Not just display. Input is an issue also. If people are inputting new regnal years and the system interprets them as old regnal years that is going to lead to some substantial headaches.
The delays under discussion have not largely been about man-rating the Atlas but about certifying the crew capsule. Manrating the Atlas is one of the easiest parts of this process.
ULA is partially owned by Boeing, but they are separate. Boeing is making the crew capsule for their version which will be launched on a ULA rocket, but ULA doesn't have much at all to do directly with the commercial crew program.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
A dyson sphere (which you brought up) is a fictional technology.
The sentence you are quoting was in reply to the statement "Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology." Which you wrote in reply to the statement "First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones." Note that this statement was a statement about visiting other stars, not a statement about Dyson spheres.
We have barely searched a fraction [extremetech.com] of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the universe for life. It is WAY too early to start drawing serious conclusions about what we should see based on what we've already seen since we've barely seen anything. Your argument is kind of similar to saying "we've looked at the other 7 planets in our solar system and haven't seen anything so we should conclude that life in the rest of the trillions of other galaxies is unlikely".
There's a pretty big difference here at two levels. First, we have searched for all sorts of megastructures- see the link I gave above. And this isn't the only sort of search of this sort done, we've also used Kepler to search for similar signs and haven't found any (with the exception of Tabby's Star which seems to be weird dust.)
You could make the same argument about an FTL drive but that doesn't mean it's possible under the actual laws of physics of our universe. Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's feasible to accomplish. Lightsabers are cool but good luck actually making one. And even if something is technically possible it isn't always economically realistic. We can and have sent men to the moon but we haven't figured out a way to do so that is economically sustainable so we don't do it anymore. Being an advanced civilization doesn't require the building of structures that are in all likelihood impossible to build.
Engineering and economic considerations are real certainly, but it is a deep mistake to make the comparison to FTL. That was part of the point: If there's a fundamental physics barrier, no one is getting past it. If a barrier is essentially economic then all it takes is a civilization which is really interested in space travel.
Lots of really bright people have given the notion a lot of thought and there is no evidence that it is actually possible in the real world. And yes it would require a lot of advanced materials, even for the less resource intensive versions like the swarm. Do you have ANY idea how large even a modest sized star like our Sun is? The circumference of our Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly a billion kilometers. Where do you expect to get enough materials for even the most modest of habitable rings to exist on that sort of scale? Forget what it would need to be made of, first you have to even find that much raw material. Good luck with that.
People have made the calculations for raw material. Dyson swarms and ring worlds are *thin* so it is easy to overestimate how much material they would use. A Dyson bubble, which would in general be larger than a Dyson sphere, requires about as much material as a medium to large asteroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_bubble. A Dyson swarm requires much less.
As for your statement about really liking Dyson spheres. Not really, they are just one of the easier examples to give that don't require a lot of explanation. In general, there are a lot of different megastructure ideas out there. These are simply some of those which have a high plausibility level.
This seems extremely unlikely. If gravity has a substantial effect that is noticeable in any way that isn't just acceleration then General Relativity has to be wrong. Moreover, it would then in this hypothetical have to be somehow having an impact on people but not make any noticeable other difference to basic chemistry or physics of objects in space (where we can see they work pretty close to how we expect).
Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
That seems like circular reasoning. You are saying we don't have evidence of other civilizations because we don't have evidence of them trying to communicate with each other. But since such evidence would constitute proof of their existence your reasoning seems to circle back on itself unless I misunderstand where you are going with this argument.
I'm not sure what your point is here. The point that "If X exists, we should see Y. We don't see Y. So this reduces our credence in X" should be straightforward.
Why should we? We have no evidence or credible physics theory that such a structure is actually physically possible in real life. Heck, where would one get enough material to create such a structure? You could strip every planet in our solar system of every useful molecule and you still wouldn't have enough material to surround our star with a ring much less a sphere. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible in the universe we actually live in.
We shouldn't necessarily see them. But if any sort of megastructures are doable,the incentive for an advanced civilization to try and make them will be high. And that goes up if leaving one's star system is tough. Moreover, the swarm variants of Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't require intrinsically advanced materials, and don't require that much material. Both Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles don't require much more mass than a large asteroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm.
Really ? Let's see your math. Assuming we'd like to land a 10 ton craft on an Earth like planet 4.5 light years away in a reasonable timeframe (say 25 years Earth time). How much fuel, and what kind of propulsion (in terms of mass-energy conversion efficiency) would we need ?
Assuming magical technology is even more arrogant than a reasonable extrapolation of current progress.
