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$13 billion?

A launch loop, even with needed scientific research, would have only cost around $10 billion and you'd get cheap access to space on top of that.

Heck, at the cost of an airplane flight you could just be shuttling people out to the Pacific and dropping them back onto the city like a daily-commuter version of Warhammer 40k drop pods.

For $30 billion, with a larger power generation capacity, the loop would be capable of launching 6 million metric tons per year, and given a five-year payback period, the costs for accessing space with a launch loop could be as low as $3/kg

I know that 6 million tons isn't really that much American fat to move annually. But the frequent missile-like return trajectories even have horrible environmental impact built-in. Basically trowing people from LA to SF through low orbit is a perfect fit for State-level stupid ideas for rapid transit.

Yes, I'm not serious. Nobody in California would ever want a transport system that causes horrible environmental impact. Unless the traffic jams hurt Almond sales. Or somehow made the wait at LAX worse.

Why can China figure out how to construct 18,000 miles of high speed rail, and we can't even figure out how to connect LA to SF?

High speed rail... dark side of the moon... mass production of consumer goods... America is failing repeatedly, with or without Trump.

The mere name "socialist" in the political party should not define a state as socialist, I think, any more than the "Democratic party" makes the USA a democracy. The USA is a republic. The Wikipedia analysis is not too bad, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., and draws a clear distinction between the "Marxist-Leninist" states and the multi-party states where there is a party with the word "Socialist" in it. I would look for the vesting of all power in the state, a state that at least has some appearance of election by the citizens, even where the election is mandated and corrupt.

>"there absolutely is an ethical responsibility to avoid purchasing products made in China, just as there is with Israel."

Did you just compare the human rights/freedom situation in China to the free/democratic ISRAEL?? Seriously?

https://object.cato.org/sites/... (USA 17, Israel 49, China 135)

https://www.heritage.org/index... (ISA 12, Israel 27, China 100)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Israel #1 in middle east)

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/2... (Israel #10 of happiest people on earth. USA #14. China- not even on list.)

https://www.jewishvirtuallibra...

I wondered how far we'd get into t6his before someone pulled the "I have an anecdote that refutes your scientific survey" bullshit.

I wondere how far we'd get into this until a coward showed up strutting like a cock-a-whoop, thinking he'd scored the game winning touchdown.

Anecdotes? If you were capable of googling you could find that it's real.

https://www.webmd.com/balance/...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/201805/espresso-stress-o-coffee-anxiety-and-panic

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

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... Not an anecdote in the bunch. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance, and excessive consumption can be a real problem. Deal with it.

While you're at it, care to refute climate change with a picture of snow on your lawn?

Nope, because the relationship between the composition of an atmosphere and the atmosphere's energy retention characteristics is irrefutable.

Claims that there is no relationship between caffeine consumption and panic attacks, well now that's the anti-science viewpoint, my dear coward.

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

Blizzards are mainly due to high winds (35MPH+) and poor visibility, but not necessarily a lot of snowfall. We had one on Feb 7th, where the snowfall was only about an inch. That one was what they call a ground blizzard, which blows snow around that had already fallen.

Halloween '91... now THAT was a proper blizzard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Lufthansa who are doing this in Germany, and United Airlines who tried this in the USA are both members of the Star Alliance.
They share programs, procedures and booking system with each other while not competing on the same routes, even though several of them both land and take off in the Germany.
Lufthansa is therefore not suing for creating precedence just for itself, but on behalf of all of its members.

So, if you'd want to boycott Lufthansa and/or United Airlines for this stunt, then you would probably want to boycott all of them.
Besides those two mentioned, they are:
Adria Airways, Aegean Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Air New Zealand, All Nippon Airways, Asiana Airlines, Austrian Airlines. Avianca, Brussels Airlines, Copa Airlines, Croatia Airlines, EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines, EVA Air, LOT Polish Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, Swiss International Air Lines, TAP Air Portugal, Thai Airways and Turkish Airlines.

Try asking your doctor about drinking a cup of willow bark tea each morning with your high blood pressure and back aches. He'll tell you it works, suggest a baby Asprin instead, it could go either way since they are the same thing.

