If you have an already-hardened "leading edge" to push off of, including a "downtime", I would not call that "simultaneous". Boring Company is seeking to achieve continuous movement, including the "regular maintenance". As for the details of "how", we'll have to wait. There's no shortage of different ways that concrete can be laid; precast segments carried in and placed is hardly the only one. I'd bet (based on no evidence whatsoever) that they're looking to cast it in place, and push off not some sort of leading edge, but an annular anchor against the hardened concrete further back (e.g. steel ring, pneumatically expanded to fill the tunnel, high traction material on the exterior)
With the TBM head (for a 8m dia tunnel)
Did that video look like an 8m dia tunnel to you? Part of the whole point is achieving smaller tunnels with the same throughput by automated vehicles moving at high speeds. All tunneling will encounter varying problems with the geology, but the smaller diameter the tunnel, the cheaper it is.
Appreciate that Elon's tunnels will be smaller diameter... therefore there is next to no chance of increasing tunneling speeds by a factor of 10x as is quoted..
Diameter is not about tunneling speed. Diameter is about tunneling cost. Smaller TBM, smaller amount of material moved, smaller casing, etc, etc.
Speed is an entirely different factor that they're trying to simultaneously improve.
current tunneling methods are continuously being optimized
And that's just the problem: "continuously being optimized". Boring Company, like everything else Musk has ever touched, is not about "continuous optimization". It's about breaking entirely with how things are traditionally done to achieve big leaps. The rocket industry had been "continuously optimized". Automobiles had been "continuously optimized". Etc. "Continuous optimization" is great, but you need to break "this is how things are done" paradigms every now and then.
There's no guarantees of success in doing so, but it's very important to try. And if you try enough paradigm breaks on a given topic, at least a few will stick, even if the others don't pan out.
Natural geology is not some nice predictable tech environment where you can confidently predict the ground conditions
Which would be a meaningful statement if anything about the Boring Company was based on the premise of geology becoming easier to work with.
, I have to call Elon Musk out as full of shit on this topic.
Reminds me of all of the rocketry people calling Musk out as full of shit on rocketry and all of the car people calling him out as full of shit on Tesla. There even was a blog, "Tesla Deathwatch" out there, counting down the days until Tesla inevitably went under.
If you want your arguments to bear more weight, you need to actually argue against things that the Boring Company is actually doing. For example, argue that all else being equal, narrower tunnels are not cheaper than higher diameter tunnels. Or you need to find out what alternative approach to casing they're actually planning to use, or the approach they're planning to use to reduce cutting head downtime, and so forth and argue against *those,*, rather than insisting that "anything that's not the same as we do it now is impossible". Otherwise, you're just going to come across looking like all of the rocket and car people a decade ago.
It's not really that simple. There's a lot of design decisions that factor strongly into how much noise an aircraft makes - for example, greater rotor area means more air moving at lower speeds. Smaller props for a given rotor area mean lower tip speeds. Greater numbers of blades increases the frequency of noise and thus its atmospheric attenuation. The surface and shape of the foils can have an effect on noise. Ducts can cause the same effect as larger props (increased air mass at lower speed). Any sort of properly designed cowling can reduce noise. Reduced blade thickness (aka, stronger materials, which we get all the time) reduces noise. And on and on. And there's lots of new techniques being investigated for noise reduction - asymmetrical spacing of blade pairs (makes it so that the blades don't pass through previous blades' vortices at perfect intervals), sound canceling, etc.
Also, I don't know of any "flying car" proponent who is proposing that people take off from their driveways - the concept is small urban/suburban helipads. You still need noise reduction, but not that degree of noise reduction.
Not with computer-controlled spacing between sleds and 125 mph travel speeds.
By dramatically increasing the throughput per lane, and the necessary width of the lane (a typical lane is much wider than a car because people drift), and the need for shoulders, the tunnel diameter can be significantly shrunk for the same throughput. Half the diameter and you quarter the cross sectional area. Boring costs scale linearly with cross sectional area.
Hence one of the publicly disclosed parts of the idea behind Boring Company.
He also plans to bore faster, but not all of the details have come out on this yet. One has, however, which is simultaneous casing and boring, rather than bore/stop/case. There's a number of changes to the head that they're looking to make, but they haven't been discussed yet. Regardless, even if none of the latter pan out, simply reducing tunnel radii for a given amount of vehicle throughput is a pretty straightforward way to reduce tunneling costs.