There isn't anything magical about nuclear propulsion
These structures are made from unobtainium and aren't passively stable. I wouldn't count on many civilizations being able and willing to build one. If you run out of room, genocide is a tried and proven solution, and much cheaper than building a Ring World. Also, most stars are too far away to see structures like that. Actually, most stars are too far away to see the star itself.
Solid ring-worlds and solid Dyson spheres cannot be made with known materials. The swarm versions lack those problems, and stability is a small issue for the swarm versions. And yes, most stars are too far away, but many are not. Please read the link I gave above- we've done systematic searches for all sorts of megastructures and found none. Also the fact that many stars are far away doesn't enter into it: if the nearby stars are a close to representative sample that shouldn't matter.
The cost of setting up a "space factory" would be orders of magnitude more than anything like this, especially because there are so many critical components which are extremely difficult to make. The primary cost of Webb isn't at all getting the material up there, it is getting very novel components to actually work and be engineered correctly. In general, space telescopes are still a pretty new thing, and the JWT is substantially larger than prior space telescopes. We're still learning a lot about how to make them.
The "space is just too big" argument doesn't work. First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones. Second, many stars are relatively close together. If you have a cluster of stars which are at most a light year away from each other and with many on the order of light months, the idea that one couldn't go from one to the other is the height of arrogant assumptions that technology isn't going to improve. Third, many of the signs of a lack of civilizations are far stronger than not just meeting them. We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres. See https://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. But if spreading out isn't possible, then the incentive to make large systems in one's own star system to make efficient use of the resources there goes up massively.
I said this was a starting point to show that the basic claim that scenarios don't look at it is false. In fact, many individual papers have looked at other situations. However, many of those are behind paywalls. I do agree though that the scenarios given in that document do in general appear to be overly pessimistic.
This inevitable increase in use of alternative energy is never taken into account by climate models that assume an ever increasing generation of CO2.
This is just false. For example, the IPCC reports have a variety of different scenarios each based on different levels of CO2 https://ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/spm/sres-en.pdf is a good place to start. Unfortunately, even given these emissions levels, the damage is going to be severe. We need to do a lot more than we're doing.
That's not to say that all other pesticides are perfect. While they are a major aspect of what has allowed humans to drastically reduce food costs and effectively escape the Malthusian trap, many neurotoxic pesticides are harmful to humans, and there's a strong correlation between general pesticide exposure and developing certain neurological diseases later in life such as Parkinson's https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parkinsons-disease-and-pesticides-whats-the-connection/. There's good reason to reduce our use of pesticides when possible, but fearmongering about bee collapse is not on them.
This really isn't accurate. Cold Fusion didn't correspond to how we understood how basic physics worked, and had substantial problems with claims being made that could not be replicated. Quantum computing in contrast has an extremely well-developed theory behind it; the primary issues of getting it to work are engineering, not physics. In that regard, quantum computing is very close to trying to develop practical conventional fusion technology: we're pretty sure in principle it can be done, but the engineering involved is difficult enough that it isn't clear we're going to be able to do it any time soon.
Valid point that the article does discuss that a minority of papers did predict global cooling even as the vast majority did not.
But of course, popularity is not a measurement of validity.
Not really relevant as an issue here, since the point in question here was precisely about a claim about what was believed by scientists in the 1970s. Note incidentally, that in technical matters, while popularity does not imply validity, expertise is relevant evidence when one doesn't have the ability or time to go through all details of claims; that's not relevant here precisely because the claim was that scientists generally predicted global cooling and the point is that that is clearly false.
Most of those can be attributed in part to specific political events yes, but the scale of the fluctuations has increased, and that's true even if you look at other metrics such as adjusting for inflation or looking at the approximate logarithmic derivative. Why do you think that is?
What this ignores is the primary issue that much of the oil which hasn't been extracted is harder to extract. That's why for example we've moved further and further out to sea to drill oil from deeper and deeper. As we exhaust the easy supplies, the remaining supplies while large, become harder to access. The most important metric in this context is EROEI- the energy returned on energy invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested. In the 1980s the EROEI was generally in the 40s. That means that the energy returned from a barrel of oil was about 40 times the energy invested. Now, the EROEI for oil is between 10 to 20. Once EROEI drops below 1, a resource no longer works as an energy source, but even before that, when it drops below 3 or 4, it becomes largely impractical. Saudi oil EROEI will drop below 1 well before we've exhausted all the oil.
