chroma

I was addressing the comment about the economics of lower launch costs, not space debris. Similar to past pollution issues, I think it will be a problem but not a show stopper. There are already global standards for satellite end of life procedures. Most governments require that satellites be able to passivate themselves so that pressure vessels or batteries don't explode and create more debris. Geosynchronous satellites are required to have extra propellant so they can move to a graveyard orbit. Many satellites are put into low orbits so that atmospheric drag will cause them to deorbit within a known time frame. And lower launch costs will make it easier to launch spacecraft that can clean up debris.

Also, reusable spacecraft such as Starship actually reduce the amount of debris created per launch, as most space debris comes from spent upper stages. Of the 25 recent debris producing events listed on Wikipedia[1], 16 were caused by debris that would not be created by a reusable spacecraft (either an upper stage, a payload adapter, or a fairing).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...

A lot of the damage happens as soon as the spacecraft enters the water, because it's extremely hot, causing more chemical reactions than you might think. Even jet engines have trouble with corrosion from ingesting small amounts of aerosolized salt water.[1]

1. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19690007944/downloads/19...

Doesn't this argument prove too much? Long ago, compute was extremely expensive. The cost of compute went down, but people made tons of money selling more and more computers. The same was true for most technologies when they were first invented.

Yes, satellites are expensive compared to launches, but that's because launch costs are so high and launches are so infrequent. If you're spending the money to launch something into space, you'll also spend lots of money making sure that satellite is as reliable and as capable as possible. For example: The James Webb Space Telescope required a complex origami folding mechanism, but it could fit unfolded in Starship's payload bay. Removing that constraint would have saved the program hundreds of millions of dollars.

If the cost of something goes down, people buy more of it. This is basic economics, and it would be foolish to assume it doesn't apply to space launches. There are quite a few potential markets that would become viable if launch costs went down: space tourism, rapid point-to-point Earth transport (this would be especially useful for the military), cheap and rapid deployment of new satellite constellations, single module space stations, cheaper satellites due to fewer mass constraints, orbital radio telescopes, beamed power, space infrastructure such as asteroid harvesting, and so on. I doubt all of these things will exist in the future, but a 20x reduction in launch costs would make quite a few of them profitable. Just as how people 50 years ago couldn't have predicted all the future uses of cheap, fast computers, we can't predict all the uses of cheap, fast launches. What we can predict is that lower costs will increase demand.

The Wikipedia article says 22 of the 36 became pregnant with a fellow crew member during the deployment. All of them had to be transferred off the ship so they could be closer to an obstetrician in case of complications.

Pregnancies become a bigger problem on submarines because of the limited space for medical facilities and the difficulty of transferring crew on/off the sub.

I do shooting competitions from time to time, and I agree that Olympic target shooting has too much strange equipment. Most great shooters don't even bother with it because it's so boring and equipment-specific. Instead they do stuff like USPSA, IPSC, and IDPA. All of those competitions depend more on movement and speed, not slow fire accuracy and special equipment. (Though USPSA does tend to have ridiculous looking guns in its unlimited division.)

With any of the practical shooting competitions, a skilled shooter can be competitive with an unmodified handgun. Also, the skills required have a lot of overlap with real world defensive handgun use. Oh, and it's way more fun.

In Australia, self-driving features beyond lane keeping are banned, and lane keeping is limited to imparting a maximum lateral acceleration of 3 meters per second squared. Because of these restrictions, all Teslas in Australia are using a gimped version of autopilot from 2-3 years ago.

I bought a Model 3 back in 2020 and got the self-driving option mostly on a whim. Until recently, it was a handy feature on freeways but a gimmick on surface streets. Ever since the update a couple months ago, it actually does drive itself. I can't remember the last time I intervened. If I did, it was probably to make the car do something dangerous or technically in violation of traffic laws, as you have to be aggressive sometimes in city driving.

You also have people like John Carmack saying, "I have made multiple two hour drives without touching the wheel." His main complaint is that the car makes him touch the steering wheel if he's wearing sunglasses (because it can't track his eyes to determine whether he's paying attention).