ISS is not designed to operate out of LEO. There are plans to build a new station around the moon (in a rather curious orbit). NASA wants it to be effectively a Mars spaceship, just parked around the moon, while the Russians want it to be a permanent fixture around the moon. So the plan appears to be to develop it so that a "Mars spaceship" portion can undock from the rest at an arbitrary future date.
Who knows how far along the design and development will actually get.
As for buyers... great if you can find them, and sure, get whatever money out of it that you can. But let's not fall for the sunk cost fallacy here. In a way, building an ambitious space project is akin to buying a computer. It may be the shiniest sleekest piece of modern technology when you make it, and it serves your purposes, but it's quickly rendered obsolete by advancing technology. ISS is increasingly obsolete, with modern technology allowing for structures that are lighter, more maintainable, and more capable for a given cost. For example, compare ATK Megaflex or Ultraflex to the ISS's solar arrays. Furthermore, part of the whole point of building such things is to advance technology. You don't advance technology by continuing to use old technology and just incrementally improving it. That may be the best option for a period of time, but eventually you need to start over with a new design that incorporates the knowledge accrued since your last design.
Every time you try something radical it's a toss of the dice. Musk's successes don't mean that everything he does will be successful. I generally am in agreement with the logic processes that lead him to each approach he wants to try to revolutionize new industries (it's generally just looking at them as a ruthless optimization problem, requiring as few new technologies as possible - for example, with the Boring Company: tunnel costs are roughly linearly proportional to boring cross section, while diameter is constrained by number of lanes, space per lane (which is much higher than the width of a car), shoulder/pulloff space, etc. So have cars ride on automated sleds to reduce space per lane, move them very fast to increase throughput and thus reduce the number of lanes (while simultaneously cutting travel times), cut the tunnel width in half, and you're cutting the boring cost by 75%, at the cost of having to engineer and build sleds; combine that with simultaneous casing rather than bore/stop/case, borehead improvements, etc, and push it down further if you can). But there's always a gamble with everything he does, and there can always be failure. Past success is no guarantee of future success.
ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. Now, to be fair to them, there has been a lot of low level research in the past several decades, and attempts to improve the technology seem to have been going well. And it's also understandable that they'd want to move away from aluminum to composites - the strength to weight ratios are far higher, and strength to weight is everything when it comes to high payload fraction rockets. But it's a risky endeavour.
To get costs down as far as they want requires revolutionizing everything, from the pad to range services to telemetry to thermal protection to the state of the art on reentry design and so on down the line. They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance (although their initial signs on that front are promising - your biggest concerns are erosion, and they're reporting that with the new alloys they're using erosion appears to be minimal). The scale of the challenge they're taking on with this one is much bigger than that they took on when founding SpaceX, or Solar City, or Tesla - and I'd argue bigger than Hyperloop and the Boring Company as well (although not as extreme as what they're taking on with Neuralink). Expect long timescales. Expect glorious, pad-destroying failures. Expect initial prices much higher than their ultimate goal, and long periods of time to get them down. And to fund it, their satellite venture is going to have to play out. Which it probably will (improving communications and satellite technology has thrown this opportunity in their laps - Blue Origin is trying for a piece of the potentially massive market as well), but it's another case of breaking-new-ground which throws another risk into the process.
But kudos to them for trying. With everything, really.
The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:
1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and 2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
It's also a lot heavier than an equivalent craft built today would be, which means a heavier transfer stage. Solar power systems for example are approaching an order of magnitude better power density than the ISS's solar arrays.
That's not the only problem. When you hack only one candidate's campaign but not the other, and then search through reems of data in the one hacked candidate to pick out the "juicy bits" (particularly if you slowly drip them out in out in order to dominate the news cycle every day, but even if you just dump them all at once), you're going to inherently bias the results. Because among the hundreds of thousands of emails generated by a campaign, there's always going to be some "gotchas!" (you could dig through anyone's email history and find things to attack them with, let alone an entire national campaign generating a huge amount of email traffic). If you only release them for one side, you're highly skewing the contest. And you're doing so via committing a crime. And it's all the worse if it's a foreign power, doing so, via a crime, in order to achieve their geopolitical objectives (but it's still bad even if it's domestic).
