After nearly a decade of QE, and with prime interest rate next to zero, there's a lot of "hot money" floating around in search of "investment" opportunities. International corporations have a couple trillion (collectively) parked in off-shore tax havens -- against which they can borrow at borrow at rock-bottom rates, and then use that money to buy-back their own stock and pad the already obscene bonuses of their fat-cat CEOs.
This is just another bubble, pumped up by the shameless, libertine excess of the FED's printing press. Look for more "volatility" like this in the future as the bubble nears its bursting point.
I call BS. I remember 1972, and it was very different from 2016. It was the height of the Cold War; anti-communist sentiment was at its peak. Income inequality was trivial by today's standards. It was before Buckley v. Valeo, so money in politics was also trivial by today's standards. The biggest issues of 1972 were the Vietnam war (and the draft) and civil rights. And let's not forget the whole Eagleton affair...
Look at some polling data. People under 45 don't give a shit about socialism these days. People under 35 have a higher opinion of socialism than capitalism. All of Bernie's core issues -- $15/hr minimum wage, universal healthcare, free college tuition, etc -- are all wildly popular. To this day, Bernie remains the single most well-liked politician in the country.
Instead of "protecting" the party from "extreme" candidates, the super-delegate system gave Dems the well-deserved appearance of corruption and insider fixing. As for closed primaries... I've got news for you, the general elections are always "open" not closed. Doesn't make much sense to be actively courting moderate GOP voters in the general when you won't let them vote in the primary.
While I understand (and agree with) your overall point, I blame that on the media rather than the voters. Case in point: the Bernie Sanders campaign. He had a clear message (economic inequality) and relentlessly hammered a handful of issues above all... and he was hugely successful. He started from nowhere, with zero name recognition, and closed a 60-point gap against Clinton in less than a year. And if not for the "super-delegates" and other hurdles (such as closed primaries) he might very well have beaten her for the nomination.
Bottom line: 2016 was an anti-establishment, populist "wave" election. Trump and Sanders both ran as anti-establishment populists; Hillary ran as the status-quo, establishment candidate. More than any other reason, that's why she lost.
The establishment all wanted Hillary to win, and indeed expected her to win... if not they would never have given Trump so much free air time -- while simultaneously ignoring Bernie's rock-star public appearances.
And don't forget, Trump also had a clear set of core issues that he hammered relentlessly: immigration; 'the wall'; Muslim ban; trade agreements; etc.. Voters do respond to issues, even if they're stupid ones.
Did you get that nugget knowledge from another Trump supporter on the Internet?
Actually that "nugget" is a frequent feature of Elon Musk's rhetoric. Apparently he's off a bit... but the the overall point still holds. Anything less than about 273-deg Kelvin would be inhospitable to life as we know it. (Not to mention that plants could not live without CO2...)
Did you get that nugget knowledge from another Trump supporter on the Internet?
Hmm... you seem to have me confused with someone else. I'm a Bernie-crat who held his nose and voted for HRC last November.
The point here is not the CO2 is either "good" or "bad"... the point is that the precise amount of CO2 turns out to be hugely important. Even a miniscule change can have drastic repercussions.
Yeah, exactly. This election should not have been close. Any decent candidate should have whupped Trump's ass by a comfortable margin. Hell, polls showed Bernie Sanders beating him by double digits in the week before the election -- at a time when HRC was only a couple of points ahead.
And in fact she did beat him by a couple of points, just not in the states where it mattered! So yeah... it WAS her fault.
By the way, don't blame me. I voted for her. (Much fucking good it did me...)
If you removed all CO2 from the atmosphere, the earth would have a stable temperature of about 3-deg Kelvin. It's the greenhouse effect from those trace amounts of CO2 that has kept us cozy and warm for the last few billion years.
Here's my quick, off-the-cuff list of things she could have done to win: 1. Show up in Wisconsin during the campaign at least once. 2. Show up in a union hall in Michigan at least once. 3. Make yard signs available to her supporters. (Apparently Robby Mook thought them "old fashioned".) 4. Select an even mildly inspiring running mate, instead of Mr. Boring, Tim Kaine. 5. Tell Obama to stop lobbying for TPP while she's ostensibly running against it. 6. Have a clear message about why she wants to be president, not just that she's "the most qualified candidate in history". 7. Run on a core set of important issues, instead of being for a laundry list of vague "good things". 8. Don't spend 75% of your ad money on anti-Trump "he's a bad man" spots (spend it on #7, above). 9. Tell Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to stop rigging the primaries, so that when Podesta's emails get leaked, there's no "shenanigans" to get exposed. 10. Don't have a private email server in your closet, so there's nothing for James Comey to investigate in the first place. 11. Don't give speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225k a pop just a few years after the financial crisis, and just a couple of years before the election.
