Speaking of guns... when I was a HS sophomore (1978-79) we needed a "gunshot" sound effect for the school play. Finding it too difficult to synchronize a tape recording with the action on stage (not to mention, it just sounded like a recording, which was distracting), one of the sound crew guys brought a.410 shotgun from home, along with some wadding-load shells (ie: blanks). That way, he could stand in the hallway, looking in through the backstage door, and deliver the sound right on cue.
This was all done with the school's full knowledge and approval. And Andy kept the gun and shells in his locker for the last few days of rehearsals and performances. Alas, those were different times.
Funny thing though, on the night of dress rehearsal, he was paying such close attention to the onstage action that he didn't really notice where he was aiming. He ended up shooting the face off the clock on the opposite side of the wall. We still razz him about that to this day.;-)
It was short but very interesting. I like how he gave a "spoiler alert" without actually revealing much. I haven't seen the film yet, but I'm looking forward to it. His only complaint was that Mission Control personnel jumped up and cheered upon liftoff of the mission, which would never happen in real life. Other than that, he pretty much loved it.
Hm... just noticed a slight error, due to ambiguity in the GP...
If CO2 doubles by around 2050 the problem was literally a lifetime away.
My brain "saw" the present-tense verb and missed the past-tense verb that followed. So I understand that my comment does not directly address the actions of Exxon in the 70s. But the broader point of my comment still stands.
Even now it is only profitable because of government intervention in the market.
That may have been true in the 70s, but it's not today in most "industrialized" energy markets. Even with no subsidies, the cost of solar PV has dropped so much in recent years that it's now competitive with coal, when you amortize the cost of installation over the life of the system. And those gov't subsidies are disappearing rapidly anyway. Even California's will be gone in a few years.
If CO2 doubles by around 2050 the problem was literally a lifetime away.
No, the problem is already here:
- increased frequency and intensity of wildfires, worldwide
- decreased arctic sea ice coverage (to the point where total loss is expected within a couple of decades)
- savage droughts associated with persistent, record-low mountain snow accumulation
- off-the-charts arctic warming, causing a more "meandering" jet-stream (ie: the "polar vortex"), bringing unseasonal highs and lows at middle latitudes
- increased severity of storms (cyclones in particular)
- sea level rise (accelerating)
- ocean acidification (if enough plankton die, we are toast)
- ocean warming (ditto above, but for coral instead of plankton)
- species migration (they can't adapt fast enough)
- human migration (cf: the current refugee crisis in Europe, ultimately cased by a drought in Syria a few years ago)
Exxon and the other oil players could have diversified, just as Phillip Morris has been doing for decades. They could have been leading the charge toward alternatives, instead of gumming up the works. Unfortunately they didn't, so now they are going to pay the piper as the market finds those alternatives in spite of them.
In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979. They found seven papers that pointed to global cooling and forty-four that indicated global warming.
You'll find a quick, 7-min summary in this video by Peter Hadfield (aka: Potholer54):
Elon Musk ranted amusingly about space-solar power a few years ago in an interview with Popular Mechanics, saying, "I wish I could stab that bloody thing through the heart." However, speaking off the cuff, he used a less favorable space/ground ratio than the L5 proposal. I'd be interested to hear what he thinks of this plan, especially as SpaceX is on the verge of proving its new reusable boosters, which would be a great enabler for the launch cost aspect.
Also, they immediately sent all the surface assets they had in the area to search for debris. I don't know where the GP got the notion that they aren't interested.
Because no matter how shit a giant crab tastes, it will always be expensive.
You're talking about what I like to call a "face place," where the product or service on offer is face rather than an actual product or service. Such places are common throughout Asia, especially in far-east Asia, where Chinese influence is more pronounced.
And so it is with steel. They don't care about whether American or Chinese steel is better, they just think they are paying through the arse for your parts, they better be getting the expensive stuff.
In this case, I think you may be reading too much into the tea leaves. Rather than favoring "exotic, expensive" foreign steel for venal reasons, I'd wager they are more concerned with the ability of their native steel-making capacity to keep up with demand.
For decades, a LOT of money has been flowing into China, and they have spent most of it on infrastructure and gold bullion, of which they are purported to have several thousand tons on reserve (we're talking physical gold, not some kind of stock).