Peak Oil is happening, pretty close to as it was predicted to- that well before oil ran out completely, oil prices would go up and start spiking at semi-random moments. You can see this pattern and the rapid fluctuations in the oil prices here http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart.
Who remembers being told we are heading into a new ice age?
There's nothing racist about acknowledging that some locations have more of certain types of criminal behavior than others. Taxis are a particularly common example in many locations, because people have little recourse if a driver does something. Heck, part of the point having substantial taxi regulations is to deal with this problem, and that only works to varying degrees. One of the best arguments in favor of Uber and Lyft is that their technological model genuinely makes many of those laws (which often don't work very well to start with) essentially unnecessary.
First, please note, that SpaceX is launching satellites more cheaply than others. Moreover, with the exception of the partially reusable space shuttle, SpaceX is the only one to successfully reuse a first stage, and SpaceX has shown that it is capable of doing so more quickly than the turnaround for the Shuttle. This rocket used a previously flown first stage (from the Zuma mission) and is one of the last of the Block 4 Falcon 9s since they are switching over to the Block 5 which is optimized for rapid and cheap reusability based on lessons from previous blocks. If this has become not newsworthy then the very fact that SpaceX has made it so routine that one doesn't think it is newsworthy is something to note.
Second, even if you find the above completely unconvincing, given that Slashdot has room for around ten stories or so a day, deciding that one of the top ten news-for-nerds/stuff-that-matters is a satellite launch seems pretty reasonable.
Or is this really about you not liking SpaceX for essentially extraneous reasons?
Ok. So let's split this into two separate claims. Claim 1) Russia tried to interfere with the election. Claim 2) Trump campaign officials were aware of this and were involved. I agree that the evidence for 2 is stronger than 1. Are we at least on the same page that the evidence for 1 is strong before we discuss 2 in more detail?
The lawyer for one of the indicted companies told the court that the other indicted company didn't even exist during the time the "crimes" were committed. If you still think it's all "clear", (versus, you know, not entirely clear) then that's some motivated reasoning — which is what my original post talked about.
Yeah, I'm going to rely on Mueller's research a lot more than a claim made by a lawyer there. But the point is that they've been charged with a variety of specific crimes; that they haven't used a specific statute really doesn't say much, and I'm confused as to how you think it has nothing to do with the "Russian collusion story" when these are indictments of Russians about actions they took regarding the US election; and Mueller is definitely not the sort to play politics or games. He isn't going to make an indictment that he cannot backup. The indictment lays out in a fair bit of detail and is worth reading in its entirety. Moreover, it isn't like we only the Mueller information. And we have other data: For example, the adds which the IRA bought have been released https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/russian-ads-released-by-congress/ and that was by Congress, completely separate from Mueller's work.
Honestly, there may be people engaging in motivated reasoning when they decide that Trump somehow stole the election given the evidence we have. But one has to be about as irrational not to see this is pretty strong evidence that Russia tried to interfere. One can discuss the degree of success of that interference, but the fact that a Russian company with deep ties to the Russian government and oligarchs bought Facebook adds and ran twitter accounts on the 2016 election is pretty well established, and it would seem that it would take about as much motivated reasoning to think otherwise.
Is your entire argument that they weren't indicting speciifically under 52 USC 30121? If so, that's got to be the weakest argument I can imagine given the text of the indictment. Literally page 2 of the indictment: "Defendant INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC (“ORGANIZATION”) is a Russian organization engaged in operations to interfere with elections and political processes." Similarly, on page 12 one has "The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. " If your entire argument is that they didn't yet use a specific statute when they explicitly wrote that there was Russian interference, what point are you trying to make?
It is true that no direct guilty pleas for collusion have occurred (but in the nature of plea deals that shouldn't be surprising). As for the idea that no one has been indicted in that context, that's simply false. See here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... or heck, read the indictments yourself https://www.justice.gov/file/1... .
Slashdot Mirror
Not just display. Input is an issue also. If people are inputting new regnal years and the system interprets them as old regnal years that is going to lead to some substantial headaches.
The delays under discussion have not largely been about man-rating the Atlas but about certifying the crew capsule. Manrating the Atlas is one of the easiest parts of this process.
ULA is partially owned by Boeing, but they are separate. Boeing is making the crew capsule for their version which will be launched on a ULA rocket, but ULA doesn't have much at all to do directly with the commercial crew program.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
A dyson sphere (which you brought up) is a fictional technology.
The sentence you are quoting was in reply to the statement "Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology." Which you wrote in reply to the statement "First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones." Note that this statement was a statement about visiting other stars, not a statement about Dyson spheres.
