Uber will pay Waymo a 0.34 percent equity stake amounting to about $245 million at Uber's recent $72 billion valuation, the companies said on Friday, after days of courtroom theatrics.
Uber worth $72 billion? For a privately held company that had a loss of $3.8 billion on revenue of $6.5 billion? For a business with limited economies of scale? (providing twice as many rides does not result in major cost savings) Anyone who actually believes Uber is worth that much is a weapons grade idiot. It's like the dotcom boom all over again.
Basically they arrive at a "$72 billion valuation" by someone buying a portion of the company and then extrapolating what that person thinks it is worth. So if I buy 1% of a company for $1 million I'm effectively valuing the company at $100 million. Doesn't mean it is actually worth that because you have to consider the winners curse. Just because someone is willing to overpay doesn't mean others will.
If nothing else, this shows Elon knows nothing about mainframe computers.
I think that comment says more about you than it does about Elon. Do you seriously think Elon doesn't get that it's an imperfect analogy used to make a rhetorical point?
1) more engines is more parts, which is generally a recipe for more failures
Only if you hold everything else in the system constant which is clearly not the case in most real world systems. To use a car example, modern cars have a LOT more parts in them than cars from 40 years ago but they also are demonstrably more reliable. Same with jet engines. Modern ones are more complex and with (usually) more parts but they also are more reliable. The relationship between number of parts and reliability is not a simple linear one. Many of those added parts actually contribute to the reliability of the overall system.
No! There are two extreme cases. One, where the probability of total system failure is the sum of the probabilities of failure of components (bad), the other where it is the product (good) 1% chance of failure + 1% chance of failure = 2% chance of total failure
You can't sum chance of failure like that. That's not how the math of it works. (think about it - if you take that to it's logical conclusion with 200 failure modes each at 1% chance of failure you can end up with a >100% chance of failure which isn't possible) First you have to determine whether the failure modes are genuinely independent or not. But even if you have two completely independent failure modes with a 1% chance of Failure A and a 1% chance of Failure B, the total chance of Failure is NOT F(A)+F(B) = 2% because there is a probability of both failure occurring simultaneously so the real probability will be less than 2%.
1% chance of failure * 1% chance of failure = %0.01 chance of total failure
It doesn't work like that either unless those failure modes are such that both have to occur for a failure to occur.
Use any definition other than "pattern recognition" and we don't have it.
So me any form of intelligence that isn't some form of pattern recognition. Hell the entire field of physics and every other science is simply the act of observing patterns and building a model to describe them that has predictive value. At it's most basic form that is just sophisticated pattern recognition.
Low skill labor is still going to be at risk of being automated away, especially as sensors and robotics continue to improve as well.
Probably not to the degree you imply. The reason is simple economics. Automation is in most cases expensive and if you actually do the financial analysis (which I do for a living FYI) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to automate most jobs to such a degree that low skill labor becomes unnecessary. Automation is used in high volume or high content value or high risk jobs. While automation has gotten and will continue to get cheaper, it's unlikely to reach such a low price point that it pushes people out of the work force entirely within the lifetime of anyone reading this. To do that you would have to have near human level intelligence AI that you can sell for less money per unit than a human costs. That is a FAR more difficult goal to reach than most people realize. People are flexible and for low production volumes or ill defined tasks rather inexpensive.
Not a lot of people are interested in automating "ordinary human activities" but they are very interested in automating very specialized activities.
People are VERY interested in automating "ordinary human activities" but automation != AI outside of very specialized niches. A dishwashing machine is automation of an ordinary human activity but it is decidedly not AI. It's not clear what you actually mean by "ordinary human activities" but humans have been automating those since there were humans.
These activities include assembling objects, inspecting objects, moving a vehicle loaded with goods to a destination and estimating risk in the stock market. These aren't ordinary human activities but they'll put half the country out of work.
No it would decidedly not put half the country out of work. First off actually assembling objects does not require the device to be intelligent in the sense of AI. Automation != AI and the two concepts are orthogonal for purposes of most assembly work. Second, the percentage of people doing assembly work in manufacturing in the US is no where close to half the work force. 10-20% tops. I am GM for a company that does this sort of work. Third, automation is EXPENSIVE and you have to do a relatively high volume of work to justify the expense of automation over people. That's not going to change any time soon.
AI isn't going to put transport workers out of jobs anytime soon either. When goods get delivered exactly how do you think they are going to get loaded and unloaded from the truck? Even if the worker isn't driving they aren't going to send goods to their destination without someone to watch over them and facilitate the transaction any time soon. It's not as if UPS is going to be able to magically make packages appear on your door step by teleporting them from the truck.