Actually they're only similar as the Willow contains Salicin which is metabolized into salicylic acid whereas Aspirin contains acetylsalicylic acid. The salicyclic acid is much harder on the stomach then the acetylsalicylic acid though they do have basically the same medical qualities.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Salicylic acid was also isolated from the herb meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria, formerly classified as Spiraea ulmaria) by German researchers in 1839.[33] While their extract was somewhat effective, it also caused digestive problems such as gastric irritation, bleeding, diarrhea and even death when consumed in high doses.

Social networks are characterized by social graphs.

That's how you categorize or analyze them, but not how you recognize them. A social graph is a representation of a social network, not a prerequirement. A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors.

The consumption of dead animals was likely useful before humans learned to farm better. I can sort of understand wanting to eat something in the dead of winter back in 1890. But now the whole meat industry is literally killing humans and the environment with their CAFOs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). If you saw what goes on there, I bet you would not eat another animal. It is such a terrible waste of land, resources, energy, and life to raise an animal just so a savage human can kill and eat it. There are still millions who think that humans need to eat meet to survive. This is just no so, but the meat lobby is huge and supplies 'studies' and 'news' with a lot of misinformation. But who am I to lecture. Go ahead and eat your dead cow, greasy potatoes, and flavored sugar water. Enjoy you diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and the polluted water that comes with that burger.

What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise

What do scientists do when the math/physics doesn't work? They adjust the model in the *belief* that the adjustment will correct the error -- until the adjusted model is tested, it is still just a *belief*. You can't know if the adjusted model is going to work until you test it, but you have to convince your peers that the adjusted model is worth testing. That's where opinion enters into your scientific enterprise. You have to get the people that control the funding to *believe* that your new model is worth testing. A really smart guy wrote a book about this process. Please check it out.

*Belief* is an inextricable part of the scientific enterprise. NB: The difference between a scientific enterprise and a non-scientific enterprise lies in what you do after nature says your model is wrong. A scientist shrugs and finds a new model, everybody else cries "heresy!" to defend their continued belief in the old model.

I think the outcome is rather a testament to how deeply neoliberal thinking has washed our brains, after +70 years of constant indoctrination.

To get a real measure, you should at least run the test twice, with both sides changing roles, no?

Please read up on how CFCs actually react with the Ozone in the atmosphere, and way the ozone destruction is seasonal and very dependent on atmospheric temperature. Then you'll see why the effect over Antartica is stronger than in the northern hemisphere.

Start with your textbooks on atmospheric science (Wallace/Hobbs probably has a chapter on it), or even easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The so-called Quack Miranda Warning.

Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.

It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.

And Americans wonder why we don't want to buy your meat... it could have anything in it, asbestos sold as a cure for the common cold.

At least over here in the UK, you have to keep your claims suitably nebulous that a reasonable person would not construe them as having an actual effect on medical conditions. They have to advertise "feelings" and nondescript benefits to get you to buy their pills which are specifically designed to not do anything as that way they avoid doing FDA testing. Trying to claim that they'll have an unproven medical or health effect is an easy way to get a huge fine and lawsuit.

Pharma companies make more out of vitamin placebos than boner pills. Produce 1000 for $1, sell them in packs of 30 for $5.

The word you're looking for is chutzpah.

Android does not run a JVM as far as I know, but Dalvik.

Actually, Dalvik was discontinued since Android 5/Lollipop in 2014, and was replaced with Android Runtime (ART).

And what language is Rust written in

Rust is written in Rust, and before that it was written in OCaml. It's been self-hosted for quite some time.

The so-called Quack Miranda Warning.

Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.

It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.

but now AT&T customers watching HBO are subsidizing Verizon customers watching HBO.

AT&T customers already subsidize HBO since AT&T owns them. I'm sure they won't bundle HBO with my internet bundle and keep trying to sell me a land line though. Synergy.

This is no big deal. Since there is no hope of getting any security updates for my Android devices from the fantastic hardware vendors and network providers, I'll just browse the web on my Android devices using lynx from now on. Thanks guys! Thanks a lot! Really appreciate ya'll locking down these devices so hard to prevent malicious third-party open source developers from flashing custom boot ROMs over your fantastic OEM build.

In moderation though

Nearly all caffeine users have little difficulty keeping their use in the "good" range. But for nicotine, there is no "good" range, and it is far more addictive.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-h...