I could go on, but my fingers are getting tired...
And when that CEO stands up at the annual X-mas party and toasts the employees "without whom none of this would have been possible"... he'd better head for the door before his 9 employees open those 'bonus' envelopes and realize how unfairly they've been treated. If I had a 10% share in the production of $50M in profits, and the CEO took $40M for himself, and I only get a couple-hundred grand, I would be pretty pissed.
It's one thing to have a 100-to-1 pay ratio for the boss of a company with 90,000 employees, but 9???
I would take that bonus and immediately start looking for a different job.
If you are prepared to end 100% of all other welfare system elements:... then there's a fair starting point for discussion.
The discussion is already underway, a main topic being how much of the traditional welfare state can be eliminated with a UBI. Murray, for example, thinks the UBI should go to all adults, 18 to 64, while existing social security and medicare should remain in place for those 65 and above.
Personally, I would also keep disability support. If you get paralysed in a car wreck, UBI is not likely to be sufficient for your expenses.
There are lots of ways to skin this cat. Some think the UBI should go to all people, regardless of age; some think minors should get a smaller amount (going to their parents as a form a child support). Some think it should be funded by income tax; others favor a corporate tax or whatever.
The bottom line is, we're going to have to figure this out eventually, and probably sooner than we expect. We already know that self-driving vehicles are going to eliminate 3 million jobs in the next 5~10 years... automation and AI will only continue to chip away at opportunities for human labor. What are we going to do when there simply are not enough jobs to go around? If not a UBI, what would you suggest?
It's not just a leftist idea. Milton Friedman was in favor of it. Indeed, our earned income tax credit (in the USA) was based on Friedman's ideas. Hayek also supported a variation of it. More recently, on the right, Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) is a strong proponent of the UBI.
it takes away incentive to do business in countries with UBI
On the contrary, it frees up the creativity of the masses by allowing people to take entrepreneurial chances. If you're dependent on a shitty job, you're stuck. But if you have a minimal income as a backup, you can say "no" to a shitty job and try to start your own business... or at least feel more confident about saying "no" and looking for a better job.
Many countries already have high tax rates, high minimum wages, etc., and yet companies still do business there, and their economies are doing just fine. Plus, you can save a bundle on things like unemployment insurance, because they're no longer needed.
How do you pay for it? There are lots of ways, but just for the sake of argument, let's limit the scope to income tax. If you want everybody to have a UBI of $10k/yr (for example) you could put a flat 15% surtax on income above that threshold, then by the time to start earning about $80k you hit the break-even point between what you put in and what you take out. So the people earning more than $80k will be supporting those who earn less, and the more you earn, the more you contribute... on an absolute basis. But as a ratio of your income, you're still contributing the exact same amount as everybody else.
It gets the job done, and it's totally fair, since everyone receives the UBI (even rich people) and everyone contributes the same portion of their above-UBI income to the pot.
A much simpler and quicker fix is to just shift the subsidies to cleaner energy.
That would be nice, but at this point it's not necessary. Renewables are already undercutting the cost of fossil energy in most areas, even without subsidies (and even though most fossil fuels are heavily subsidized). And all indications are that renewables will only continue to get cheaper while fossil fuels will only continue to get more expensive. If we're not already past the tipping point, we will be soon.
Another tipping point in the near future is energy storage. Tesla claims to have already broken the $200/kwh threshold, and rumor has it they may in fact be closer to $130/kwh. Again, with all the VC cash that's been invested in battery tech in the last decade, this cost will keep going down for a while yet.
The future looks bright for renewables, not so much for fossils.
Trump, plus a good percentage of the US population, which means the ratios must be much higher in the other countries surveyed in order to average out to 80% overall. According to Gallup, just 42% of Americans "Think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime." Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as "catastrophic risk" with no time constraint, but it's frankly lower than I expected.