I don't think owners will rent out their cars as taxis any time soon, but the technology really does seem to be there.

1. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1814687334366912530

That's why you click on the "Following" tab, not the "For you" tab. Also, how is that any different from any other social media platform? Heck, I just opened Apple News and it recommended me a Buzzfeed article titled, "People are sharing moments where they saw millionaire's spoiled kids get humbled by the real world, and it's a trip".

They got those domesticated breeds from agricultural societies. The only example of an animal domesticated by hunter-gatherers is the dog.

Horses were domesticated long before the Magyars showed up. It’s much easier to selectively breed horses if you start with domesticated ones.

Agriculture is almost certainly a prerequisite to domesticating horses (as they must be selectively bred in captivity), so hunter-gatherer tribes like the Clovis never had a chance to do so.

Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented. I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body. Yes the new body is strange and interesting in some ways, but on an emotional level it’s like driving a different car.

The regulations are different. The FDA only gets in trouble if they approve a drug that turns out to be harmful, not if they fail to approve (or delay approving) a beneficial drug. On net, the FDA has caused far more harm than they’ve prevented. eg: Banning the importation of infant formula from the EU, or delaying the approval of new beta blockers by a decade.

Where can I read more about this? If that’s true, it seems like a problem of over-regulation, not drug companies being exploitative.

Semaglutide was invented before 2008. Its patent expires in a few years.

It takes a long time to get drugs through trials and get the FDA to approve drugs for new uses. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on drugs that never make it through trials. If you don’t enforce their patents, companies won’t make new drugs.

Probably never because every generation of Starlink satellite has been dimmer than the last. Despite being significantly bigger, the v2 minis are only 19% as bright as the original satellites.

I think a lot of men don't realize that for most women, the feeling of walking around alone in a normal place is equivalent to a man walking around in a very sketchy neighborhood. Almost any man can overpower a woman and, if he really wanted to, kill her with his bare hands. But if a man wants to attack another man, his chance of success is only as good if he has a weapon of some kind.

It is for this reason that I encourage women to carry weapons and train with them. Even if it's just pepper spray, it's better than nothing. And like a fire extinguisher or a tourniquet, it only has to come in handy once to be worth all the trouble of keeping it around.

This sort of thing happens all the time in SF. There are a lot of crazy people in some areas of the city. If you stopped for every one of them (even the ones a lane or two away) you’d never get anywhere. Heck, I’ve had someone run in front of my vehicle, then pull out a collapsible baton and try to rob me. I pinned the throttle and they jumped out of the way.

Tesla offers three tiers of automated driving:

Autopilot. This automatically accelerates, decelerates, and steers on roads. This works on all roads with lane markings, not just limited access freeways. It also obeys speed limit signs.

Enhanced autopilot. This is autopilot but will also self drive from on-ramp to off-ramp, changing lanes to pass (and exit the passing lane), taking interchanges to other freeways, and exiting the offramp.

Full self driving beta. This will drive on pretty much any street. Early on it was purely a gimmick that required constant intervention, but lately it’s gotten pretty good. My main complaint is that it drives too conservatively, causing impatient drivers to behave erratically around you. Imagine someone driving as if they're taking a driving test. Because of that I tend to drive manually unless I’m on a freeway.

You could look at liability insurance rates. If the same driver has a lower insurance rate for a car with a certain automated system, then that system probably makes driving safer.

China is the same size as the US but has four times the population, and most of them are in the east. This means they have much higher population density. Another important difference is that they can build rail for much cheaper than the US because their government doesn’t have to respect property rights or follow stringent environmental regulations.

I've never gotten to an airport two hours ahead of my flight, not even for international travel. For a short, frequent flight like SFO-LAX, I arrive at the airport 15 minutes before boarding starts. I'm not at all worried about missing my flight. Worst case I'll get on the next flight.

The reason I didn't add travel time from LAX to Union Station is because LA is incredibly spread out and most destinations are not downtown. To get to where you want to go in LA, you'll need a car.