We have barely searched a fraction [extremetech.com] of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the universe for life. It is WAY too early to start drawing serious conclusions about what we should see based on what we've already seen since we've barely seen anything. Your argument is kind of similar to saying "we've looked at the other 7 planets in our solar system and haven't seen anything so we should conclude that life in the rest of the trillions of other galaxies is unlikely".
There's a pretty big difference here at two levels. First, we have searched for all sorts of megastructures- see the link I gave above. And this isn't the only sort of search of this sort done, we've also used Kepler to search for similar signs and haven't found any (with the exception of Tabby's Star which seems to be weird dust.)
You could make the same argument about an FTL drive but that doesn't mean it's possible under the actual laws of physics of our universe. Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's feasible to accomplish. Lightsabers are cool but good luck actually making one. And even if something is technically possible it isn't always economically realistic. We can and have sent men to the moon but we haven't figured out a way to do so that is economically sustainable so we don't do it anymore. Being an advanced civilization doesn't require the building of structures that are in all likelihood impossible to build.
Engineering and economic considerations are real certainly, but it is a deep mistake to make the comparison to FTL. That was part of the point: If there's a fundamental physics barrier, no one is getting past it. If a barrier is essentially economic then all it takes is a civilization which is really interested in space travel.
Lots of really bright people have given the notion a lot of thought and there is no evidence that it is actually possible in the real world. And yes it would require a lot of advanced materials, even for the less resource intensive versions like the swarm. Do you have ANY idea how large even a modest sized star like our Sun is? The circumference of our Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly a billion kilometers. Where do you expect to get enough materials for even the most modest of habitable rings to exist on that sort of scale? Forget what it would need to be made of, first you have to even find that much raw material. Good luck with that.
People have made the calculations for raw material. Dyson swarms and ring worlds are *thin* so it is easy to overestimate how much material they would use. A Dyson bubble, which would in general be larger than a Dyson sphere, requires about as much material as a medium to large asteroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_bubble. A Dyson swarm requires much less. As for your statement about really liking Dyson spheres. Not really, they are just one of the easier examples to give that don't require a lot of explanation. In general, there are a lot of different megastructure ideas out there. These are simply some of those which have a high plausibility level.
This seems extremely unlikely. If gravity has a substantial effect that is noticeable in any way that isn't just acceleration then General Relativity has to be wrong. Moreover, it would then in this hypothetical have to be somehow having an impact on people but not make any noticeable other difference to basic chemistry or physics of objects in space (where we can see they work pretty close to how we expect).
Gravity is one of the easiest things to simulate. Just need a large rotating section. We've known that since the 1930s.
Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
That seems like circular reasoning. You are saying we don't have evidence of other civilizations because we don't have evidence of them trying to communicate with each other. But since such evidence would constitute proof of their existence your reasoning seems to circle back on itself unless I misunderstand where you are going with this argument.
I'm not sure what your point is here. The point that "If X exists, we should see Y. We don't see Y. So this reduces our credence in X" should be straightforward.
Why should we? We have no evidence or credible physics theory that such a structure is actually physically possible in real life. Heck, where would one get enough material to create such a structure? You could strip every planet in our solar system of every useful molecule and you still wouldn't have enough material to surround our star with a ring much less a sphere. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible in the universe we actually live in.
We shouldn't necessarily see them. But if any sort of megastructures are doable,the incentive for an advanced civilization to try and make them will be high. And that goes up if leaving one's star system is tough. Moreover, the swarm variants of Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't require intrinsically advanced materials, and don't require that much material. Both Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles don't require much more mass than a large asteroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm.
Really ? Let's see your math. Assuming we'd like to land a 10 ton craft on an Earth like planet 4.5 light years away in a reasonable timeframe (say 25 years Earth time). How much fuel, and what kind of propulsion (in terms of mass-energy conversion efficiency) would we need ?
People have made those calculations with Orion type craft. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)#Theoretical_applications. What you label as a "reasonable time frame" isn't doable, but journeys between star systems on the order of hundreds of years are completely consistent.
Assuming magical technology is even more arrogant than a reasonable extrapolation of current progress.
There isn't anything magical about nuclear propulsion
These structures are made from unobtainium and aren't passively stable. I wouldn't count on many civilizations being able and willing to build one. If you run out of room, genocide is a tried and proven solution, and much cheaper than building a Ring World. Also, most stars are too far away to see structures like that. Actually, most stars are too far away to see the star itself.