Pew has a more lengthy survey which does a detailed breakdown of views by political affiliation. Here's one aspect I found intriguing:
One thing that doesn’t strongly influence opinion on climate issues, perhaps surprisingly, is one’s level of general scientific literacy. According to the survey, the effects of having higher, medium or lower scores on a nine-item index of science knowledge tend to be modest and are only sometimes related to people’s views about climate change and climate scientists, especially in comparison with party, ideology and concern about the issue. But, the role of science knowledge in people’s beliefs about climate matters is varied and where a relationship occurs, it is complex. To the extent that science knowledge influences people’s judgments related to climate change and trust in climate scientists, it does so among Democrats, but not Republicans. For example, Democrats with high science knowledge are especially likely to believe the Earth is warming due to human activity, to see scientists as having a firm understanding of climate change, and to trust climate scientists’ information about the causes of climate change. But Republicans with higher science knowledge are no more or less likely to hold these beliefs. Thus, people’s political orientations also tend to influence how knowledge about science affects their judgments and beliefs about climate matters and their trust in climate scientists.
I suspect that people could adapt, just as they do to zero-g. But we've never tested it. Not even on mice. (Though I think there is such an experiment in the pipeline in the next year or two.)
"Eccentric" is a term reserved for rich people who are batshit crazy.
No, it simply means "unconventional and slightly strange"... which is certainly true of Stallman, whatever you may think of his relevance in any other aspect. As a longtime user of "GNU/Linux" (22 years and counting) I'm grateful for his contributions to "the cause" (whatever that may be). You may quibble about which license is "freer" but some people might think that level of scrutiny is a bit eccentric. Though I did try FreeBSD once, many years ago, it didn't work well for me. Maybe I'm just lazy... whatever.
Bottom line: Linux just keeps getting better, and I never have to pay a dime for it. And I don't really worry about viruses (though I am careful about opening stray links anyway). And Stallman played a major role in making that possible. What have you or I or most other folks accomplished to rival that?
What I wonder is, will the HURD ever overtake Linux as the de-facto kernel? I rather doubt it. But the rest of GNU is indispensable.
I wouldn't say he's "mad" but he is very eccentric. I'm glad that Psych. Today delved into that aspect as much as his advocacy, which folks around here are already familiar with. IANA psychologist, but I would diagnose him as OCPD, along with whatever it is that causes him to do weird shit like plucking the tips of his hairs and eating them... in public... at the dinner table... (a scene I witnessed from the next seat, about 15 years ago).
As an OCPDer myself, I can easily see how his moral rigidity wrt software freedom fits the profile. And his skill as a coder is also a good fit. But there's more going on than just OCPD. Although the article doesn't mention any diagnoses, it's a very interesting read, and really illuminates the eccentricities.
Even measuring in dollars is a pretty "rough" way to compare these two. Even an apples to oranges comparison would be more apt -- at least they're both fruits, about the same size and nutritional value. Data and oil are completely different commodities. Though the market for data is booming, I think it's still a bit early to start projecting long-term trends.
As a speaker of both English and Mandarin, I can't help chiming in... English is hard to master but it's easy to learn "just enough" to get by. Mandarin (and Chinese in general) is the same. It all depends on your background. For an Asian student, learning English is probably harder than Chinese; for a Western student, learning English is easier.
Both languages are hard to master because they both have a rich etymological history going back thousands of years. Both languages have multi-100k-word vocabularies... more than anyone can hope to learn, even in their native tongue.
However, something like 97% of all verbal communication involves a vocabulary of only 3k~5k words. And both English and Chinese have a pretty simple grammar system -- no declensions / cases in Chinese (only a few 'vestigial' ones in English); no gender; a fairly simple system of verb conjugations; both are, for the most part, simple SVO syntax -- so it's not hard to learn enough of either language to be useful.
Just look at any hustler on the beach in the Philippines... "Hey Boss, you wan' buy pearl? You wan' fake Rolex?" They can negotiate the entire transaction in broken English. And it doesn't matter where you come from, they will approach you in English every time. Because they know, if you're rich enough to afford a vacation in the PI, you probably learned some basic English in school.
Chinese -- or any other language -- has a steep hill to climb if it wants to supplant English as the de-facto lingua franca of the modern world.
Thank you for fleshing that out, and putting it much better than I would have. The main purpose of the booster/first stage is to get the second stage up into the super-thin air going super-fast, and let your vacuum-optimized LH2/LOX engine(s) operate in ideal conditions.