They are certainly not communist, but they are authoritarian (which is what I assume you really mean), and as I've just described, they've been playing a pretty good game at amassing capital in recent years. And there are plenty of Chinese billionaires and millionaires who've been snapping up ritzy real estate in the West, who could liquidate those assets to stay afloat in this current crisis.
To claim that China is "communist" is ludicrous. You apparently either don't know what the word means, or you don't know much about modern China.
It's been a few years since I searched this on the 'net, but now there is an answer:
"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. Despite being so common in English as to be known as "the Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.
Gov't "nationalizes" the building and gives away the apartments to peasants...? If you're the gov't, you don't care if some investor loses his shirt, you want useful stuff that you can give to the masses to keep them from overthrowing you.
The Chinese gov't doesn't define "assets" the same way as a Western banker would.
The banks may not have collateral, but the country overall has a lot of assets, such as empty apartment buildings, etc., which the gov't could simply nationalize. They are also sitting on at least a thousand tons of gold (nobody knows for sure), which could come in handy at a time like this.
On the up-side, the gov't has been pouring tons of money into infrastructure (partly fueling the bubble), and they still control their own currency. So they have some room to maneuver. And with a technocratic, authoritarian gov't, they have some leeway to take drastic measure that would be difficult if not impossible in a democracy. It will be interesting* to see how this plays out in the coming days and weeks.
* BTW, about that Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times," after decades in Asia, I have yet to find a native speaker who can tell me the original Chinese. So it seems this curse is apocryphal, most likely invented by a Westerner as a joke.
The cameras pulled back to show the launch facility, which was not of interest as the failure occurred at altitude.
Well, what else are you going to show, if you've lost your video feed from the vehicle and the tracking camera shows nothing but blue sky? Patch-in a feed from Sesame Street?
My concern is, how long is this going to put SpaceX out of commission? How many months (or years) will it take to track down the source of this failure and bring the Falcon family of rockets back online?
Elon has said many times that he won't go to Mars until SpaceX is running regular flights to the red planet. He says the same thing about taking SpaceX public.
Desalination produces water for hundreds of times the cost that farmers are charged for the water they squander.
Then clearly the "market" is not performing well here. Whether that is due to over-regulation or unfettered monopolies is a separate issue, the question is, how can we make the market reflect the true cost of water? And how can we find cost-effective solutions to the water problem?
In a nutshell: raise the price of almonds.
If everybody paid an extra nickel for their snack-pack of mixed nuts at the pub, farmers could invest more in their water handling infrastructure, such as terracing the landscape to retain rain water and allow it to slowly soak into the ground. There are lots of tricks like this in the field of permaculture which is the art and science of sculpting and tweaking the ecosystem to become inherently over-productive. (If you are lucky enough to live near a mature permaculture "food forest", you only spend a few hours a week on subsistence, and most of that time is just gathering the harvest.) Suffice to say, most of California's drought problems could be greatly alleviated by better management.
As for the cost of desalination... why is it so damned expensive? According to my Boy Scout Handbook, a few sheets of plastic and a couple of pots and/or cups is enough to distill fresh water on the open sea, so surely with space-age materials and techniques we ought to be able to engineer a high-volume "passive solar" desalination design that can be replicated with backyard tools in third-world countries.
What if California spent 0.2% of its budget on passive desalination plants for the next ten years? How much of a dent would that make?
Yes, obviously. I guess I don't get your original point about LEO. Asrobotics doesn't DO transport to LEO, so why even mention it? It's irrelevant to whether or not they can get a payload delivered from TLI to lunar surface.
Getting the payload to LEO will be done by someone like SpaceX, not Astrobotics. Presumably Mexico is paying the bill, so they can probably afford a Falcon 9, or at least a secondary payload slot.
You're right and wrong. He wants a system that covers both Earth and Mars, but he also wants to run a satellite internet service. As he said at the Seattle announcement a few weeks ago, we don't know exactly what we'll need to build a city on Mars, "But one thing's for sure, it'll take a whole lot of money." So he intends to use the ISP satellite network to fund the overall Mars mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of guns... when I was a HS sophomore (1978-79) we needed a "gunshot" sound effect for the school play. Finding it too difficult to synchronize a tape recording with the action on stage (not to mention, it just sounded like a recording, which was distracting), one of the sound crew guys brought a .410 shotgun from home, along with some wadding-load shells (ie: blanks). That way, he could stand in the hallway, looking in through the backstage door, and deliver the sound right on cue.
