sangnoir

Cool story. The Falcon 9 is not going to Mars any time soon.

It was done by NASA, who have a culture of triple/ quadriple checking and being very careful about mitigating risk in ways that may seem inefficient to some. I don't see NASA leading the effort to Mars in any meaningful way besides being a conduit for money from the treasury.

> We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech

When JFK made the speech, it was in the middle if the cold war and there was a realistic fear that the "capitalist way if life" could be beaten by command economics of the Soviet Union in cutting edge science and rocketry, justifying the huge amounts invested in the space race. What is the impetus now? We're all about government efficiency in cutting the social-safety nets, scientific research, but we'll carve out a Mars mission "because it's hard"?

Schiphol was already the superior airport for connections anyway, not being arrested just sweetens the deal.

> As any engineer in East Asia can tell you, there is nothing especially collaborative about tech in Confucian culture

IIRC, Bunnie (Huang) mentioned how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers.

> source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics.

(Winces)

Biden chose not to use the power available to him to its full extent. He could have done something really extreme with the immunity he was granted by SCOTUS, but instead, he disavowed it.

A surprising number of Trump voters do not understand how tariffs work and believe the exporting country pays. They are intentionally ignorant, so they'll tell you inflation is not the outcome they wanted, even though it's an obvious first order effect of the policies they support (see mass deportation)

"No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law"

How very Soviet; installing political commissars to spy on renegades and ensure everyone on the right side of the Politburo^w President.

Every media processing or delivery service you've interacted with in the last decade is a lib-ffmpeg wrapper, including broadcast TV, streaming, or anything remotely related to re-encoding video. I'm only being slightly hyperbolic, FFMpeg is ubiquitous.

> You are not in business to train people for your competitors or the industry.

If only employee retention were not an inscrutable black box. What are the poor job-creators to do in the face of ungrateful, capricious employees who can at anytime for unfathomable reasons like "more remuneration", "recognition", or "better working conditions". Perhaps one day someone in the social sciences will do research in this uncharted corner of human psychology, and 50 years later, employers will know what to do.

I've seen colleagues uproot their lives by moving across the country and be laid off before they got their 3rd paycheck. I have worked under a toxic manager brought in at a startup for the express purpose of increasing attrition, amd afterwards looked at his linked in an realized that was his speciality: a contractor brought in to shake engineering teams to see what falls. The power imbalance, and rate of abuse between employers and employees are clear to me.

Thanks - those are correct terms for aircraft in flight, that don't apply to out-of-control vehicles on the ground. An airplane that loses traction and rotates about it's vertical axis is spinning, not yawing.

It was bipartisan because the Democratic party swung rightwards (towards the center) on economic policy under Clinton with the said "Third way[1]", which combined being socially progressive with economic liberalism, i.e. cozying up to employers rather than workers, which was the Democratic party's former schtick until they lost a couple of presidential elections in a row through the 1980s.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

Manufacturing in Shenzen was economical, just not as maximally profitable as it is now. Economies of scale are a thing.

Apple, and Google could have been formed anyway on earth, but there were advantages of being in Silicon Valley that compounded the growth into the behemoths they are now without worrying about where to source talent.

> Is VAT a better system? Arguably, yes—given that the majority of countries worldwide have adopted it as their preferred taxation model

Most VAT countries I know that are not Saudi Arabia have VAT and income tax.

A good chunk of that cohort specifically voted against high inflation.

Trump is on record deriding the CHIPS act, which does exactly that.

Would the subsidies be funded by the tariffs? If so, perhaps having the government print the vouchers ans have buyers apply for the vouchers 90 days before procurement by filling out the TF-1735 form, get the voucher, supply it to the importer who returns it to the Customs officer at point of importation, and the tariffs and vouchers will then be reconciled. Those who fail to get vouchers ahead of time can make claims in their tax filing for the current tax year. /s

> Shipping is extremely cheap these days. You can move any manufacturing you want, if you're determined to do so.

Sure, this works when you know exactly what you want. If you're prototyping or looking for a replacement component, those who can walk/drive to visit 10 potential suppliers' factories in a day have a competitive advantage versus waiting 10 business days for the samples to arrive.

Having a concentration of jobs in one place also results in having a concentration of domain experts in that place; forming a self-sustaining ecosystem. A lot of local governments the world over have tried and failed to replicate Silicon Valley, but without the critical mass of academia, technologists and VCs. Trying to replicate Shenzen without the machinists and injection mold greybeards is equally fruitless.

> There’s a reason the American left opposed free trade until five minutes ago

I don't know on what scale your clock runs on, but Bill Clinton's "Third Way" campaign was 35 years ago. China's admission into the WTO was under the Clinton administration. If 5 minutes is a generation, America isn't 2 hours old yet on your clock.

> It does, however, invalidate the original argument, which was that tariffs are being promoted by the rich because it's better for them than the existing income tax

If I were to steelman that argument, I'd say getting rid of income tax takes the wind out of the sails of the "wealth tax" / "tax the billionaires" / "fix the loopholes" argument which seem to be gathering steam.

That it kills or underfunds government social-safety programs is a secondary bonus, and using it as an excuse for decapitating safety/oversight/enforcement agencies who get in the way of higher profits via "overregulation" is a tertiary bonus for those that believe in starving the beast that is central government.

It's telling that nowhere in you ad hominem did you attempt to give a simplistic answer to an argument against your position that a middle-schooler could construct; they may not know the Categorical Imperative, but can intuit what's fair and what's not, and are old enough to know the world doesn't revolve around them.

Were all your employees blank slates when they joined, or did they "use" their previous employers to gain the skills required to become hirable by you?

If your training is so valuable, why aren't you charging for it? I'm sure your competition would be willing to pay lot's of money to have their people upskilled from 0.

What you describe in the second sentence - rotating around the vertical-axis - is typically termed a spin .

I think parent was saying the roll was along the planes' length rather than tail-over-nose, the latter usually result in the aircraft breaking up as the torque will be really high.

> I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together

Geography

Buy a Pinecile[1] from Pine64. It's currently discounted to $25.99 (excluding shipping), and it's both cheap and has a great feature list that makes soldering a breeze.

1. https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...

Yes. Public companies just have more reporting requirements, but as long as an organization deals with Securities like shares, they fall under the SEC's ambit, public or private.

I think the OpenAI's non-profit to profit transition would have warranted a looking into by any administration, I suspect there will be additional personal animus driving this specific set of players.

For the majority of humanity, it's several days' worth of wages vs several weeks or months.

> you either want to get into electronics or not. If not, there's no real point in spending the money, even if it's $2

It's fuzzier than that; there are hobbies that look fun but I can't decide if I want to fully invest into them, but having a cheap, but not-great equipment is a good stepping stone. Besides, beginners won't have the skill to fully use fully-featured pro-level-gear. A cheap soldering iron is great for those looking to get their feet wet; sure the lack of precise temperature control can be a hinderance, but investing in an expensive soldering station is wasteful if one decides that it's not really for them.

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