LH2 is a huge PITA to work with (more demanding than LOX or liquid methane), and is not even necessary if you have a high-performing booster that can run on RP-1 -- which is an easy-to-handle liquid at both ambient pressure and temperature.
And thank you for illuminating a nagging, old question... why do hydrolox boosters so often have SRBs attached? Now I know.... it's the thrust coefficient.
I think, by definition, it's both. But in either case it's a kind of "inertia"... which would support the GP's point.
Out of curiosity, what sort of hardware do you fly? (if you're allowed to say...) And why do you think these establishment players got "inertially-wedded" to hydrolox back in the 70s & 80s? Was it simply the higher ISP?
it gives NASA a path to getting heavy lift capabilities in the event that the private enterprises working on the problem fail.
That's a good point. My only nitpick would be that NASA has been getting along without heavy lift capability since the Saturn-V was retired. (The Shuttle was about 22 tons IIRC...) They could have done the rough equivalent of SLS 25 years ago when Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan came out, probably for a lot less money. But that idea got lost in the internal 'politics' of NASA. Given those internal politics, I have a tough time assessing how much "will" there has been for a heavy lifter at NASA over the years. That is why I still give at least equal weight to the "pork-barrel" theory for SLS.
Just remembered that Delta-IV also uses LH2/LOX first stage, and also can have SRBs attached. But I think you're right that SpaceX opted against LH2 because of the added level of difficulty and expense. More to the point, I suspect that they figured out early in the process that reusability was within reach without LH2... and they turned out to be right. But if the numbers had gone the other way, I think they would have spent the time and money to master LH2.
Luckily, they didn't have to; fuel 'densification' was more than enough to get the job done.
As for SRBs, I suspect both companies avoided them for the reasons you give, but chiefly for the sake of reusability. SRBs just don't work well with a fly-refuel-fly-again scheme. And if you can do the job without them, why bother?
Good points. I suspect that the "inertia" of sunk development costs is probably the reason why the Ariane-6 is expected to follow the same basic configuration. And I agree there's nothing wrong with SRBs per-se, but in the new age of reusable rockets, they are a bit cumbersome.
Slashdot Mirror
After nearly a decade of QE, and with prime interest rate next to zero, there's a lot of "hot money" floating around in search of "investment" opportunities. International corporations have a couple trillion (collectively) parked in off-shore tax havens -- against which they can borrow at borrow at rock-bottom rates, and then use that money to buy-back their own stock and pad the already obscene bonuses of their fat-cat CEOs.
This is just another bubble, pumped up by the shameless, libertine excess of the FED's printing press. Look for more "volatility" like this in the future as the bubble nears its bursting point.
Tom Sawyer?
I call BS. I remember 1972, and it was very different from 2016. It was the height of the Cold War; anti-communist sentiment was at its peak. Income inequality was trivial by today's standards. It was before Buckley v. Valeo, so money in politics was also trivial by today's standards. The biggest issues of 1972 were the Vietnam war (and the draft) and civil rights. And let's not forget the whole Eagleton affair...
Look at some polling data. People under 45 don't give a shit about socialism these days. People under 35 have a higher opinion of socialism than capitalism. All of Bernie's core issues -- $15/hr minimum wage, universal healthcare, free college tuition, etc -- are all wildly popular. To this day, Bernie remains the single most well-liked politician in the country.
Instead of "protecting" the party from "extreme" candidates, the super-delegate system gave Dems the well-deserved appearance of corruption and insider fixing. As for closed primaries... I've got news for you, the general elections are always "open" not closed. Doesn't make much sense to be actively courting moderate GOP voters in the general when you won't let them vote in the primary.
Yes, and it was the release of CO2 and methane that got us out of those "ice-ball earth" episodes.
While I understand (and agree with) your overall point, I blame that on the media rather than the voters. Case in point: the Bernie Sanders campaign. He had a clear message (economic inequality) and relentlessly hammered a handful of issues above all... and he was hugely successful. He started from nowhere, with zero name recognition, and closed a 60-point gap against Clinton in less than a year. And if not for the "super-delegates" and other hurdles (such as closed primaries) he might very well have beaten her for the nomination.
Bottom line: 2016 was an anti-establishment, populist "wave" election. Trump and Sanders both ran as anti-establishment populists; Hillary ran as the status-quo, establishment candidate. More than any other reason, that's why she lost.
The establishment all wanted Hillary to win, and indeed expected her to win... if not they would never have given Trump so much free air time -- while simultaneously ignoring Bernie's rock-star public appearances.
