bmcusick

This is wonderful news for humanity, in the long term. Bezos is dedicated to expanding humanity into the solar system in a more sensible way than Musk is. O'Neil cylinders are really the way to go for a lot of reasons, and that's the vision that Bezos is dedicated to. More money for that is fantastic.

I just wish there was a Bezos/Gates-level billionaire who care as much about life extension via SENS. That's the only thing of equal importance I can think of that needs long term vision and financial support.

We'll see, I guess. I've also been making resistance exercise a regular part of my life and am building up muscle mass. I'm hopeful that a larger lean body mass when this is all over will make weight maintenance easier.

> Do you eat your breakfast at 4 AM?

No, I eat when I sit down at my desk at work at 9 AM. It's part of my routine. I'm just busy in the morning so while I'm aware of being hungry I just do my stuff and my commute until I can sit down and enjoy my breakfast sandwich and black coffee.

I get a box of the frozen turkey sausage, egg, and cheese sandwiches at Costco and just grab one as I leave the house each morning.

"Calorie restriction is proven to help you live a longer life."

This is essentially false for anyone reading the article. The studies that showed mice living longer lives from calorie restriction were restricted from birth, and thus their growth was stunted, and smaller creatures live longer (think about dogs; big ones die earlier).

Studies of animals where the calories restriction was started mid-life all show increased mortality. The immune system and wound healing are compromised.

That being said, I've been using a system basically like Leangains since March for the purpose of losing weight. It's just cutting calories and I find that two meals a day plus a big plate of vegetables for dinner allows me to fast from Noon to breakfast the next day with minimal hunger.

But this is a calorie deficit/weight loss strategy because I'm overweight, not a lifestyle thing I'm going to keep up forever. And so far I've lost 29 lbs since March, so that's nice.

There are benefits to fasting occasionally I think, but that's not calorie restriction. It's just giving your body a 24 hr period to engage in autophagy and clear out some of the junk; you make up the calories on the other days.

Despite all the rules? My friend, who do you think the rules are for? Compliance departments are EXPENSIVE, which means that only big banks can afford them. Which means less competition. Which means higher prices and profits for the few that remain.

The bank I work at employees 70,000 people and has ginormous computers too. You should see our resource usage.

The blockchain is an accounting ledger that no one has global write-access to, so you don't have to worry about your bank/broker being hacked, going out of business, or freezing your accounts.

It solves the problem of financial intermediation. The whole financial world has been built on financial intermediaries (banks and stock exchanges) to verify that you actually own things. Now you can point to a public record (the blockchain) for that, and no one can take it away from you (without your private key).

Americans are dying because our healthcare is too expensive. Not the insurance but the actual tests and procedures. They're all crazy expensive compared to anywhere else in the world. Graphics that really show this clearly could generate political momentum for fixing that.

Non-Chinese shouldn't kid ourselves. Our governments want to do this too, and probably will. Drones with gigapixel cameras hovering over metro regions. Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.

I wonder what the archival properties of this paper are like. Is it fully inert? That would be useful.

Basically still correct it's just taken longer to get scaling solutions like SegWit/Lightning into production. One the Lightning Network is up you just pay one BTC transaction to establish a channel with the network, then all subsequent LN transactions are cheap and instantaneous.

It's not weird at all. Lyft (like Uber) wants to be the universal middle-man, not an in-house captured app of General Motors. They want to be the marketplace where consumers of transport call up the nearest self-driving resource, whether that's Cruise/GM, Waymo, or someone else.

This is good news for the USA, but it's GREAT news for countries where the government regularly cuts off and controls the Internet for political purposes. If receivers can be as small as a personal laptop, expect a thriving black market in them in places like Iran and Egypt.

Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.

There are two inflection points for renewables:

1. Cheaper than NEW CONSTRUCTION of coal or gas 2. Cheaper than OPERATING COST of coal and gas

We have passed inflection point 1 in the last couple years. That's why the predictions were off. As soon as we hit inflection point 1, new construction switches from goal and gas to renewables.

This will continue until we start getting instability problems, but cheaper storage (batteries or whatever) will ameliorate this.

The next inflection point will make the current rate of growth look slow. When renewables are cheaper than the operating cost (forget about paying back the capital), the entire coal and gas installed base becomes a stranded asset and it will be replaced at whatever rate we can build out renewables.

> Could anybody here comment on the differences between spacex's engine, and the engines on the space shuttle?

It's sort of apples vs oranges to compare the Shuttle main engines vs the Falcon 9 engines, because the Shuttle main engines were on the the crewed upper stage of the Shuttle stack and the Falcon 9 booster is the boost stage of the Falcon 9 stack.

