chaum in 1983.

According to the latest energy report from Lazard, the subsidized cost of solar and wind is now below the marginal cost of operating nuclear and coal plants.

And the unsubsidized cost isn’t far behind and is still falling. It fell 9% last year.

Correct

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-ro...

I bet this will get the employee plenty of high-fives and maybe a few paid-for drinks at the bar, but it won't help him replace that job. Any employer would have to ask themselves whether they'd do something similar to one of their high-profile customers.

My theory is that ETH is a useful medium of exchange for buying compute resources from "the world computer", but BTC is better as a store of value. And the dollar continues to be better than both of them as a unit of account.

Basically, competing forms of money are breaking down into specialized kinds of money. Automatic atomic swaps between blockchains will make the specialization even more obvious over time.

Remember Peak Oil? Good times.

It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.

The only hard part about that is the municipal permitting. Home construction is not rocket science! This is a mature industry and purchase, demolition, and new construction all have predictable costs.

You can almost always build more housing on a given lot though. My detached single family home uses 1/5 or less of the land on my lot. You could build four town homes of the same size as my house on the same lot. If you went to four stories, eight units of 2,000 square feet each.

This isn't rocket science. It's about density of units per amount of land.

And yet many of the longest-lived populations on earth have diets rich in carbohydrates, like the Okinawans.

I hate associational studies like this which don't distinguish between types of carbohydrates (sugar vs starch) or other factors, like whether they were eating whole meals of natural foods or snacking on potato chips 24/7.

But at least they've finally noticed they were completely wrong about saturated fat for 80 years.

Yup, that's what I meant. I don't know how reliable those Elonian schedules are though. :-p

You mistook my point. Not that New Shepherd can be used "as is", but merely that Blue Origin and SpaceX have developed propulsion-based landing technology and NASA/Boeing have not. There's a much shorter development path from New Shepherd/Dragon 2-->LEM, than from Orion.

And of course SLS could launch a LEM. The problem there is that it costs $2 billion/launch. That's "just a bit" of a price premium relative to Falcon Heavy, or whatever the fully reusable generation of rockets is going to cost.

> It means establishing a renewed American presence on the moon... > And from the foundation of the moon...

This is potentially bad news for SLS/Orion. They have no ability to land on the Moon. SLS doesn't do retro-propulsion and Orion can only land on Earth's ocean using heat shields and parachutes.

That's why NASA has pushed for asteroid missions and building a space station around the Moon. Those are things that SLS can do.

Of course if the intention is to land on the moon this is very good news for SpaceX and Blue Origin, both of whom have working retro-propulsion landings under their belt. Arguably, Blue Origin is in an ever better position than SpaceX since their New Shepard is about the right size for a moon lander. SpaceX would have to develop one.

(Dragon 2 was originally supposed to do retro-propulsion landing, but NASA nixed the idea of landing legs that extended from a heat shield, so the idea was dropped. They would either have to develop a lander version of Dragon 2, or wait until the BFS is available)

Well you and I are just speculating, so who knows. But I sort of doubt it. People would have noticed if SpaceX was hiring nuclear engineers. I think they have enough R&D on their plate getting to full reusability.

NASA is working on it, but until there's a working engine available for private rockets it seems premature.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/201...

Maybe. I understand the physics says there's an ISP benefit. Standard rocket engines are well-understood though, work well, allow for retro-propulsion, and you can synthesize methane easily on Mars.

In the long term when the space transport infrastructure is as well developed as the terrestrial one, I can see the benefit of having different systems for different purposes, so you get the specialized benefits. But I'm not sure we are there yet.

To use an analogy from history, we aren't at the Golden Spike moment yet where California was sufficiently settled to warrant a continental rail road connecting the East and West Coasts. We're still in the exploration and settlement stage, and while trains may be more energy efficient, what we need is a Conestoga Wagon that can be operated and maintained by the settlers themselves while they live off the land and develop the first homesteads.