And don't forget, Trump also had a clear set of core issues that he hammered relentlessly: immigration; 'the wall'; Muslim ban; trade agreements; etc.. Voters do respond to issues, even if they're stupid ones.
Did you get that nugget knowledge from another Trump supporter on the Internet?
Actually that "nugget" is a frequent feature of Elon Musk's rhetoric. Apparently he's off a bit... but the the overall point still holds. Anything less than about 273-deg Kelvin would be inhospitable to life as we know it. (Not to mention that plants could not live without CO2...)
Did you get that nugget knowledge from another Trump supporter on the Internet?
Hmm... you seem to have me confused with someone else. I'm a Bernie-crat who held his nose and voted for HRC last November.
The point here is not the CO2 is either "good" or "bad"... the point is that the precise amount of CO2 turns out to be hugely important. Even a miniscule change can have drastic repercussions.
+1 Informative
but no doesn't matter. it's all Hillary's fault.
Yeah, exactly. This election should not have been close. Any decent candidate should have whupped Trump's ass by a comfortable margin. Hell, polls showed Bernie Sanders beating him by double digits in the week before the election -- at a time when HRC was only a couple of points ahead.
And in fact she did beat him by a couple of points, just not in the states where it mattered! So yeah... it WAS her fault.
By the way, don't blame me. I voted for her. (Much fucking good it did me...)
If you removed all CO2 from the atmosphere, the earth would have a stable temperature of about 3-deg Kelvin. It's the greenhouse effect from those trace amounts of CO2 that has kept us cozy and warm for the last few billion years.
Here's my quick, off-the-cuff list of things she could have done to win:
1. Show up in Wisconsin during the campaign at least once.
2. Show up in a union hall in Michigan at least once.
3. Make yard signs available to her supporters. (Apparently Robby Mook thought them "old fashioned".)
4. Select an even mildly inspiring running mate, instead of Mr. Boring, Tim Kaine.
5. Tell Obama to stop lobbying for TPP while she's ostensibly running against it.
6. Have a clear message about why she wants to be president, not just that she's "the most qualified candidate in history".
7. Run on a core set of important issues, instead of being for a laundry list of vague "good things".
8. Don't spend 75% of your ad money on anti-Trump "he's a bad man" spots (spend it on #7, above).
9. Tell Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to stop rigging the primaries, so that when Podesta's emails get leaked, there's no "shenanigans" to get exposed.
10. Don't have a private email server in your closet, so there's nothing for James Comey to investigate in the first place.
11. Don't give speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225k a pop just a few years after the financial crisis, and just a couple of years before the election.
I could go on, but my fingers are getting tired...
And when that CEO stands up at the annual X-mas party and toasts the employees "without whom none of this would have been possible"... he'd better head for the door before his 9 employees open those 'bonus' envelopes and realize how unfairly they've been treated. If I had a 10% share in the production of $50M in profits, and the CEO took $40M for himself, and I only get a couple-hundred grand, I would be pretty pissed.
It's one thing to have a 100-to-1 pay ratio for the boss of a company with 90,000 employees, but 9???
I would take that bonus and immediately start looking for a different job.
If you are prepared to end 100% of all other welfare system elements: ... then there's a fair starting point for discussion.
The discussion is already underway, a main topic being how much of the traditional welfare state can be eliminated with a UBI. Murray, for example, thinks the UBI should go to all adults, 18 to 64, while existing social security and medicare should remain in place for those 65 and above.
Personally, I would also keep disability support. If you get paralysed in a car wreck, UBI is not likely to be sufficient for your expenses.
There are lots of ways to skin this cat. Some think the UBI should go to all people, regardless of age; some think minors should get a smaller amount (going to their parents as a form a child support). Some think it should be funded by income tax; others favor a corporate tax or whatever.
The bottom line is, we're going to have to figure this out eventually, and probably sooner than we expect. We already know that self-driving vehicles are going to eliminate 3 million jobs in the next 5~10 years... automation and AI will only continue to chip away at opportunities for human labor. What are we going to do when there simply are not enough jobs to go around? If not a UBI, what would you suggest?