The direct comparison is comparing the Falcon 9 booster (first stage) with the solid rocket boosters of the Shuttle stack, and comparing the Shuttle with the Dragon. Dragon v1 has a heat shield (like Shuttle) and then parachutes (unlike Shuttle). Dragon 2 will have reusable engines to land propulsively, which means it will land on land like the Shuttle.

The Falcon 9 booster is much, much more sophisticated than the Shuttle boosters. The Shuttle boosters were solid fueled; once lit they could not be turned off or throttled. They just burned at maximum thrust until they ran out of fuel, which is why they needed parachutes to land in the ocean.

Unfortunately NASA learned that salt water is terrible for engines, even if they land gently, and the cost of refurbishing the boosters after each launch (and the amount of time it took) was much higher than anticipated. Falcon 9's Block 5 booster should (hopefully) reach a point where it can land, get refueled, and immediately take off again, like a 747.

> I was under the impression that SpaceX was trying to make the first re-usable rocket stage, but I've recently found out that that isn't true. The space shuttle already holds that title.

For the reasons I have above, you were right the first time. SpaceX is trying to make the first reusable booster that achieves orbit. Both Shuttle and Blue Origin's New Shepard are reusable, but neither of them can reach orbit by themselves.

> I'm also kindof curious why they decided to go with a vertical-landing-design, instead of putting some wings on it and having it glide home like the shuttle did.

Scaling laws. Vertical take-off, vertical landing (VTVL) rockets scale to any size. Wings don't. The Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, and future mega-rockets will all be able to use the same basic technology. Wings don't scale well at all.

Except that my rule makes it easier to sue Google if you have a good case.

The whole point of "Loser Pays" is to filter out the frivolous, weak, and marginal cases. But it also makes it easier to file the strong and meritorious cases, because you know you're going to win (eventually), and they'll pay for it.

Of course because the strong cases get settled out of Court, the overall effect is that a lot fewer cases will go to Court at all and this is generally a good thing (IMO). The Court system is overburdened, which means it can take months or years for meritorious cases to just get a hearing and trial. Prisoners can languish for years in prison without conviction of guilt, just awaiting trial.

Furthermore you have to think about the unseen costs. All those businesses that are never formed in the first place because of these legal tactics. My guess is that small businesses that are put out business by lawsuits are outnumbered 100:1 or more by potential businesses that never get past the planning stages.

And … this is why we get strategic lawsuits.

I'm not assuming any such thing. I'm an attorney and understand the tradeoffs and I think society would be better off if these sorts of cases didn't waste everyone's time.

American courts should have a "Loser pays" rule, and stricter standards for determining what is a frivolous lawsuit warranting additional penalties for the filer.

American jurisprudence has always favored making sure "everyone gets their day in Court" to the point where trolls and professional litigants are ruining things.

What level is "makes a website that's usable on mobile"?

The SENS Research Foundation (http://www.sens.org/) has identified the seven ways that the elderly are different from the young, and hypothesizes that the aggregate damage from these seven things is what we call "aging".

Essentially, aging is just accumulated damage from these seven processes.

One of the seven processes is the accumulation of senescent cells. They clog up the works and also release chemicals that prevent normal cells from functioning at full effectiveness. Normally senescent cells kill themselves and are broken down by the body, but this process gets worse over time and senescent cells multiply.

The drug in this story targets and kills these senescent cells selectively. Effectively they are reducing the population of senescent cells in your body from the number you'd find in an 80 year old person so some lesser number (perhaps like a 20-, 30-, 40-, or 60-year old, but human studies would be required to say how effective it is).

But that's what aging reversal is. It's taking the seven biomarkers identified by SENS and reverting them from 85-year old levels to 25-year old levels. If all you're biomarkers are the same as a 25-year old, you are 25 in every sense except calendrical.

EDIT: typo

The Korean car companies really broke into the market by providing unheard of warranties on their powertrains. I'd love to see a new entrant to the white goods market try something similar. Guaranteed to last 10+ years; engineered for maximum reparability at minimum cost.

The trick would be to market the total cost of ownership, rather than the sticker price at the store. They already do that with electricity consumption, but don't for repairs and warranties.

There should be an "or" before the word "packing" if "packing for shipment or distribution" is a single phrase (rather than two alternatives). The Oxford Comma debate is a sideshow. It's all about where you find the "or", which indicates the last choice.

While I understand wanting to make things available to the deaf, making them unavailable to everyone else is nuts. It's crazy that the law put UC Berkeley in the position of having to choose between bearing the expense of close-captioning all these videos, and taking them down.

How is society improved by taking them down?