Yes, but do you have any rock crushers to sell me? Because what I really want is BEST QUALITY CHINA ROCK CRUSHER 50 TONNE BUY GOOD PRICE. Do you have any BEST QUALITY CHINA ROCK CRUSHER 50 TONNE BUY GOOD PRICE for sale?
And it makes sense to tax them for their exhaust. But taxing them for "mileage" reflects a fundamental failure to understand how rockets work. They could at least tax them for delta-V, although that's still not as logical as taxing them for what they actually emit in the state.
Distance in orbit is equivalent to time standing still on the ground - in that you're sitting there doing nothing. A proposal to tax distance is equivalent to proposing to tax truckers based on how many seconds they spend in California, even if they're not actually driving their truck for 99% of that time. It's even worse because higher energy orbits move slower relative to the ground, and geosynchronous almost stand still. Which would be taxing higher energy orbits lower than low energy orbits.
On the other hand, one comment from the article sounds like they want to tax rockets on altitude, not distance - they say that all unknown / classified rockets will be taxed at 310 miles. No clue whether they're talking perigee or apogee here. Or whether they take into account elliptical orbits, and if so how. Or accounting for the fact that polar orbits take more energy to launch to than equatorial. Or whether they account for the extra energy if they have to dogleg to match orbits with something else. If they have a fixed tax for mile of apogee, I can't imagine what a launch to Mars would cost. And what's the tax on something launched on a solar system escape trajectory - infinite?
Yes and no. While the first couple of hops are quite straightforward, most of the Internet, and especially all the big server farms, is still connected to the major fiber backbones, and therefore still subject to the vagaries of whatever whacky peering agreements the MBAs can dream up. No longer being subjected to the wankeries of routing Comcast indulges in will certainly help, but the other end isn't exactly pristine.
We're not talking about server farms, we're talking about connections for every home and business at up to 1Gbps. People can have whatever they want on the ground, but ultimately, to get to end users it's going to go through the constellation.
Also yes and no. Sure they potentially have a global reach, but securing spectrum licenses in 250 jurisdictions will take longer than actually launching the constellation (given the SpaceX launch tempo).
Yes, countries will have the option to not take up "100% net connectivity for your citizens at fiber speeds and low cost". For some reason, I don't think there's going to be many countries refusing that.
. More to the point, while phased array antennas are indeed a little bit magical, they're still subject to bandwidth limitations. There's only so many bytes per second that can be crammed into the spectrum they're using, and I suspect that number is considerably less than the number of bytes per second currently being shoved around the world at any given time.
You're not broadcasting the same data across the entire region that a satellite covers; each narrow beam to each end user is steered (via phased array, on the satellite end) to their specific location. Now of course the beam isn't some perfectly collimated signal, but it doesn't need to be; there's dozens of channels on the satellite.
And the big thing for SpaceX, is that by ensuring a continuous market for large numbers of launches, they can ensure economies of scale for launches as well. Which gets launch costs even lower.
I couldn't possibly wish them more luck in succeeding with this project.
Indeed. It's a phased-array antenna. It'll look like a flat sheet of individual printed mini-antennas. Switching satellites will be basically instant. With phased array you can even allocate varying fractions of a single dish to multiple satellites at once.
And as was noted, latency will be low, as this is a LEO constellation, not GEO. LEO isn't actually very high up. In many cases latency will be lower than with ground networks - fewer hops, no getting routed through particularly out-of-the-way locations, etc.
This is a big gamble on SpaceX's part, but while very difficult, there's no fundamental barriers. If they succeed, the revenue potential is almost unthinkably large - they could become the entire planet's ISP. It would be very difficult for ground-based networks to compete, due to all of the fibre you'd have to lay, versus how little SpaceX's launch costs per satellite are. SpaceX might have competition, however - Blue Origin appears to be pursuing the exact same sort of plan as well. Honestly, I'd just be ignoring Blue Origin (don't care much for the way they approach most things), if not for how wealthy the guy backing the company is and how much in love with the project he seems to be.
You're a moron aren't you. Look up profit shifting some time.
Profit shifting doesn't undercut anything written above. An inability to write a post without resorting to playground insults, however, does undercut your credibility.
Profit shifting is a problem actively being tackled by the G20. It is not an excuse to have one country operating by entirely different taxation means than the rest of the world, a system that doesn't prevent BEPS but does introduce brand new headaches, both for itself and for the rest of the world.