I know the leftists love this idea,
It's not just a leftist idea. Milton Friedman was in favor of it. Indeed, our earned income tax credit (in the USA) was based on Friedman's ideas. Hayek also supported a variation of it. More recently, on the right, Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) is a strong proponent of the UBI.
it takes away incentive to do business in countries with UBI
On the contrary, it frees up the creativity of the masses by allowing people to take entrepreneurial chances. If you're dependent on a shitty job, you're stuck. But if you have a minimal income as a backup, you can say "no" to a shitty job and try to start your own business... or at least feel more confident about saying "no" and looking for a better job.
Many countries already have high tax rates, high minimum wages, etc., and yet companies still do business there, and their economies are doing just fine. Plus, you can save a bundle on things like unemployment insurance, because they're no longer needed.
How do you pay for it? There are lots of ways, but just for the sake of argument, let's limit the scope to income tax. If you want everybody to have a UBI of $10k/yr (for example) you could put a flat 15% surtax on income above that threshold, then by the time to start earning about $80k you hit the break-even point between what you put in and what you take out. So the people earning more than $80k will be supporting those who earn less, and the more you earn, the more you contribute... on an absolute basis. But as a ratio of your income, you're still contributing the exact same amount as everybody else.
It gets the job done, and it's totally fair, since everyone receives the UBI (even rich people) and everyone contributes the same portion of their above-UBI income to the pot.
A much simpler and quicker fix is to just shift the subsidies to cleaner energy.
That would be nice, but at this point it's not necessary. Renewables are already undercutting the cost of fossil energy in most areas, even without subsidies (and even though most fossil fuels are heavily subsidized). And all indications are that renewables will only continue to get cheaper while fossil fuels will only continue to get more expensive. If we're not already past the tipping point, we will be soon.
Another tipping point in the near future is energy storage. Tesla claims to have already broken the $200/kwh threshold, and rumor has it they may in fact be closer to $130/kwh. Again, with all the VC cash that's been invested in battery tech in the last decade, this cost will keep going down for a while yet.
The future looks bright for renewables, not so much for fossils.
Trump, plus a good percentage of the US population, which means the ratios must be much higher in the other countries surveyed in order to average out to 80% overall. According to Gallup, just 42% of Americans "Think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime." Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as "catastrophic risk" with no time constraint, but it's frankly lower than I expected.
Pew has a more lengthy survey which does a detailed breakdown of views by political affiliation. Here's one aspect I found intriguing:
One thing that doesn’t strongly influence opinion on climate issues, perhaps surprisingly, is one’s level of general scientific literacy. According to the survey, the effects of having higher, medium or lower scores on a nine-item index of science knowledge tend to be modest and are only sometimes related to people’s views about climate change and climate scientists, especially in comparison with party, ideology and concern about the issue. But, the role of science knowledge in people’s beliefs about climate matters is varied and where a relationship occurs, it is complex. To the extent that science knowledge influences people’s judgments related to climate change and trust in climate scientists, it does so among Democrats, but not Republicans. For example, Democrats with high science knowledge are especially likely to believe the Earth is warming due to human activity, to see scientists as having a firm understanding of climate change, and to trust climate scientists’ information about the causes of climate change. But Republicans with higher science knowledge are no more or less likely to hold these beliefs. Thus, people’s political orientations also tend to influence how knowledge about science affects their judgments and beliefs about climate matters and their trust in climate scientists.
I suspect that people could adapt, just as they do to zero-g. But we've never tested it. Not even on mice. (Though I think there is such an experiment in the pipeline in the next year or two.)
"Eccentric" is a term reserved for rich people who are batshit crazy.
No, it simply means "unconventional and slightly strange"... which is certainly true of Stallman, whatever you may think of his relevance in any other aspect. As a longtime user of "GNU/Linux" (22 years and counting) I'm grateful for his contributions to "the cause" (whatever that may be). You may quibble about which license is "freer" but some people might think that level of scrutiny is a bit eccentric. Though I did try FreeBSD once, many years ago, it didn't work well for me. Maybe I'm just lazy... whatever.
Bottom line: Linux just keeps getting better, and I never have to pay a dime for it. And I don't really worry about viruses (though I am careful about opening stray links anyway). And Stallman played a major role in making that possible. What have you or I or most other folks accomplished to rival that?
What I wonder is, will the HURD ever overtake Linux as the de-facto kernel? I rather doubt it. But the rest of GNU is indispensable.