Perhaps I work in the wrong crowds. Nearly everyone I have ever worked with has been told to cut back on their caffiene use, and most have suffered withdrawal symptoms. Several, including me, have hit the 10 cups per day mark that is considered too damn much.

As well, the puritans who are shitting their pants because the tobacco users have found a loophole in vaping

Nonsense. We are only shitting our pants over kids getting ahold of vaping devices. Adults can do what they want.

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

Perhaps we might keep the children out of the bars, if we only care about them, and have no intention of impeding adult use. I mean - bar bans if we are interested in keeping vaping devices out of the hands of kids, thry must be hanging out in bars.

Do you really think that putting a highly addictive and harmful product into the hands of kids is acceptable? They are too stupid and naive to understand the consequences.

I think that there are some fairly simple ways to attempt to keep them out of the hands of those who have not achieved the age of majority. But if I might cite my own and my friend's experience. I and most of my friends started smoking when we were in 7th grade, which for me was 13. Why? Forbidden fruit. Smoking was something "adults" did. So we were playing adults. We had no trouble getting cigarettes or tobacco. Teenagers are indeed capable of taking stupid risks, but they can also be very very capable. Some of us were pretty good at shoplifting tobacco, who didn't have parents that smoked.

Today? Tobacco is harder to get, but I assume I would be as precocious now if I was in junior high. I'd simply make my vapor device. Probably something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Mine would be a lot better, but its simple, and my homebrew version would make me look even more adult to my silly friends.

...I suppose lack of memory safety is a "decision" for processor manufacturers too. How dare assemblers not implement proper heap protection!

.

Actually, it was a decision, and some vendors made different choices. Quite successful choices.

while (*p++=*q++);
when you actually mean
p = q;
(and the idiom depends on idiosyncrasies of the PDP-11 instruction set), was a stupid decision.

Build a small container that imitates Venus and put a "craft" in there and see how far you get. You can't even do that ON EARTH.

It has been done on Earth. It was even proposed to be done on Titan. Why is Venus any different?

Why do you need a container that imitates Venus? Why is that your hill you choose to die on? If that Titan mission was chosen (it still might happen in the 2020s) by NASA/ESA, would they have needed a "container that imitates Titan" to satisfy your arbitrary test?

you guys always say "there is nothing stopping us". ... . I guess the "other people" who are actually working on space exploration are too lazy or something.

Maybe if you finished my quote you would understand that there is something that is stopping us but I said it wasn't technological. "Do we want to and is it worth the money. Just like other missions in space.".

What should NASA do? Is it worth it over other programs that they could do? That Titan mission sounds cool but obviously other things took priority. There are a lot of ideas and the thing that turn ideas into reality is convincing people that said idea is good. Are other plans better than Venus? I said I don't know. How is that a space nutter response?

It's astonishing to find Kremlin trolls even on /.

Compostable plastics are produced from renewable sources,

There is no requirement that something that is compostable be produced from renewable sources,

I didn't say there was any such requirement. However, the vast majority are currently being made from renewable sources, primarily corn starch. Most corn is grown without irrigation, and the rest of the corn plant is also good for something, e.g. corn cobs into rayon, and corn stalks into building materials. Next time, I'll try to get that qualifier in there for you.

so they even have the potential to be carbon-neutral.

And just because something is derived from renewable materials does not automatically mean it is carbon neutral.

Your leg is jerking so hard you seem to have lost the ability to read. I never said that either. What happened to you? Take a knock on the noggin? You used to have reading comprehension skills.

I think you are conflating biodegradable plastic with compostable. Compostable is a subset of biodegradable. A product can be biodegradable but not break down into usable compost. If it cannot be turned into compost then it isn't compostable.

I'm not confused. It's a subset, but it's a desirable subset. All biodegradable means is that it can be broken down biologically, it doesn't speak to how safe the byproducts are in the environment. Compostable means it's not just biodegradable, but also safe to permit to biodegrade. So while you're technically correct, you're not speaking to the actually relevant issue, which is what happens to the material when it's released into the environment.

They have to learn a lot of mental gymnastics to justify pirating all those games.

You prove the study right, you obviously don't have high moral reasoning skills. The last 200 years of theft from the public domain by big companies and dipshits like you can't just wait to bend over and get fully raped.