2002: Law establishing DHS bans it from contracting with inverted companies. 2004: Companies are outright banned from inverting. More and more, respond to the law by instead merging with foreign companies and adopting the new company's headquarters during the merger. 2014: Treasury department tries to crack down on merger inversions with harsher merger rules. Ironically, merger inversions accelerate. 2015: Stricter rules yet again. 2016: Stricter rules yet again - this time, at least, derailing the high profile Pfizer inversion merger attempt that was underway.
Just re-write the laws and close the fucking loopholes that ultimately create tax havens.
"Loopholes" don't create tax havens. Countries that want to be tax havens create tax havens. Loopholes are an entirely different (also largely American) problem, in that huge tax deductions are given for a wide range of purposes. Some industries are very good at claiming them, making their effective tax rate much lower than those which don't. While US corporate tax rates are very high by global standards, effective tax paid is lower than the OECD average because of such deductions.
Corruption feeds unethical practices in lobbying, and prevents this from happening.
America "doing its own thing" in pretty much every field is the root of this and many other similar problems.
The cost is no longer the panels; it's the installation. Panels are dirt cheap in bulk.
When talking about solar prices, it's important to make a distinction between home installs and grid-scale installs. The latter in the US is now averaging around $1,50 per kW, and some installs are coming in around $1 per kW. Which is crazy-cheap, even taking into account the capacity factor.
i am not sure its that simple, Apple (also others) trasfer their IP's to a subsidiary in a tax shelter, then all the profit from local (country) sales is paid to the subsidiary that Holds the IP and is thus prevented from being taxed in the country of sale.
How does having your IP in a tax shelter affect your sales in a country that's not a tax shelter, and thus will tax your operations there?
They shouldn't get a "tax break", because there shouldn't be a tax on foreign profits to begin with, as in almost all of the rest of the world. You pay taxes on where you're operating..... unless, for some strange reason, if you're headquartered in America.
It's a symptom of the US's weird system of taxation. In most countries, profits earned from your overseas business is taxed overseas, while profit earned locally is taxed locally; it doesn't matter where you're headquartered. But the US demands taxes from US-headquartered companies' overseas business as well (after deducting what they pay locally). So this inherently creates a motive for moving headquarters out of the US (which the US has tried all sorts of means to stop). However, the money from their overseas business is only taxed when it comes back to the US, so it's also encouragement for them to keep the money overseas and invest in overseas business.
The US also does the same thing with personal income taxes. Eritrea is the only other country in the world that does that.
The world would be a lot simpler if the US decided to stop doing everything different from everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
You have your computer set up to have 24/7 read-write access to your backup system?
Yeah, not a good plan.
If you have an already-hardened "leading edge" to push off of, including a "downtime", I would not call that "simultaneous". Boring Company is seeking to achieve continuous movement, including the "regular maintenance". As for the details of "how", we'll have to wait. There's no shortage of different ways that concrete can be laid; precast segments carried in and placed is hardly the only one. I'd bet (based on no evidence whatsoever) that they're looking to cast it in place, and push off not some sort of leading edge, but an annular anchor against the hardened concrete further back (e.g. steel ring, pneumatically expanded to fill the tunnel, high traction material on the exterior)
Did that video look like an 8m dia tunnel to you? Part of the whole point is achieving smaller tunnels with the same throughput by automated vehicles moving at high speeds. All tunneling will encounter varying problems with the geology, but the smaller diameter the tunnel, the cheaper it is.
Diameter is not about tunneling speed. Diameter is about tunneling cost. Smaller TBM, smaller amount of material moved, smaller casing, etc, etc.
Speed is an entirely different factor that they're trying to simultaneously improve.
And that's just the problem: "continuously being optimized". Boring Company, like everything else Musk has ever touched, is not about "continuous optimization". It's about breaking entirely with how things are traditionally done to achieve big leaps. The rocket industry had been "continuously optimized". Automobiles had been "continuously optimized". Etc. "Continuous optimization" is great, but you need to break "this is how things are done" paradigms every now and then.
There's no guarantees of success in doing so, but it's very important to try. And if you try enough paradigm breaks on a given topic, at least a few will stick, even if the others don't pan out.
Which would be a meaningful statement if anything about the Boring Company was based on the premise of geology becoming easier to work with.