Solid ring-worlds and solid Dyson spheres cannot be made with known materials. The swarm versions lack those problems, and stability is a small issue for the swarm versions. And yes, most stars are too far away, but many are not. Please read the link I gave above- we've done systematic searches for all sorts of megastructures and found none. Also the fact that many stars are far away doesn't enter into it: if the nearby stars are a close to representative sample that shouldn't matter.
The cost of setting up a "space factory" would be orders of magnitude more than anything like this, especially because there are so many critical components which are extremely difficult to make. The primary cost of Webb isn't at all getting the material up there, it is getting very novel components to actually work and be engineered correctly. In general, space telescopes are still a pretty new thing, and the JWT is substantially larger than prior space telescopes. We're still learning a lot about how to make them.
The "space is just too big" argument doesn't work. First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones. Second, many stars are relatively close together. If you have a cluster of stars which are at most a light year away from each other and with many on the order of light months, the idea that one couldn't go from one to the other is the height of arrogant assumptions that technology isn't going to improve. Third, many of the signs of a lack of civilizations are far stronger than not just meeting them. We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres. See https://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. But if spreading out isn't possible, then the incentive to make large systems in one's own star system to make efficient use of the resources there goes up massively.
Soyuz is both the name of a rocket and the name of a crewed vehicle. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft). The Russians sometimes have named rockets after the first or most prominent payload of the rocket in question.
I said this was a starting point to show that the basic claim that scenarios don't look at it is false. In fact, many individual papers have looked at other situations. However, many of those are behind paywalls. I do agree though that the scenarios given in that document do in general appear to be overly pessimistic.
This inevitable increase in use of alternative energy is never taken into account by climate models that assume an ever increasing generation of CO2.
This is just false. For example, the IPCC reports have a variety of different scenarios each based on different levels of CO2 https://ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/spm/sres-en.pdf is a good place to start. Unfortunately, even given these emissions levels, the damage is going to be severe. We need to do a lot more than we're doing.
Colony collapse disorder is likely due to mites on the bees more than pesticides https://ipm.missouri.edu/MPG/2013/7/Colony-Collapse-Disorder-the-Varroa-Mite-and-Resources-for-Beekeepers/, and bee hives are generally recovering from colony collapse disorder https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-01/good-news-for-bees-as-numbers-recover-while-mystery-malady-wanes. It is true that pesticide use can be a problem, but that's probably not the primary cause of most of the bee population problems, even as neonicotinoids are separately creating problems for bees. It is also in this context, important to focus on specific pesticides like neonicotinoids rather than "pesticides" as a general category, many of which are harmless to bees. And for this reason, reducing or eliminating neonicotinoid use makes sense.
That's not to say that all other pesticides are perfect. While they are a major aspect of what has allowed humans to drastically reduce food costs and effectively escape the Malthusian trap, many neurotoxic pesticides are harmful to humans, and there's a strong correlation between general pesticide exposure and developing certain neurological diseases later in life such as Parkinson's https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parkinsons-disease-and-pesticides-whats-the-connection/. There's good reason to reduce our use of pesticides when possible, but fearmongering about bee collapse is not on them.
This really isn't accurate. Cold Fusion didn't correspond to how we understood how basic physics worked, and had substantial problems with claims being made that could not be replicated. Quantum computing in contrast has an extremely well-developed theory behind it; the primary issues of getting it to work are engineering, not physics. In that regard, quantum computing is very close to trying to develop practical conventional fusion technology: we're pretty sure in principle it can be done, but the engineering involved is difficult enough that it isn't clear we're going to be able to do it any time soon.
But of course, popularity is not a measurement of validity.
Not really relevant as an issue here, since the point in question here was precisely about a claim about what was believed by scientists in the 1970s. Note incidentally, that in technical matters, while popularity does not imply validity, expertise is relevant evidence when one doesn't have the ability or time to go through all details of claims; that's not relevant here precisely because the claim was that scientists generally predicted global cooling and the point is that that is clearly false.
Most of those can be attributed in part to specific political events yes, but the scale of the fluctuations has increased, and that's true even if you look at other metrics such as adjusting for inflation or looking at the approximate logarithmic derivative. Why do you think that is?