Yes, absolutely. That's why the Apollo capsules and the Dragon spacecraft don't have them. The loads and heat involved are enormous. Even the Space Shuttle had pretty stubby wings, and the special tiles those wings needed to protect themselves were a constant source of high-cost maintenance (and ended up destroying one of the Shuttles and killing all its crew when they failed).

The wings on SpaceShipOne were pretty light and flimsy because they didn't need to be any stronger considering how slow SpaceShipOne's top speed was. It topped out at Mach 3, and you need to reach Mach 25 to achieve orbit. Wings strong enough to handle Mach 25 would be too heavy to ever reach Mach 25; Catch 22!

"Rutan won the X-Prize"

Yes, he did, but he did with an architecture incapable of doing anything more impressive than win the X-Prize.

I'll give you another example from the self-driving X-prize.

There were always two teams that were very close to winning. One team hand-coded every decision tree for the particular path the car might encounter, and the other team used machine learning and let the car figure it.

Now as it happened in the self-driving challenge, the machine-learning car won, but it was really, really close. For the limited purpose of the challenge, the hand-coded car was nearly good enough. Maybe if they'd hand-coded it just a little better, that car would have won.

But hand-coding doesn't scale from a closed challenge track to real-world self-driving cars. Only machine learning can do that. But because of the artificial constraints on the challenge, the non-scaling solution almost won.

Well for the Ansari X-Prize, the non-scaling solution DID win. That's the Rutan solution, which used wings, which work for 1 passenger but (as Branson has spent 20 years and a billion dollars proving) doesn't even scale to 10 passenger joy-rides, let alone orbit.

There's no indication that they've figured out that Virgin's real problem is their architecture. They're still trying to use wings to get to space.

The Germans and NASA back in the 50s understood that "mass is mass", and wings compete with fuel for weight. They're dead mass you have to accelerate. The lift they provide isn't worth it.

The Russians put Sputnik and Gegarin in orbit with a rocket.

NASA went to the Moon with a rocket.

ICBMs are rockets.

SpaceX and Blue Origin are making rockets.

Branson's problem is that he founded a company started by Burt Rutan (a brilliant airplane designer), and never hired the right rocket designers, and he doesn't have the technical expertise himself to realize what he's doing wrong.

For an example of a rocket company that understands this, but is trying to square the circle anyway, read about Skylon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

They at least understand the mass trade-offs being made and are trying to develop new technology that helps skirt around them.

Not even carbon nanotubes are strong enough to make a space elevator on Earth. Individual CNTs (the molecules) are just barely strong enough, but you cannot make a macroscale fabric out of them that's just as strong as the individual molecules. And even if you did, there's no safety margin.

It's never going to happen on Earth.

However we could make an elevator today on the Moon or Mars with already existing fabrics like Kevlar.

Well I don't care about all you naysayers and negative nellies. I'm psyched as hell by this.

1/ Does humanity need to stop screwing up Earth? Yes. Does Elon going to Mars make that job any harder? No. Is claiming that people shouldn't try to make progress on issue X until issue Y is fully resolved total BS? Yes.

2/ Are planets the best place for human colonization off Earth? I have no idea. I find The High Frontier to be persuasive but I think we can all agree that landing a few people on Mars is easier than building an O'Neil Cylinder. Baby steps, people! Even if Mars ends up being a backwater, the infrastructure that Musk builds to allow its colonization will also allow us to start developing the rest of the solar system too.

Remember, Elon's going to build a giant reusable rocket that can lift hundreds of tons into orbit with each launch, and I doubt SpaceX is going to use 100% of that launch capacity. I'm sure that if Bezos, Bigelow, or some other billionaire wants to throw a 6,000 cubit meter inflatable space-hab at L5 as a starter-home for O'Neil colonies, Musk will be happy to sell him that launch.

3/ Will Elon terraform Mars within his lifetime? Probably not! Is that a reason to never start? No.

4/ Even if the colony doesn't work out, just think of the science! If Musk can put colonists on Mars he'll also be able to send teams of NASA, ESA, etc. astronauts for the Martian equivalent of McMurdo Station. And the same for Venus (in floating habitat at 50km altitude), the Moon, or even the larger asteroids or outer moons.

5/ If you have a rocket that big, and colonization makes the economics cheap, just think of the size of the telescopes you can put into orbit. Hubble, eat your heart out.

How does your perceptual recognition technology distinguish piracy from Fair Use? Given the impossibility of knowing with certainty which jurisdiction the end user is in, which Copyright scheme are you assuming? Can works be registered as Public Domain or as subject to a permissive license such as Creative Commons?

This sounds like you're making an Internet-scale DRM scheme. What precautions are taking to protect people from creators trying to take more than copyright provides?