This was all done with the school's full knowledge and approval. And Andy kept the gun and shells in his locker for the last few days of rehearsals and performances. Alas, those were different times.
Funny thing though, on the night of dress rehearsal, he was paying such close attention to the onstage action that he didn't really notice where he was aiming. He ended up shooting the face off the clock on the opposite side of the wall. We still razz him about that to this day. ;-)
It was short but very interesting. I like how he gave a "spoiler alert" without actually revealing much. I haven't seen the film yet, but I'm looking forward to it. His only complaint was that Mission Control personnel jumped up and cheered upon liftoff of the mission, which would never happen in real life. Other than that, he pretty much loved it.
Hm... just noticed a slight error, due to ambiguity in the GP...
If CO2 doubles by around 2050 the problem was literally a lifetime away.
My brain "saw" the present-tense verb and missed the past-tense verb that followed. So I understand that my comment does not directly address the actions of Exxon in the 70s. But the broader point of my comment still stands.
Even now it is only profitable because of government intervention in the market.
That may have been true in the 70s, but it's not today in most "industrialized" energy markets. Even with no subsidies, the cost of solar PV has dropped so much in recent years that it's now competitive with coal, when you amortize the cost of installation over the life of the system. And those gov't subsidies are disappearing rapidly anyway. Even California's will be gone in a few years.
If CO2 doubles by around 2050 the problem was literally a lifetime away.
No, the problem is already here:
- increased frequency and intensity of wildfires, worldwide
- decreased arctic sea ice coverage (to the point where total loss is expected within a couple of decades)
- savage droughts associated with persistent, record-low mountain snow accumulation
- off-the-charts arctic warming, causing a more "meandering" jet-stream (ie: the "polar vortex"), bringing unseasonal highs and lows at middle latitudes
- increased severity of storms (cyclones in particular)
- sea level rise (accelerating)
- ocean acidification (if enough plankton die, we are toast)
- ocean warming (ditto above, but for coral instead of plankton)
- species migration (they can't adapt fast enough)
- human migration (cf: the current refugee crisis in Europe, ultimately cased by a drought in Syria a few years ago)
Exxon and the other oil players could have diversified, just as Phillip Morris has been doing for decades. They could have been leading the charge toward alternatives, instead of gumming up the works. Unfortunately they didn't, so now they are going to pay the piper as the market finds those alternatives in spite of them.
In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979. They found seven papers that pointed to global cooling and forty-four that indicated global warming.
You'll find a quick, 7-min summary in this video by Peter Hadfield (aka: Potholer54):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms&index=3
Elon Musk ranted amusingly about space-solar power a few years ago in an interview with Popular Mechanics, saying, "I wish I could stab that bloody thing through the heart." However, speaking off the cuff, he used a less favorable space/ground ratio than the L5 proposal. I'd be interested to hear what he thinks of this plan, especially as SpaceX is on the verge of proving its new reusable boosters, which would be a great enabler for the launch cost aspect.
Or just forget about space-solar power altogether, as Elon Musk recommends.
Why not L1 or L2? They both have a lower delta-v budget than L5. Is there some particular advantage to L5 that makes it a better choice?
Mod parent up.
Also, they immediately sent all the surface assets they had in the area to search for debris. I don't know where the GP got the notion that they aren't interested.
Because no matter how shit a giant crab tastes, it will always be expensive.
You're talking about what I like to call a "face place," where the product or service on offer is face rather than an actual product or service. Such places are common throughout Asia, especially in far-east Asia, where Chinese influence is more pronounced.
And so it is with steel. They don't care about whether American or Chinese steel is better, they just think they are paying through the arse for your parts, they better be getting the expensive stuff.
In this case, I think you may be reading too much into the tea leaves. Rather than favoring "exotic, expensive" foreign steel for venal reasons, I'd wager they are more concerned with the ability of their native steel-making capacity to keep up with demand.
And this contradicts my point... how?
For decades, a LOT of money has been flowing into China, and they have spent most of it on infrastructure and gold bullion, of which they are purported to have several thousand tons on reserve (we're talking physical gold, not some kind of stock).