Reminds me of all of the rocketry people calling Musk out as full of shit on rocketry and all of the car people calling him out as full of shit on Tesla. There even was a blog, "Tesla Deathwatch" out there, counting down the days until Tesla inevitably went under.
If you want your arguments to bear more weight, you need to actually argue against things that the Boring Company is actually doing. For example, argue that all else being equal, narrower tunnels are not cheaper than higher diameter tunnels. Or you need to find out what alternative approach to casing they're actually planning to use, or the approach they're planning to use to reduce cutting head downtime, and so forth and argue against *those,*, rather than insisting that "anything that's not the same as we do it now is impossible". Otherwise, you're just going to come across looking like all of the rocket and car people a decade ago.
The ability to travel where you want, when you want, at minimal sacrifice, is otherwise known as "quality of life".
And I will always be opposed to people whose "solutions" involve sacrifices to quality of life, as will most people in the world.
It's not really that simple. There's a lot of design decisions that factor strongly into how much noise an aircraft makes - for example, greater rotor area means more air moving at lower speeds. Smaller props for a given rotor area mean lower tip speeds. Greater numbers of blades increases the frequency of noise and thus its atmospheric attenuation. The surface and shape of the foils can have an effect on noise. Ducts can cause the same effect as larger props (increased air mass at lower speed). Any sort of properly designed cowling can reduce noise. Reduced blade thickness (aka, stronger materials, which we get all the time) reduces noise. And on and on. And there's lots of new techniques being investigated for noise reduction - asymmetrical spacing of blade pairs (makes it so that the blades don't pass through previous blades' vortices at perfect intervals), sound canceling, etc.
Also, I don't know of any "flying car" proponent who is proposing that people take off from their driveways - the concept is small urban/suburban helipads. You still need noise reduction, but not that degree of noise reduction.
Not with computer-controlled spacing between sleds and 125 mph travel speeds.
By dramatically increasing the throughput per lane, and the necessary width of the lane (a typical lane is much wider than a car because people drift), and the need for shoulders, the tunnel diameter can be significantly shrunk for the same throughput. Half the diameter and you quarter the cross sectional area. Boring costs scale linearly with cross sectional area.
Hence one of the publicly disclosed parts of the idea behind Boring Company.
He also plans to bore faster, but not all of the details have come out on this yet. One has, however, which is simultaneous casing and boring, rather than bore/stop/case. There's a number of changes to the head that they're looking to make, but they haven't been discussed yet. Regardless, even if none of the latter pan out, simply reducing tunnel radii for a given amount of vehicle throughput is a pretty straightforward way to reduce tunneling costs.
ISS is not designed to operate out of LEO. There are plans to build a new station around the moon (in a rather curious orbit). NASA wants it to be effectively a Mars spaceship, just parked around the moon, while the Russians want it to be a permanent fixture around the moon. So the plan appears to be to develop it so that a "Mars spaceship" portion can undock from the rest at an arbitrary future date.
Who knows how far along the design and development will actually get.
As for buyers... great if you can find them, and sure, get whatever money out of it that you can. But let's not fall for the sunk cost fallacy here. In a way, building an ambitious space project is akin to buying a computer. It may be the shiniest sleekest piece of modern technology when you make it, and it serves your purposes, but it's quickly rendered obsolete by advancing technology. ISS is increasingly obsolete, with modern technology allowing for structures that are lighter, more maintainable, and more capable for a given cost. For example, compare ATK Megaflex or Ultraflex to the ISS's solar arrays. Furthermore, part of the whole point of building such things is to advance technology. You don't advance technology by continuing to use old technology and just incrementally improving it. That may be the best option for a period of time, but eventually you need to start over with a new design that incorporates the knowledge accrued since your last design.
Curious how women and children are seen as a resource to you, equivalent to money, land, water, and other resources.
Rather than, you know, human beings.
Every time you try something radical it's a toss of the dice. Musk's successes don't mean that everything he does will be successful. I generally am in agreement with the logic processes that lead him to each approach he wants to try to revolutionize new industries (it's generally just looking at them as a ruthless optimization problem, requiring as few new technologies as possible - for example, with the Boring Company: tunnel costs are roughly linearly proportional to boring cross section, while diameter is constrained by number of lanes, space per lane (which is much higher than the width of a car), shoulder/pulloff space, etc. So have cars ride on automated sleds to reduce space per lane, move them very fast to increase throughput and thus reduce the number of lanes (while simultaneously cutting travel times), cut the tunnel width in half, and you're cutting the boring cost by 75%, at the cost of having to engineer and build sleds; combine that with simultaneous casing rather than bore/stop/case, borehead improvements, etc, and push it down further if you can). But there's always a gamble with everything he does, and there can always be failure. Past success is no guarantee of future success.
ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. Now, to be fair to them, there has been a lot of low level research in the past several decades, and attempts to improve the technology seem to have been going well. And it's also understandable that they'd want to move away from aluminum to composites - the strength to weight ratios are far higher, and strength to weight is everything when it comes to high payload fraction rockets. But it's a risky endeavour.
To get costs down as far as they want requires revolutionizing everything, from the pad to range services to telemetry to thermal protection to the state of the art on reentry design and so on down the line. They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance (although their initial signs on that front are promising - your biggest concerns are erosion, and they're reporting that with the new alloys they're using erosion appears to be minimal). The scale of the challenge they're taking on with this one is much bigger than that they took on when founding SpaceX, or Solar City, or Tesla - and I'd argue bigger than Hyperloop and the Boring Company as well (although not as extreme as what they're taking on with Neuralink). Expect long timescales. Expect glorious, pad-destroying failures. Expect initial prices much higher than their ultimate goal, and long periods of time to get them down. And to fund it, their satellite venture is going to have to play out. Which it probably will (improving communications and satellite technology has thrown this opportunity in their laps - Blue Origin is trying for a piece of the potentially massive market as well), but it's another case of breaking-new-ground which throws another risk into the process.
But kudos to them for trying. With everything, really.
The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:
1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and
2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.
It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).
It's also a lot heavier than an equivalent craft built today would be, which means a heavier transfer stage. Solar power systems for example are approaching an order of magnitude better power density than the ISS's solar arrays.
That's not the only problem. When you hack only one candidate's campaign but not the other, and then search through reems of data in the one hacked candidate to pick out the "juicy bits" (particularly if you slowly drip them out in out in order to dominate the news cycle every day, but even if you just dump them all at once), you're going to inherently bias the results. Because among the hundreds of thousands of emails generated by a campaign, there's always going to be some "gotchas!" (you could dig through anyone's email history and find things to attack them with, let alone an entire national campaign generating a huge amount of email traffic). If you only release them for one side, you're highly skewing the contest. And you're doing so via committing a crime. And it's all the worse if it's a foreign power, doing so, via a crime, in order to achieve their geopolitical objectives (but it's still bad even if it's domestic).
Yes, but do you have any rock crushers to sell me? Because what I really want is BEST QUALITY CHINA ROCK CRUSHER 50 TONNE BUY GOOD PRICE. Do you have any BEST QUALITY CHINA ROCK CRUSHER 50 TONNE BUY GOOD PRICE for sale?
I was about to make a joke about your mixed metaphor "horse in this fight", only to discover that horse fighting is apparently a real thing.
And it makes sense to tax them for their exhaust. But taxing them for "mileage" reflects a fundamental failure to understand how rockets work. They could at least tax them for delta-V, although that's still not as logical as taxing them for what they actually emit in the state.
Distance in orbit is equivalent to time standing still on the ground - in that you're sitting there doing nothing. A proposal to tax distance is equivalent to proposing to tax truckers based on how many seconds they spend in California, even if they're not actually driving their truck for 99% of that time. It's even worse because higher energy orbits move slower relative to the ground, and geosynchronous almost stand still. Which would be taxing higher energy orbits lower than low energy orbits.
On the other hand, one comment from the article sounds like they want to tax rockets on altitude, not distance - they say that all unknown / classified rockets will be taxed at 310 miles. No clue whether they're talking perigee or apogee here. Or whether they take into account elliptical orbits, and if so how. Or accounting for the fact that polar orbits take more energy to launch to than equatorial. Or whether they account for the extra energy if they have to dogleg to match orbits with something else. If they have a fixed tax for mile of apogee, I can't imagine what a launch to Mars would cost. And what's the tax on something launched on a solar system escape trajectory - infinite?
We're not talking about server farms, we're talking about connections for every home and business at up to 1Gbps. People can have whatever they want on the ground, but ultimately, to get to end users it's going to go through the constellation.