What this ignores is the primary issue that much of the oil which hasn't been extracted is harder to extract. That's why for example we've moved further and further out to sea to drill oil from deeper and deeper. As we exhaust the easy supplies, the remaining supplies while large, become harder to access. The most important metric in this context is EROEI- the energy returned on energy invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested. In the 1980s the EROEI was generally in the 40s. That means that the energy returned from a barrel of oil was about 40 times the energy invested. Now, the EROEI for oil is between 10 to 20. Once EROEI drops below 1, a resource no longer works as an energy source, but even before that, when it drops below 3 or 4, it becomes largely impractical. Saudi oil EROEI will drop below 1 well before we've exhausted all the oil.
Who remembers being told we are heading into a new ice age?
Sigh. In the 1970s, some people in the media claimed that there would be an ice age; scientists were in fact already talking about global warming https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm.
Why do we pay attention to this crap. It's just like a new fad diet.
Because this "crap" happens to be pretty accurate and pretty concerning. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/1732/, and look at changing sea ice levels http://nsidc.org/sites/nsidc.org/files/images/cryosphere/sotc/arctic-antarctic-anomaly-trend-1978-2017.png http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html.
There's nothing racist about acknowledging that some locations have more of certain types of criminal behavior than others. Taxis are a particularly common example in many locations, because people have little recourse if a driver does something. Heck, part of the point having substantial taxi regulations is to deal with this problem, and that only works to varying degrees. One of the best arguments in favor of Uber and Lyft is that their technological model genuinely makes many of those laws (which often don't work very well to start with) essentially unnecessary.
First, please note, that SpaceX is launching satellites more cheaply than others. Moreover, with the exception of the partially reusable space shuttle, SpaceX is the only one to successfully reuse a first stage, and SpaceX has shown that it is capable of doing so more quickly than the turnaround for the Shuttle. This rocket used a previously flown first stage (from the Zuma mission) and is one of the last of the Block 4 Falcon 9s since they are switching over to the Block 5 which is optimized for rapid and cheap reusability based on lessons from previous blocks. If this has become not newsworthy then the very fact that SpaceX has made it so routine that one doesn't think it is newsworthy is something to note.
Second, even if you find the above completely unconvincing, given that Slashdot has room for around ten stories or so a day, deciding that one of the top ten news-for-nerds/stuff-that-matters is a satellite launch seems pretty reasonable.
Or is this really about you not liking SpaceX for essentially extraneous reasons?
Ok. So let's split this into two separate claims. Claim 1) Russia tried to interfere with the election. Claim 2) Trump campaign officials were aware of this and were involved. I agree that the evidence for 2 is stronger than 1. Are we at least on the same page that the evidence for 1 is strong before we discuss 2 in more detail?
The lawyer for one of the indicted companies told the court that the other indicted company didn't even exist during the time the "crimes" were committed. If you still think it's all "clear", (versus, you know, not entirely clear) then that's some motivated reasoning — which is what my original post talked about.
Yeah, I'm going to rely on Mueller's research a lot more than a claim made by a lawyer there. But the point is that they've been charged with a variety of specific crimes; that they haven't used a specific statute really doesn't say much, and I'm confused as to how you think it has nothing to do with the "Russian collusion story" when these are indictments of Russians about actions they took regarding the US election; and Mueller is definitely not the sort to play politics or games. He isn't going to make an indictment that he cannot backup. The indictment lays out in a fair bit of detail and is worth reading in its entirety. Moreover, it isn't like we only the Mueller information. And we have other data: For example, the adds which the IRA bought have been released https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/russian-ads-released-by-congress/ and that was by Congress, completely separate from Mueller's work.
Honestly, there may be people engaging in motivated reasoning when they decide that Trump somehow stole the election given the evidence we have. But one has to be about as irrational not to see this is pretty strong evidence that Russia tried to interfere. One can discuss the degree of success of that interference, but the fact that a Russian company with deep ties to the Russian government and oligarchs bought Facebook adds and ran twitter accounts on the 2016 election is pretty well established, and it would seem that it would take about as much motivated reasoning to think otherwise.
Is your entire argument that they weren't indicting speciifically under 52 USC 30121? If so, that's got to be the weakest argument I can imagine given the text of the indictment. Literally page 2 of the indictment: "Defendant INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC (“ORGANIZATION”) is a Russian organization engaged in operations to interfere with elections and political processes." Similarly, on page 12 one has "The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. " If your entire argument is that they didn't yet use a specific statute when they explicitly wrote that there was Russian interference, what point are you trying to make?
It is true that no direct guilty pleas for collusion have occurred (but in the nature of plea deals that shouldn't be surprising). As for the idea that no one has been indicted in that context, that's simply false. See here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... or heck, read the indictments yourself https://www.justice.gov/file/1... .