They are certainly not communist, but they are authoritarian (which is what I assume you really mean), and as I've just described, they've been playing a pretty good game at amassing capital in recent years. And there are plenty of Chinese billionaires and millionaires who've been snapping up ritzy real estate in the West, who could liquidate those assets to stay afloat in this current crisis.
To claim that China is "communist" is ludicrous. You apparently either don't know what the word means, or you don't know much about modern China.
It's been a few years since I searched this on the 'net, but now there is an answer:
"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. Despite being so common in English as to be known as "the Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.
Gov't "nationalizes" the building and gives away the apartments to peasants...? If you're the gov't, you don't care if some investor loses his shirt, you want useful stuff that you can give to the masses to keep them from overthrowing you.
The Chinese gov't doesn't define "assets" the same way as a Western banker would.
The banks may not have collateral, but the country overall has a lot of assets, such as empty apartment buildings, etc., which the gov't could simply nationalize. They are also sitting on at least a thousand tons of gold (nobody knows for sure), which could come in handy at a time like this.
I would call that an up-side.
True for the stock bubble, but their entire economy has been "bubbly" for a lot longer than that (eg: real estate).
On the up-side, the gov't has been pouring tons of money into infrastructure (partly fueling the bubble), and they still control their own currency. So they have some room to maneuver. And with a technocratic, authoritarian gov't, they have some leeway to take drastic measure that would be difficult if not impossible in a democracy. It will be interesting* to see how this plays out in the coming days and weeks.
* BTW, about that Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times," after decades in Asia, I have yet to find a native speaker who can tell me the original Chinese. So it seems this curse is apocryphal, most likely invented by a Westerner as a joke.
They've been building up this bubble for years, it was only a matter or time.
As a bacon lover, I would say the "Great Genus Of Our Times" has got to be Porcus.
The cameras pulled back to show the launch facility, which was not of interest as the failure occurred at altitude.
Well, what else are you going to show, if you've lost your video feed from the vehicle and the tracking camera shows nothing but blue sky? Patch-in a feed from Sesame Street?
My concern is, how long is this going to put SpaceX out of commission? How many months (or years) will it take to track down the source of this failure and bring the Falcon family of rockets back online?
Elon has said many times that he won't go to Mars until SpaceX is running regular flights to the red planet. He says the same thing about taking SpaceX public.
Desalination produces water for hundreds of times the cost that farmers are charged for the water they squander.
Then clearly the "market" is not performing well here. Whether that is due to over-regulation or unfettered monopolies is a separate issue, the question is, how can we make the market reflect the true cost of water? And how can we find cost-effective solutions to the water problem?
In a nutshell: raise the price of almonds.
If everybody paid an extra nickel for their snack-pack of mixed nuts at the pub, farmers could invest more in their water handling infrastructure, such as terracing the landscape to retain rain water and allow it to slowly soak into the ground. There are lots of tricks like this in the field of permaculture which is the art and science of sculpting and tweaking the ecosystem to become inherently over-productive. (If you are lucky enough to live near a mature permaculture "food forest", you only spend a few hours a week on subsistence, and most of that time is just gathering the harvest.) Suffice to say, most of California's drought problems could be greatly alleviated by better management.
As for the cost of desalination... why is it so damned expensive? According to my Boy Scout Handbook, a few sheets of plastic and a couple of pots and/or cups is enough to distill fresh water on the open sea, so surely with space-age materials and techniques we ought to be able to engineer a high-volume "passive solar" desalination design that can be replicated with backyard tools in third-world countries.
What if California spent 0.2% of its budget on passive desalination plants for the next ten years? How much of a dent would that make?
Yes, obviously. I guess I don't get your original point about LEO. Asrobotics doesn't DO transport to LEO, so why even mention it? It's irrelevant to whether or not they can get a payload delivered from TLI to lunar surface.
Getting the payload to LEO will be done by someone like SpaceX, not Astrobotics. Presumably Mexico is paying the bill, so they can probably afford a Falcon 9, or at least a secondary payload slot.
You're right and wrong. He wants a system that covers both Earth and Mars, but he also wants to run a satellite internet service. As he said at the Seattle announcement a few weeks ago, we don't know exactly what we'll need to build a city on Mars, "But one thing's for sure, it'll take a whole lot of money." So he intends to use the ISP satellite network to fund the overall Mars mission.