Yes, countries will have the option to not take up "100% net connectivity for your citizens at fiber speeds and low cost". For some reason, I don't think there's going to be many countries refusing that.
You're not broadcasting the same data across the entire region that a satellite covers; each narrow beam to each end user is steered (via phased array, on the satellite end) to their specific location. Now of course the beam isn't some perfectly collimated signal, but it doesn't need to be; there's dozens of channels on the satellite.
And the big thing for SpaceX, is that by ensuring a continuous market for large numbers of launches, they can ensure economies of scale for launches as well. Which gets launch costs even lower.
I couldn't possibly wish them more luck in succeeding with this project.
Indeed. It's a phased-array antenna. It'll look like a flat sheet of individual printed mini-antennas. Switching satellites will be basically instant. With phased array you can even allocate varying fractions of a single dish to multiple satellites at once.
And as was noted, latency will be low, as this is a LEO constellation, not GEO. LEO isn't actually very high up. In many cases latency will be lower than with ground networks - fewer hops, no getting routed through particularly out-of-the-way locations, etc.
This is a big gamble on SpaceX's part, but while very difficult, there's no fundamental barriers. If they succeed, the revenue potential is almost unthinkably large - they could become the entire planet's ISP. It would be very difficult for ground-based networks to compete, due to all of the fibre you'd have to lay, versus how little SpaceX's launch costs per satellite are. SpaceX might have competition, however - Blue Origin appears to be pursuing the exact same sort of plan as well. Honestly, I'd just be ignoring Blue Origin (don't care much for the way they approach most things), if not for how wealthy the guy backing the company is and how much in love with the project he seems to be.
Profit shifting doesn't undercut anything written above. An inability to write a post without resorting to playground insults, however, does undercut your credibility.
Profit shifting is a problem actively being tackled by the G20. It is not an excuse to have one country operating by entirely different taxation means than the rest of the world, a system that doesn't prevent BEPS but does introduce brand new headaches, both for itself and for the rest of the world.
Yes, there have been.
2002: Law establishing DHS bans it from contracting with inverted companies.
2004: Companies are outright banned from inverting. More and more, respond to the law by instead merging with foreign companies and adopting the new company's headquarters during the merger.
2014: Treasury department tries to crack down on merger inversions with harsher merger rules. Ironically, merger inversions accelerate.
2015: Stricter rules yet again.
2016: Stricter rules yet again - this time, at least, derailing the high profile Pfizer inversion merger attempt that was underway.
"Loopholes" don't create tax havens. Countries that want to be tax havens create tax havens. Loopholes are an entirely different (also largely American) problem, in that huge tax deductions are given for a wide range of purposes. Some industries are very good at claiming them, making their effective tax rate much lower than those which don't. While US corporate tax rates are very high by global standards, effective tax paid is lower than the OECD average because of such deductions.
America "doing its own thing" in pretty much every field is the root of this and many other similar problems.
That should read $1/W, not kW. Shuold porffraed bettre.
The cost is no longer the panels; it's the installation. Panels are dirt cheap in bulk.
When talking about solar prices, it's important to make a distinction between home installs and grid-scale installs. The latter in the US is now averaging around $1,50 per kW, and some installs are coming in around $1 per kW. Which is crazy-cheap, even taking into account the capacity factor.
How does having your IP in a tax shelter affect your sales in a country that's not a tax shelter, and thus will tax your operations there?
They shouldn't get a "tax break", because there shouldn't be a tax on foreign profits to begin with, as in almost all of the rest of the world. You pay taxes on where you're operating. .... unless, for some strange reason, if you're headquartered in America.
It's a symptom of the US's weird system of taxation. In most countries, profits earned from your overseas business is taxed overseas, while profit earned locally is taxed locally; it doesn't matter where you're headquartered. But the US demands taxes from US-headquartered companies' overseas business as well (after deducting what they pay locally). So this inherently creates a motive for moving headquarters out of the US (which the US has tried all sorts of means to stop). However, the money from their overseas business is only taxed when it comes back to the US, so it's also encouragement for them to keep the money overseas and invest in overseas business.
The US also does the same thing with personal income taxes. Eritrea is the only other country in the world that does that.
The world would be a lot simpler if the US decided to stop doing everything different from everyone else.
You seem to be of the impression that people are talking about the surface of Venus.