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SpaceX Successfully Lands A Falcon 9 Rocket At Sea For The Third Time (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for the third time in a row. The Verge reports: "It was the third time in a row the company has landed a rocket booster at sea, and the fourth time overall. The landing occurred a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 delivered the THAICOM-8 satellite to space, where it will make its way to geostationary geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). GTO is a high-elliptical orbit that is popular for satellites, sitting more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. The 3,100-kilogram satellite will spend 15 years improving television and data signals across Southeast Asia." The company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship for the second time earlier this month. UPDATE 5/27/15: Frank249 writes in a comment: "Elon Musk just tweeted: 'Rocket landing speed was close to design max and used up contingency crush core, hence back and forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'" He went on to tweet: "Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port)."
You're probably going to get downmodded for daring to state it, but your general point is valid.
We haven't really made any real technological progress since the 1970s.
When we look closer at the things that do look like progress, we soon realize that they're just refinements of technology that was first developed in the 1970s or earlier.
This includes the Internet, mobile devices, social media, electric cars, self-driving cars, virtual reality, and pretty much every other "modern" technology.
This really becomes apparent when watching TV sitcoms from the 1980s or the early 1990s. Despite being over 20 or 30 years ago, life today really isn't much different from what's depicted in those shows. Homes are nearly identical. The appliances are nearly identical. The vehicles are nearly identical. Aside from being smaller, today's mobile devices aren't much different from the PCs we had back then.
If you look at how life was lived in 1930 versus 1950, the difference was absolutely massive. The same was true if you compared life in 1950 to life in 1970. It was even true, but to a much lesser extent, if you compared life in 1970 to life in 1990. But life in 1990 isn't much different at all to life today, in 2016.
This trend is really apparent when we look at programming languages. Most important software today is still developed in C, which dates from the 1970s, or C++, which dates from the 1980s. There has been some refinement, but K&R C isn't all that different from C11.
Newer programming languages meant to replace C and C++ have been total failures. Look at Rust. It's a total joke!
Technological progress has stalled. We no longer make the huge breakthroughs we used to make. All we can do now is iterate on what we've had for decades. We can make it smaller, thinner, faster, and more energy-efficient, but that's pretty much all we can do.
We're no longer making revolutionary breakthroughs.
You blame leftism, and I think you could be right. Our decline has correlated well with the rise of leftism. Will President Trump be enough to halt this rampant leftism, and restore us to a path of innovation and development? I'm not sure. But I think it's the best chance we've had in at least 4 decades.
Thanks for dropping your personal politics into this in completely unrelated way. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ is a bit relvant. Note that if you think that "Social Justice Warriors" are a political group that objects to rocket launches, then this says more about you than any actual political group. Most people who care about social justice don't even have this on their radar screen at all. You appear to be taking every political position you don't like an labeling them all as "Social Justice." Maybe this means you should try harder to actually understand the political groups you don't agree with?