I wouldn't say he's "mad" but he is very eccentric. I'm glad that Psych. Today delved into that aspect as much as his advocacy, which folks around here are already familiar with. IANA psychologist, but I would diagnose him as OCPD, along with whatever it is that causes him to do weird shit like plucking the tips of his hairs and eating them... in public... at the dinner table... (a scene I witnessed from the next seat, about 15 years ago).
As an OCPDer myself, I can easily see how his moral rigidity wrt software freedom fits the profile. And his skill as a coder is also a good fit. But there's more going on than just OCPD. Although the article doesn't mention any diagnoses, it's a very interesting read, and really illuminates the eccentricities.
measuring in dollars
Even measuring in dollars is a pretty "rough" way to compare these two. Even an apples to oranges comparison would be more apt -- at least they're both fruits, about the same size and nutritional value. Data and oil are completely different commodities. Though the market for data is booming, I think it's still a bit early to start projecting long-term trends.
As a speaker of both English and Mandarin, I can't help chiming in... English is hard to master but it's easy to learn "just enough" to get by. Mandarin (and Chinese in general) is the same. It all depends on your background. For an Asian student, learning English is probably harder than Chinese; for a Western student, learning English is easier.
Both languages are hard to master because they both have a rich etymological history going back thousands of years. Both languages have multi-100k-word vocabularies... more than anyone can hope to learn, even in their native tongue.
However, something like 97% of all verbal communication involves a vocabulary of only 3k~5k words. And both English and Chinese have a pretty simple grammar system -- no declensions / cases in Chinese (only a few 'vestigial' ones in English); no gender; a fairly simple system of verb conjugations; both are, for the most part, simple SVO syntax -- so it's not hard to learn enough of either language to be useful.
Just look at any hustler on the beach in the Philippines... "Hey Boss, you wan' buy pearl? You wan' fake Rolex?" They can negotiate the entire transaction in broken English. And it doesn't matter where you come from, they will approach you in English every time. Because they know, if you're rich enough to afford a vacation in the PI, you probably learned some basic English in school.
Chinese -- or any other language -- has a steep hill to climb if it wants to supplant English as the de-facto lingua franca of the modern world.
Thank you for fleshing that out, and putting it much better than I would have. The main purpose of the booster/first stage is to get the second stage up into the super-thin air going super-fast, and let your vacuum-optimized LH2/LOX engine(s) operate in ideal conditions.
LH2 is a huge PITA to work with (more demanding than LOX or liquid methane), and is not even necessary if you have a high-performing booster that can run on RP-1 -- which is an easy-to-handle liquid at both ambient pressure and temperature.
And thank you for illuminating a nagging, old question... why do hydrolox boosters so often have SRBs attached? Now I know.... it's the thrust coefficient.
> This isn't business, it's aerospace.
I think, by definition, it's both. But in either case it's a kind of "inertia"... which would support the GP's point.
Out of curiosity, what sort of hardware do you fly? (if you're allowed to say...) And why do you think these establishment players got "inertially-wedded" to hydrolox back in the 70s & 80s? Was it simply the higher ISP?
it gives NASA a path to getting heavy lift capabilities in the event that the private enterprises working on the problem fail.
That's a good point. My only nitpick would be that NASA has been getting along without heavy lift capability since the Saturn-V was retired. (The Shuttle was about 22 tons IIRC...) They could have done the rough equivalent of SLS 25 years ago when Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan came out, probably for a lot less money. But that idea got lost in the internal 'politics' of NASA. Given those internal politics, I have a tough time assessing how much "will" there has been for a heavy lifter at NASA over the years. That is why I still give at least equal weight to the "pork-barrel" theory for SLS.
YMMV...
Just remembered that Delta-IV also uses LH2/LOX first stage, and also can have SRBs attached. But I think you're right that SpaceX opted against LH2 because of the added level of difficulty and expense. More to the point, I suspect that they figured out early in the process that reusability was within reach without LH2... and they turned out to be right. But if the numbers had gone the other way, I think they would have spent the time and money to master LH2.
Luckily, they didn't have to; fuel 'densification' was more than enough to get the job done.
As for SRBs, I suspect both companies avoided them for the reasons you give, but chiefly for the sake of reusability. SRBs just don't work well with a fly-refuel-fly-again scheme. And if you can do the job without them, why bother?
Good points. I suspect that the "inertia" of sunk development costs is probably the reason why the Ariane-6 is expected to follow the same basic configuration. And I agree there's nothing wrong with SRBs per-se, but in the new age of reusable rockets, they are a bit cumbersome.