The Sun shines on Mars too. Solar energy is a practical source of energy as far out as the asteroid belt. Nuclear energy isn't needed to accomplish anything that Musk wants to accomplish in life.

Sorry, but your theory doesn't work because plenty of other fusion projects are attracting VC. There is something wrong with Lerner specifically, not fusion generally, that's stopping people from putting money in.

This, exactly. I don't know why you're getting down-votes. It's indisputable that both (1) the economy improving on average and (2) the distribution of those gains is highly skewed to the right-side of the income/wealth table.

Stories based on average numbers lose a great deal of the details that matter.

Lerner has been beating this drum for years, and presented at many conferences. And yet no one has invested. I'd love to know why. Either there's a catch to the technology that he's not disclosing (and the smart money doesn't have a motivation to disclose), or he's asking for unreasonable business terms.

The only thing I know for sure is there's no lack of capital available for good fusion research. Not if the money raised by Tri-Alpha, General Fusion, and others is an indicator.

SpaceX is already 10x cheaper than the Space Shuttle. Reusable rockets will be another 10x or more cheaper. Access to space will be cheap and routine.

One of the main benefits of a LEO colony is you can design it with 1/10th or less of the shielding mass of deep space colony, because it's shielded from radiation by Earth's magnetic field. Such a design would not be able to keep people healthy beyond LEO.

A LEO colony would be a staging point for colonists and ships, but not a ship itself.

> This is assuming we can even get a person to mars, which has not been demonstrated as feasible. Let alone a whole community.

Landing per se shouldn't be impossible. We landed people on the Moon a long time ago. Recent advances in magnetic shell aerocapture are really exciting and make landing on Mars more feasible. The real question is whether we can learn how to do it in an economic and sustainable way; unlike Apollo.

> It would be better to colonize the moon

I agree with this. Going straight for Mars seems unwise. We should expand slowly out into the Solar System, step by organic step. Even better than the Moon would be Low Earth Orbit. A colony in LEO would have same-day access to Earth in either direction, and would benefit from being inside Earth's magnetic field, which would allow the designers to cut the mass needed for shielding significantly. Big savings.

A LEO colony would be close enough to Earth that people on Earth could teleoperate robots in the colony in real time with minimal lag, allowing it to circumvent the bootstrap question of "Where do people live while it's being built?"

A LEO colony would also have to built using bulk physical resources from the Moon or the Near Earth Asteroids, building up our manufacturing base there, and serving as a "shore leave" destination for people working further up in Geosyncrhonous Orbit or elsewhere Cis-Lunar space.

Once we have a basic torus capable of holding, say, 10,000 people, it could serve as a staging area for venturing deeper into the Solar System, such as Mars. But personally even then, I wouldn't advocate for Mars. After all that work of moving humanity out of a deep gravity well, why climb into a new one? Space is where all the solar energy is, and all the resources of the asteroid belt and the moons are (gravitationally speaking) close at hand.

> It’s a massive waste of resources which could go towards making earth better, where we’re all stuck anyway.

Now here's where I disagree with you.

1. In no way did colonizing Australia or North America prevent England from improving the homeland. You can do both! Heck, Elon Musk is already doing both. The whole point of Tesla/Solar City is to move humanity off fossil fuels.

2. Space colonization can be part of the solution. Imagine industrial processes that have very polluting intermediate steps; they could be done on the Moon where you don't have water or air to worry about polluting. Earth could be cleaned up by exporting those industries to space. The Moon could also serve as a much better repository of high-level nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain.

And of course in the very long term, the Solar System has the energy and material resources to support a human population 10,000x bigger than Earth does. As much solar energy as Earth receives, space receives a lot more. As much iron and PGM and carbon and water as Earth has, space has more. Europa alone is estimated to have 2x as much water as Earth. And so those resources can support more people who have more ideas who solve the very problems you want solved.

Eh.. right off the bat, you have to doubt "analysis" that comes from an article that doesn't know the difference between the Falcon Heavy and ITS.