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

The last 20 years of PC games has been one of Valve and big videogame companies attacking and undermining game ownership and control of game software on the PC by literally stealing the game and chaining it to servers in their office, ensuring the game is never really yours. It's basically fraud on a massive scale. Which began with half-life/counterstrike in 2004.

Given the overwhelming amount of corruption in america, and the success of big corporations having undermind our rights to own the products we buy. There's a good chance people like you cannot morally reason yourself out of a wet paper bag.

Select title(s) are restricted by select compan(y/ies), therefore I'm entitled to pirate all titles from all companies.

I think what would be really useful is something Google could deliver pretty easily - a speed run as it were, a fast video showing me traveling the whole route (street map style view) in about 30 seconds or so, ...

And... now we know SuperKendall is Quicksilver IRL.

They have to learn a lot of mental gymnastics to justify pirating all those games.

You prove the study right, you obviously don't have high moral reasoning skills. The last 200 years of theft from the public domain by big companies and dipshits like you can't just wait to bend over and get fully raped.

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

The last 20 years of PC games has been one of Valve and big videogame companies attacking and undermining game ownership and control of game software on the PC by literally stealing the game and chaining it to servers in their office, ensuring the game is never really yours. It's basically fraud on a massive scale. Which began with half-life/counterstrike in 2004.

Given the overwhelming amount of corruption in america, and the success of big corporations having undermind our rights to own the products we buy. There's a good chance people like you cannot morally reason yourself out of a wet paper bag.

Not necessarily. Plastic is a category of materials based on their mechanical properties. Specifically, their plasticity--- especially thermoplasticity.

A variety of materials can be derived from plant feed stocks such as starches or waxes, which have plastic properties, and can reliably be referred to as plastics. One such material is rayon. it is chemically reprocessed cellulose.

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

Other such materials are PLA and PHA.

> intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides.

This ! Agriculture is destructive on the environment, leading to loss of top soil, destruction of local plants and animals. Check what happened to Limberlost Swamp.

Are you too fucking lazy to google? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Compostable plastics are produced from renewable sources, so they even have the potential to be carbon-neutral.

There is no requirement that something that is compostable be produced from renewable sources. It can be but it does not have to be. Being compostable just means it can break down safely into compost. And just because something is derived from renewable materials does not automatically mean it is carbon neutral. If the energy inputs to process the material are not carbon neutral then it is unlikely the product itself will be.

They do have to be tested to make sure they only break down into harmless compounds, though.

I think you are conflating biodegradable plastic with compostable. Compostable is a subset of biodegradable. A product can be biodegradable but not break down into usable compost. If it cannot be turned into compost then it isn't compostable.

Ever been to Glass Beach?

No, but I've been to Glass Beach. (Sadly, most of the glass is gone now, but I got a great piece on my last visit, it's the Coca-Cola script logo off an old bottle on which the words were highly raised.)

Everybody loves beach glass. I've previously proposed that what we do with glass instead of recycling it is just dump it, at least for glass near a coast. But then there's the problem of peak sand...

Ever been to Glass Beach?

No, but I've been to Glass Beach. (Sadly, most of the glass is gone now, but I got a great piece on my last visit, it's the Coca-Cola script logo off an old bottle on which the words were highly raised.)

Everybody loves beach glass. I've previously proposed that what we do with glass instead of recycling it is just dump it, at least for glass near a coast. But then there's the problem of peak sand...

Ever been to Glass Beach?

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think crystal balls are cloudy in this area. The computers are now becoming capable of performing service jobs, which is where people went when automation reduced manufacturing jobs.

I work in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have not been reduced the way many people think. Some have been relocated. There are more manufacturing jobs than ever globally. What has changed in the US is that labor intensive products are not built in countries with low labor costs. Capital intensive products are built in the US. The US has a $3 Trillion manufacturing sector. The total number of manufacturing jobs in the US is about the same as it was at the start of WWII. It's down from the peak numbers in the 1970s but still accounts for around 13 million people and holding. The percent of the jobs in the economy has fallen but that's largely because the other sectors grew while manufacturing jobs stayed steady.

As well, the workers' share of profits has been declining for decades, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, so that final point is extremely disputable.

That depends on exactly how you measure it and which jobs you are measuring. Just because someone has a smaller piece of the pie doesn't mean they are worse off if the pie overall grew. And the evidence is clear that the pie has grown. Sure you can find some periods where the data shows a decline but I can show you hundreds of years of data showing a very steady increase. Yes there are some serious income inequality issues going on but that isn't proof of some irreversible decline in employment thanks to automation. Don't conflate the two issues.

