1,113 karma · joined July 12, 2012
The USPS claims to have 230,000 vehicles. How much of that environmental footprint could be eradicated?
https://facts.usps.com/postal-service-has-more-than-200000-v...
2. Unions are heavily involved in politics. As a worker, part of your paycheck is being seized to support politicians whom you may vehemently oppose.
3. American unions fixate on seniority and credentials as metrics of merit. This is a poor fit for professions like software engineering and educators, where those only loosely correlate to actual performance.
4. Unions foster adversarial relationships within companies, an us/them mentality against "management". Sometimes the environment is already toxic so nothing is lost, but it can also turn an otherwise reasonable workplace sour.
"The size of the Supreme Court, which has fluctuated since it was established in 1789, has remained at nine since 1869."
This is the world Americans now live in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McNeil_Jr.#Dismissal_fr...
https://www.space.com/private-satellites-docking-success-nor...
But not so sci-fi.
The Wikipedia page does not clarify either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...
It shows how various subsystems improved as virtualization evolved at AWS.
SpaceX has been flying cargo to the International Space System for some time using their Dragon capsule. A few days ago they completed their first manned mission on the Crew Dragon.
Three big items from this:
1. They have a reusable cargo/crew capsule for LEO operations.
2. They have gained experience in building human life support systems and associated ground operations.
3. They implemented autonomous docking for both the cargo and crew variants of Dragon. This is one of the keys to achieving in-orbit propellent transfer. Item (2) in my original post.
There are three big targets they need to hit:
1. Make Low Earth Orbit (LEO) cheap with a combination of launch cadence and reusability.
2. Reset the rocket equation in LEO by doing in-orbit fuel transfer.
3. Reset the rocket equation at Mars by generating fuel from the environment.
* The reasoning...
(1) A high launch cadence means you can switch from artisanal to mass production. You drastically reduce fixed costs of ground equipment and personnel. Experience translates to increased knowledge, reliability, and safety. You are less prone to schedule slip costs because there are more trains leaving the station.
(1) Reuse lets you get more life out of expensive components. It also helps you hit a higher launch cadence with less manufacturing capacity, further reducing costs.
(2) In orbit propellant transfer lets you start with a full tank again in LEO. It might take four tanker launches to refill one tank, but ultimately you can increase payload to non-LEO destinations by an order of magnitude. Being less mass constrained also makes things simpler and cheaper for payload development.
(3) Propellant production, aka in-situ resource utilization, lets you fully refuel at Mars or the moon. This lets you send non-trivial payloads in the return direction.
* The progress so far...
SpaceX has regular reuse of the 1st stage of their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. They have begun catching the fairings (nosecone) in giant nets mounted on ships and reusing those too. The 2nd stage is not reused. Doing so is difficult because it's much further downrange and has much larger velocity.
SpaceX has used their progress on reusability to drive down costs and capture a large part of the commercial launch market.
SpaceX is launching Starlink satellites to provide a global, low-latency, high-bandwidth internet access. Existing satellite internet is based on geosynchronous orbit satellites which have high-latency and low-bandwidth. SpaceX hoists 60 Starlink satellites per Falcon 9 launch. There are a couple hundred satellites in orbit already with several thousand planned. Their low orbit means they have a lifetime of just a few years and require regular replacement. If Starlink is a commercial success, then SpaceX will have found the "demand" needed to drive a high launch cadence.
* Why the SN-5 hop matters...
SN-5 is a prototype second stage for the "Starship" rocket. This rocket has both a massive payload capacity and _full_ reuse. In conjunction with Starlink this would solve (1). This prototype is demonstrating progress on the manufacturing process and viability of the design. There is still tons of work to be done.
SpaceX is already planning to do in-orbit propellant transfer using Starship, which then solves (2).
SpaceX has not begun on (3). However, the Mars 2020 rover mission actually has an experiment on board which does propellant production at demonstration-scale. The chemical reactions (sabatier process) are pretty straight forward, but providing sufficient energy and gathering the resources is a massive engineering challenge.
Ultimately, SpaceX has a coherent, achievable vision for reducing space transport costs by multiple orders of magnitudes and has made demonstratable progress towards that vision.
We already have low latency, high bandwidth internet available in big urban areas. Starlink offers a real solution for the rest of the world (rural communities, boats, vacation homes, isolated industrial facilities, etc).
The era of being outside of internet coverage is coming to a close.
You are free to criticize the government all you want.
You can also advocate for independence without fear of imprisonment. Both California and Texas have supporters of succession.
You aren't free to blow up police cars though. For that you'll face consequences.
"Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces are punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison"
I'm not sure if criticizing Chairman Xi or the CCP would qualify as subversion.
1. Your internal leveling scheme for SDEs needs to have been sorted out. External titles like "senior" are pretty meaningless, so one reasonable solution is mapping SDEs to an internal numerical tier so you can differentiate between "senior" and actual "senior".
2. Radford data comes with a trillion job titles. You need to identify the relevant ones and how your internal tiers map to them.
3. In markets where compensation is exploding (Seattle a few years ago), compensation data is a trailing indicator of what market rates you need to pay for new hires. You get fresher, but noisier, signals from candidates who reject your offers and from your personal network.
https://stratechery.com/2015/venture-capital-and-the-interne...
But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.
A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.
This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.
Whether you have a credential becomes less important the more experience you have. There will always be silly companies that do a hard-filter on degree, but you can have a perfectly happy and successful career without them.
But winter has come.
Available positions will become way more competitive, with more people chasing after few opportunities. It may be unfair, but the combination of no degree and no experience will be a large handicap.
Given that you have a scholarship, you'd be unwise not to snag the credential.
Also, it does not need to be a waste of time. Don't do the bare minimums. Push yourself. Take the hardest relevant classes you can find. Dig deep into any topics that interest you.
Finally, focus very hard on getting internships. In a grim market, you will be needing both the resume entries and the job leads that those can provide.