But then it gets really stupid. The idea that you'd transport water from asteroids to the surface of Mars is bananas. Mars has enough surface water already. The reason asteroid ice is valuable isn't because it's water, it's because it's not on the surface of a planet. To fly around the solar system you need rocket fuel in space, and launching it off planets is really expensive. Landing asteroid water on a planet that already has water destroys 99% of its market value.

Also the idea that water ice is only useful if you're going to Mars misunderstands why water ice on asteroids is useful in the first place; as fuel for flying around the Solar System more cheaply (or with more mass) than you could if you had to launch all your fuel from Earth. That's useful no matter where you're going.

Anyway, I'm not going to debunk this whole article, but it was basically written by a very uniformed person. Basically the only thing they got right was recognizing that launch costs (not engineering ability per se) is the primary barrier to further space exploration.

This can't be about direct revenue. We all know that Android handset business is barely profitable. Even Samsung makes a fraction of what Apple does, and the rest are rounding errors.

I expect this is Google trying to prevent the Android market from becoming a Samsung monopsony. They're half the market, and everyone else is less than 5% (except Hauwei, which is 6%). Given the profits available, I bet half of these businesses are in danger of being shut down every year.

Another thought is that Apple has a huge advantage in that they make really low-level investments in hardware, especially the camera and security devices. Google would probably be willing to make those investments and license them to the other OEMs, but to really be good at it they'll need to be a hardware company themselves.

Lastly, and I think this is less likely, it's just my inner fanboy talking, but I hope Google makes really good phones and makes them Project Fi exclusives. If they can create an anchor phone that draws people to Google Fi, then Google has more leverage to negotiate lower prices from the wireless companies. Anything that take Verizon down a couple pegs is OK by me.

Your first claim was so interesting I had to Google it. But this article suggests it doesn't hold up.

https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/will-shading-your-air-co...

Moneyquote: "The temperature of the surrounding air has a much bigger effect on cooling efficiency than direct solar gain, and the volume of air pulled in by an air conditioner is huge."

Yeah, this seems like a probable trademark violation as it's likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. I expect they'll have to change it.

> More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.

I didn't say it was bad! I'm pro-productivity. My contention is simpler; that going from a pre-industrial economy to an advanced economy has a path that's been well trod by the West and now by east Asia too.

There's a give-and-take, or zig-zag path, between automating the old jobs and finding new jobs for people to do. You need to automate farming to free up farm labor to do more productive things, but you also have to have a large demand for jobs to absorb all those ex-farm laborers. Otherwise you just get urban slums full of the unemployed.

India tried to jump directly from pre-industrial economy to a financial and technological services economy, and it's not working as well as China's model. India's GDP/capita is still a fraction of China's. The problem is that you can't take a billion subsistence farmers and turn them into the 10 million specialties needed to run a modern economy. Growing human capital is an organic process that takes decades and requires intermediate steps of sophistication.

And for centuries now, garment production was a good stepping stone to more advanced kinds of manufacturing. It's like if you take the middle three rungs out of a ladder, how do you get to the top? You can't. The top is still there, but you're stuck at the bottom.

Now maybe there's another path from Pre-IR to OECD-level economics that doesn't involve sweatshops, but if so, can you point to a country that's done it?

All three over the next 10 years.

Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples.

Food Service: The real killer app here is that special-purpose automated kitchens (like the ones that produce only fresh hamburgers) will combine with drone and self-driving car delivery to make meal deliver 1/4 the price of restaurants today.

Garments: The technology in this article means that production in the EU/USA will cost about the same as Indonesia or Kenya, and the EU/USA labor pool will have more of the high-skill technicians you need to service the robots. Combined with shorter supply chains and faster time to market and you'll see garment manufacturing becoming "local but automated" in most markets.

Depending on the supply of "sewbot technicians" the USA might even start exporting clothing to Latin America or wherever.

Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.