Estimating risk in the stock market? No that won't take humans out of the loop any time soon either.
We don't have AI, in any form, in the modern world.
Not true at all unless you are narrowing the definition of AI to such a narrow degree as to make it effectively meaningless.
We have nothing even approaching "artificial intelligence," which at the very minimum of the bar would be the level of an "intelligent" Human
Nonsense. Dogs do not as a general proposition approach human level intelligence. Yet do have real and measurable intelligence. A computer with the intelligence of a dog could very fairly be described as intelligent. AI does not have to pass human intellect be classified as intelligence or to be useful.
The problem is that knowledge changes and articles summarizing that knowledge become out of date.
That's true even for primary research. Just because it is primary data doesn't mean that it is actually correct or up to date.
The solution is to change the summation of that knowledge to reflect the current knowledge.
Not with regards to citations it isn't. For citations to be valuable you have to be able to understand the exact context and data they are referencing. A citation that points to a source that can change for ANY reason is effectively useless.
Are you actually stating that we're better off with a world of outdated knowledge?!
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. I'm stating that citations need to be able to point to the exact data/text being cited at the time it was cited. The ultimate accuracy of the data being cited is of no concern here.
You don't cite second-hand hearsay, highly editorialized summaries or quotations of quotations, you go to the actual research article.
Not that simple. It's ok to cite secondary sources (including opinion pieces or editorials) as long as it is made clear that that is what it is and provided that the secondary source cannot change in the future. Primary sources are preferred for obvious reasons but there are sometimes good/useful reasons to cite secondary sources. The biggest problem with citing something like Wikipedia is that there is no straightforward way to cite the specific revision of an article. Citations simply need to be able to unambiguously and reliably point to the exact data/text being cited. You can cite a paper article because there is no chance of it being changed in the future and there is a reasonable chance of it being accessible in the future. This is true even for opinion pieces. Primary sources are to be strongly preferred but it's foolish to categorically refuse to use secondary sources as long as they can be reliably referenced.
The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct.
Even if it couldn't be changed there still would be no guarantee that the information is correct. Correctness isn't the issue for citations and citations make no assurance that the data being cited is correct. Things get cited all the time that either aren't or are later determined to be incorrect. The problem is that because it can be changed there is no way to ensure traceability of the specific version of reference. If it is printed in a magazine you can see exactly the text cited. With a web page that can be changed any time with no version tracking it is impossible to know what data was cited.
If Wikipedia had some reliable way to reference a specific version an article being cited then it would be reasonable to cite Wikipedia. You just have to be able to unambiguously identify the specific text being cited. It's not a primary reference but there is nothing inherently wrong with citing non-primary sources as long as you can look up exactly the data being cited later on.
But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it.
Oh they'll admit it. They just don't cite it. There is nothing wrong with that. My wife could fairly be described as a scientist and she has several peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters to her name. She uses Wikipedia (and will freely admit as much) as a way to get her bearings on a topic she isn't deeply familiar with. Then if needed she jumps off to primary data or more authoritative sources when she needs to go deeper. She's under no illusion about the fact that Wikipedia isn't always reliable but it's certainly useful in many circumstances.
Encyclopedias have value even to subject matter experts because nobody is an expert in everything. If you need a quick primer on a topic Wikipedia can be a great place to start. No it won't and shouldn't be cited as a reference but it's a useful tool to avoid repeating the task of getting an overview on a topic.
Good for you, but I'm more than happy to connect my vulnerable TCL to my home network.
And just how confident are you that your home network is some impregnable fortress? Unless you are an anal retentive network security professional I'm dubious you have it locked down tight.
but there's nothing you can do with my TV that concerns me.
If you honestly believe that then you don't understand the problem or what some clever asshat might do with it.
A) That will never happen in any meaningful scale. B) A better thing to do is to simply not connect the device to a network if you don't have a compelling need to do so. Can't be hacked if it can't be reached. C) Another better thing to do is for some enterprising lawyer(s) to sue them until they get the message. EULA be damned lawsuits will cost them money even if they win so eventually it becomes cheaper to actually provide real security. D) EULA that you don't agree to prior to purchase are on thin legal ground. There is plenty of precedent for holding such agreements invalid when they cannot be examined prior to handing over money. Expecting someone to bear the cost of returning a large TV is arguably unreasonable when the terms of purchase/use weren't available prior to purchase.
Why go pubic? you need a viable business plan and other annoyances like profits and disclosure to do that.
You demonstrably do NOT need a viable business plan. Just the ability to convince others that your plan is viable. There are plenty of companies that go public without profits too.
