nickjarboe

The strike slip nature of the San Andreas Fault zone in California precludes really big earthquakes. USGS thinks a 8.2 or 8.3 is about as big as they could get. The biggest historical California earthquakes have reached 7.9 in magnitude. (http://www.conservation.ca.gov/index/Earthquakes/Pages/qh_ea...)

Here is the technical webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WimRhydggo

Lots of good information on reddit (/r/spacex).

If you "over engineer" the road it can last much longer. The 580 interstate in Oakland was built in the 1960's to standard US interstate specs but bans large trucks 99.9% of the time. It is in almost original condition. The parallel interstate (the 880) in Oakland has all the trucks and is in very bad condition with constant repair.

The major plot point of Neal Stephenson's novel Reamde (2011) was people paying off ransomware in a MMORPG with in-game gold which was easily changed for real money. One of the characters makes the comment that ransomware was not possible until anonymous payment online could happen. It would be interesting to know when Stephenson became aware of bitcoin.

While the edges of the Milky Way are not well defined, the solar system is about 25,000 light years from the center and 25,000 from the edge of the disk. The disk is about 1000 light years thick where the solar system resides[1]. Not sure where the Earth is relative to the Milky Way ecliptic, but odds are it is near it and that our radio broadcasts won't be leaving the Milky Way any time soon.

[1]http://www.universetoday.com/65601/where-is-earth-in-the-mil...

I don't see why changing the tax rules around retirement accounts (like taxing Roth withdrawals) would be any more difficult than changing Social Security payouts. You never know what may happen in the future. The government could even make owning gold illegal.

I agree that capital gains should be taxed like income except for the fact of inflation. If you hold, say a house for 10 years, and inflation averages 8% a year (remember the 1970's), and then you sell it at the same inflation adjusted value, you will pay a bunch of tax on no real gain. Maybe we could adjust capital gain tax to inflation. This would have added benefit of having a constituency that wants a higher CPI against those who would like to keep it low (for example to keep Social Security payments or other retirement payments from increasing).

I'm hoping, as the "duck and cover" generation dies out, we might see a renaissance in nuclear engineering. Some revival is going on at the moment, but civilization only worked on nuclear ideas for about 30 years (1940-1970). We barely touched the surface. I imagine Musk would have a nuclear rocket division, if that was politically acceptable. Maybe a nuclear technology ecosystem is only possible off Earth.

One time pads for encryption(Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep").

The US has a very complicated system of multiple, income-based, student loan repayment schemes[1]. 20 to 25 years of repayment based on many factors. It is so complicated the government has created a "Repayment Estimator"[2] to help people choose the best plan. At a glance it looks similar to the New Zealand 8%. Seems like most systems evolve to where they are impossible for a human understand. See tax code, social security, Obamacare, etc.

[1] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans [2] https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/mobile/repayment/repay...

What might stand up to a legal challenge is creating an entity that owns say ~1000 houses and when you want to buy a house you buy a very small fraction of the company with what your house would cost to purchase. Then the company would buy the house and let you live there until you want to sell. Maybe these already exist as a weird residential coop REIT.

Looks like the market cap for US traded coal companies is only $4 billion[1]. Maybe a US multi-billionare could buy them out as a philanthropic act and reduce mining to only that needed for chemical stock.

[1]http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/markets/usmarkets/ind...

Oil is already a boom/bust business. Leaving oil and in the geological formations where it sits is probably the best way to store it.

An intermediate step to a total ban would be to require greater testing to get a drivers license (say similar to a pilots license) and then make the penalties for driving infractions much higher.

Prop 13 actually fixes commercial property taxes as well so long-lived corporations end up paying very low tax. In addition, one can also pass the lower property assessment value on to ones children (principle residence and up to $1,000,000 other property)[1]. California has been slowly building up a landed aristocracy.

[1]http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_13A

But with batteries improving, one could have a better car than the original when replacing the battery pack.

I wonder how much thinner helps with heat dissipation?

I recently got my first smartphone and the main reason was to have access to Uber. Prices are 1/2 to 1/3 of taxis, with better availability. I'm not sure the pricing is sustainable and feel many drivers are just using Uber sell a fraction of their late model vehicle along with a small bonus.

The other day I grabbed an Uber from Pleasanton to Oakland. $33 for 30 miles. Not much in it for the driver, if you consider all the costs, but he works in Pleasanton and lives in San Leandro. As they say, a win/win. Uber lets you set a destination for your pickup twice a day, which allows commuters to be drivers. I like this use case and hope these types of lawsuits against Uber doesn't eliminate it.

Not a big fan of Class C the stock buyback. As a holder of Class A and Class C shares (from the earlier split), I thought I should sell Class C, that has no votes and buy Class A which get to vote. Mostly out of laziness, I didn't switch up to Class A, but if I can't vote with my Class A shares to buy back only Class A and not Class C, then I don't know which I would buy now. Seems like a backdoor transfer to Google employees who get Class C shares, but I knew what I was getting into with Larry and Sergey controlling the company with their B shares.

I believe it's SpaceX not Tesla that is investigating an internet microsat constellation, but if the Tesla/Solar City merger goes through, you could be right in the long term.

True. But think of the status of going from point to point anywhere on earth in less than an hour. How much risk is that worth?

Maybe the cars will be safe enough we can get rid of those restrictive laws.

If you don't like reading just a press release, the scientific paper describing this concept is at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379614...