What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

Several answers to that.
1) Robots do not and will not do all the service jobs. Automation does not solve every problem because it is not economical to automate everywhere. People naively extrapolate automation trends to infinity without really understanding what is going on. It's too expensive to automate problem and automation creates new jobs that cannot yet be automated. 70 years ago secretarial pools were a common thing. Today they are unheard of and yet we still have full employment.
2) We have no idea what jobs will be created by further advances in automation. We never have known and cannot know. I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and if anyone claims they predicted what it would do and the huge economic impact it has had is lying. We dreamed about such things but had absolutely no idea what form it would actually take or what jobs it would involve. The jobs people will be doing in 50 years are hard to imagine today. Some will be the same but many haven't even been invented yet.
3) Humans control legislatures and can easily regulate automation in places should it become necessary.
4) The amount of economically valuable work that can be done is effectively infinite and our resources to automate are finite. Automation can sometimes depress wages but it doesn't eliminate them altogether. Some things that are currently impossible become economically achievable as automation makes it possible for people to address those problems.

It's also not known for its software companies, so the talent pool is not that deep.

I take it you've never heard of Silicon Alley.

You know, you really have no clue what you are talking about do you? You call everyone else "anti-science" but seem to have no ideal that gravity can be simulated. I would suggest you spend some time reading up on subjects before commenting on them. Start with O'Neill Colonies and work out from there. Here is a link to get you started.

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

Come back when you are better informed.

But the beauty of colonizing an asteroid is that we don't have to go to the asteroid. We can bring the asteroid to earth, or at least earth orbit.

Here is how we do it: Find a nice sized asteroid in a earth-crossing orbit, maybe a few cubic kilometers. Nudge it a bit with a fusion warhead, so that it veers closer to earth. Then adjust the orbit, so that it juuuust skims through the upper atmosphere. This will slow it enough to go into an eccentric elliptical orbit. A few more passes through the atmosphere at perigee, and it will settle down into a circular orbit, maybe about 500 km up.

If it is, say, 10 km^3, that is 50 billion tonnes of iron, nickel, and other siderophile elements, including gold, platinum, iridium, etc. It will pay for itself in no time.

The "Mars One" people are just being unrealistic.

Their invent-new-month-names department blew up their budget.

The needed a lot of names. On Mars, there is a new month every seven hours and 40 minutes.

> He created AC you young dimwit.

Nope. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Duchenne

Is there something the EU member want to do that the current GPS network cannot or declines to do?

Yes. Not have an important piece of technology controlled by a (potential) rival nation. Maybe not an ideal reason but NIH is sometimes a strong motivation.

This ! Agriculture is destructive on the environment, leading to loss of top soil, destruction of local plants and animals. Check what happened to Limberlost Swamp.

Accomplished? Other than coasting on other people's work, what has he actually managed to accomplish?

Oh he seems to have accomplished a thing or two...

Founded Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $307 million
Founder of X.com and CEO of Paypal - sold to eBay for $1.5 billion
Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors since 2008 - company now worth $52 billion as of this post
Founder of Solarcity
Created concept of Hyperloop
Founded OpenAI research corporation
Founded Neuralink
Founded The Boring Company
Founded SpaceX and got the first privately financed orbital rocket into space and has driven down the cost to orbit dramatically.

My question would be what have you accomplished besides being bad at snark on the internet? Name me one person who has actually accomplished more than Musk has in the last 20 years.

Accomplished? Other than coasting on other people's work, what has he actually managed to accomplish?

Oh he seems to have accomplished a thing or two...

Founded Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $307 million
Founder of X.com and CEO of Paypal - sold to eBay for $1.5 billion
Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors since 2008 - company now worth $52 billion as of this post
Founder of Solarcity
Created concept of Hyperloop
Founded OpenAI research corporation
Founded Neuralink
Founded The Boring Company
Founded SpaceX and got the first privately financed orbital rocket into space and has driven down the cost to orbit dramatically.

My question would be what have you accomplished besides being bad at snark on the internet? Name me one person who has actually accomplished more than Musk has in the last 20 years.

Accomplished? Other than coasting on other people's work, what has he actually managed to accomplish?