And don't forget that this is a comparison of a trip you can take today versus a hypothetical train that will cost you several times more. In real life the train is unlikely to run as frequently or to be as fast as claimed. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone will ever take high speed rail from SF to LA. The current plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield some time between 2030 and 2033. Will the political willpower to continue the project still exist a decade from now? I don't know.

We can go back and forth arguing about which is faster all day long, but the real problem is the finances of CA HSR. I've yet to see any figures that show it being financially competitive with air travel. Is the plan to increase taxes on everyone to subsidize ticket prices? Considering the clientele of high speed rail, that seems rather regressive.

What would change your mind about this? I'd be in favor of CA HSR if costs were significantly lower. (I naively assumed government competence when I voted for prop 1A.) It looks like that's not an option, so the best course of action is to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.

Air travel is 2% of global CO2 emissions. Making air travel carbon neutral (by capturing carbon) would increase ticket prices by around 20%. That would be much cheaper than switching from planes to high speed rail.

I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.

I didn't say anything about roads, but it's not true that roads are unprofitable. Roads are paid for by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees. California's gas taxes raise $8 billion per year. The state's registration and licensing fees collect another $12 billion per year. The state spends $18 billion per year on Caltrans, meaning that vehicles provide $2 billion in revenue for other state programs.

BART takes 30 minutes to get from Civic Center to SFO. Even without TSA pre-check, it takes less than 15 minutes to get through security. If you get through security 15 minutes before the plane leaves, that's 2.5 hours total travel time to LAX. From the same place in SF it takes 20-25 minutes to get to 4th & King. (Yes, Muni is that bad.) Let's say the train leaves 15 minutes after you arrive at the station. Then it will take 2 hours and 40 minutes to get to Union Station in LA. Total travel time: 3.25 hours. And again, the train cost is 5-10x that of a flight.

Edit: If you think my math about the long-term profitability of California High Speed Rail is incorrect, I'd love to see some numbers showing how it could be priced similarly to air travel. I was agnostic about CA HSR for a long time. I even voted for Proposition 1A back in 2008. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, it really seems like CA HSR is a boondoggle.

The distance between SF and LA (350 miles) is 50% greater than the distance between Tokyo and Kyoto (227 miles), making the time tradeoff favor trains to planes. The two cities are much bigger than SF and LA, so many more people travel between the two cities (85 million per year). Also Japan can build and maintain rail much cheaper than the US.

High speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles isn't economically viable. California HSR will cost at least $30 billion to construct and California's own estimates claim it will cost $700-$874 million per year to operate.[1] Around four million passengers fly between SF and LA every year. Assuming every single one of them takes the train instead of flying, you're looking at $175-$218 per ticket just to pay for operations. If you wanted the project to pay for itself in 20 years, you'd have to charge $550-$600 per ticket. For comparison, airfare between the two cities starts at $80 round trip. Also the train will take 3 hours while flying takes 1.5 hours. Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.

1. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/san_jose...

HSR only makes economic sense in the northeast. Everywhere else is too spread out for rail to compete with air travel. The most popular air route in the western US (SF-LA) isn’t worth making high speed rail between. The project is expected to cost over $30 billion. Assuming 100% of air passengers use rail (4 million per year), at $150 per ticket it would take 50 years to break even… and that assumes zero maintenance costs. Also it would be slower than taking a plane.

TSA can screen people the same for rail, they just tend not to. Ideally we’d go back to pre-9/11 screening for everything.

You can charge Teslas at other charging stations. It’s just that other chargers are inconvenient and unreliable. You usually need an adapter. You have to pull out a credit card and maybe install an app on your phone. With the Tesla chargers you just plug in and everything’s billed automatically.

Also Tesla’s navigation automatically adds charging stops for superchargers. You don’t have to do much thinking. Just drive the car (usually on autopilot on the freeway), follow the directions, and every few hours you’re at a charging station next to some restaurants, grocery stores, or pretty landmarks. The view from the charger at Twin Falls, Idaho is particularly beautiful.