Oh he seems to have accomplished a thing or two...

Founded Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $307 million
Founder of X.com and CEO of Paypal - sold to eBay for $1.5 billion
Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors since 2008 - company now worth $52 billion as of this post
Founder of Solarcity
Created concept of Hyperloop
Founded OpenAI research corporation
Founded Neuralink
Founded The Boring Company
Founded SpaceX and got the first privately financed orbital rocket into space and has driven down the cost to orbit dramatically.

My question would be what have you accomplished besides being bad at snark on the internet? Name me one person who has actually accomplished more than Musk has in the last 20 years.

Accomplished? Other than coasting on other people's work, what has he actually managed to accomplish?

Oh he seems to have accomplished a thing or two...

Founded Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $307 million
Founder of X.com and CEO of Paypal - sold to eBay for $1.5 billion
Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors since 2008 - company now worth $52 billion as of this post
Founder of Solarcity
Created concept of Hyperloop
Founded OpenAI research corporation
Founded Neuralink
Founded The Boring Company
Founded SpaceX and got the first privately financed orbital rocket into space and has driven down the cost to orbit dramatically.

My question would be what have you accomplished besides being bad at snark on the internet? Name me one person who has actually accomplished more than Musk has in the last 20 years.

Accomplished? Other than coasting on other people's work, what has he actually managed to accomplish?

Oh he seems to have accomplished a thing or two...

Founded Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $307 million
Founder of X.com and CEO of Paypal - sold to eBay for $1.5 billion
Chairman and CEO of Tesla motors since 2008 - company now worth $52 billion as of this post
Founder of Solarcity
Created concept of Hyperloop
Founded OpenAI research corporation
Founded Neuralink
Founded The Boring Company
Founded SpaceX and got the first privately financed orbital rocket into space and has driven down the cost to orbit dramatically.

My question would be what have you accomplished besides being bad at snark on the internet? Name me one person who has actually accomplished more than Musk has in the last 20 years.

You're improperly comparing to a zero base state - post-surgery death vs if the person were living a normal life and didn't need surgery. That leads you to the incorrect conclusion that "something is wrong" when someone dies after surgery.

The correct comparison is is against what would've happened to the person if they hadn't gone into surgery. Except for cosmetic surgery, going to the OR is usually to treat a life-threatening problem. 4.2 million deaths after surgery vs 313 million surgical procedures is a 1.3% chance of death post-surgery. People opt for surgery because that's a helluva improvement over the ~50% chance of death if they hadn't gone into surgery.

The same miguided argument is used against vaccines. A few dozen children die from vaccines each year. Anti-vaxxers (comparing to a zero base state of no deaths) cite that as evidence that vaccines are unsafe. But the correct comparison is a few dozen deaths from vaccines, vs the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths if nobody were vaccinated. We opt for vaccines and surgery because they're the lesser of two evils (far, far lesser).

Another example is the crash of United Airlines 232. One of the passengers was a lap child - an infant or small child carried on the parents' lap and traveling without paying for a seat. The head stewardess abroad the flight followed procedure and instructed the parents to put the lap child underneath the seat in front of them like carry-on luggage. When the child died, she was so racked with guilt that she went on a multi-decade crusade to get lap children banned. The FAA finally ruled against her a few years ago. She was incorrectly comparing against a zero base state - the lap child dying vs possibly surviving if it had been belted into a seat. The FAA made the correct comparison. Lap children are allowed because flying is two orders of magnitude safer than driving. If you forced all parents with small children to pay for a seat for those children, a lot of them would opt to drive instead of fly. And as a result a lot more children would die from car accidents than this one lap child on this one ill-fated flight.

Instead of being frustrated over not knowing why the "unnecessary" death occurred, treat it as a gamble. The patient's original status gave him, say, a 50% chance of survival. Surgery gives him a 98.7% chance of survival. So surgery is obviously the better bet and wiser choice. But 1.3% of the time you will still lose that bet. It still boils down to the luck of the draw, except with surgery (and vaccines and lap children) you are stacking the deck far, far in your favor.

We can and certainly should try to improve the 1.3% fatality rate following surgery. But 1.3% is still a good thing, not something to be ashamed or fearful of. People are making jokes because TFA is naively trying to spin this story as if surgery were an additional risk, when it's actually a reduction in risk.