It's much more comfy to be bank rolled by VCs and stay in dreamland.
"Comfy"? I'm guessing you have never dealt with VCs. Working with them is anything but comfy. And it typically is a VC that pushes the company to go public (or to be bought out) because that is where a VC makes their profit. VCs are rarely long term investors. They generally demand a return on their investment within a period of a few years and the return they demand is not a small one.
Going public is expensive, and there is unlimited liability for a company’s owners.
Yes it is expensive but no there is decidedly not unlimited liability for company owners. The ENTIRE point of incorporation is to limit liability to a company's owners. If you own shares in a company you are an owner of the company and I assure you that you do not have unlimited liability. There are some limited circumstances where the corporate veil can be breached but these are the exception and difficult to litigate (though not for lack of trying).
Public companies may have an easier time raising large amounts of capital by selling securities.
Sometimes but it depends on the company and its circumstances. It's not unusual for companies to be able to raise large amounts of capital without needing to go public. The stock markets are not the only and often not the best source of capital. Equity capital is generally very expensive compared to alternatives. Cost of capital for loans (bonds) is generally less. Eventually if companies get big enough they are often forced to go public by law but no company wants to go public unless they have to. It brings a lot of administrative burden and distraction to management, not to mention cost.
Investors are more likely to invest in a public company because there is less risk and more potential to reap large rewards.
"Less risk"? In what parallel universe is that true? There is zero difference in the amount of risk to an investor. Nor does being publicly traded grant any special ability to garner large profits. That can be done with or without being publicly traded. Small investors are more likely to invest in a public company because they don't have the option to invest in private ones as a general proposition. But large investors aren't restricted to the public markets.
Public companies can return to the stock market and raise more capital via a secondary stock offering or by issuing a bond.
Private companies do the exact same thing. They just don't do it in a public market. You do not need a stock market to sell shares in the company nor do you need one to take out a loan (a bond).
You sound like you have never worked in the space industry. You cannot make a 50K payload that does anything useful.
I call bullshit. You can get the components to build a microsat for $25K so you absolutely could design something to do some task more useful than being dead weight for under $50K. But even if it cost 5X that much it still would be a bargain and much more useful than launching a fracking car. And it certainly wouldn't cost SpaceX a thin dime more than what they are already doing.
Oh and FYI in my day job I am the lead engineer and GM for a company that has made equipment that has been sent into space to the ISS.
Active payload is designed and tested like you wouldn't believe and this alone costs oodles of money.
That is for something that is expected to be reliable. Not necessary to test something to have absurd levels of reliability and safety in this circumstance. It will be lucky to even make it to orbit. The usual expectations don't apply here. You merely would have to do some rudimentary checking to ensure it wouldn't screw up the primary mission (testing the launch vehicle) which doesn't need to cost vast sums.
The fact that you say it shouldn't be a hard problem to come up with a sub 50K payload for any scientist proves to pretty much anyone who has worked in the space industry that you are clueless when it comes to payload development.
You sound like someone who works for a cost+ contractor who cannot imagine that things can be done for less than millions of dollars. I don't have a doubt in my mind that someone could develop some sort of payload to do something scientifically interesting for less money than a luxury car.
You need something sufficiently heavy that someone would be willing to sacrifice.
Yes and? I'm pretty sure that's not a hard problem to solve. Just ask literally every professor on earth for their best proposal. Pretty sure someone can come up with something that would fit the mission parameters and be more useful than dead weight.
Or do you have any payload costing less than several millions (or alternatively are you willing to take the risk of losing more than several millions) and weighing at least two tonnes or so to in order to match the conditions for the planned FH missions? I'm pretty sure SpaceX would have been able to accommodate you if you paid for it.
Why would SpaceX need to charge for it? Especially given the risk of KABOOM? Right now it's just a cost to them to even put dead weight on it. You think that Elon's car was free? It's a sunk cost so it costs SpaceX nothing to put something other than dead weight in place as long as they don't foot the bill. They would be no worse off if they offered to launch something for free to anyone willing to take the risk.
Testing a launch vehicle that is supposed to launch billion dollar payloads in the future before you put said billion dollar payloads on top of it is not "waste" or "a dumb stunt" or "nonsense", it's the reasonable thing to do.
Who said the payload has to cost a billion dollars? Launch something of equal or lesser value than the car with any amount of scientific utility and you have a net gain. I'm pretty sure we can design a payload that costs very little and still has more utility than dead weight.
They aren't "wasting a launch", they are testing a rocket.
Those are orthogonal concepts. You can both waste a launch and test a rocket in the same launch. And that is what they are doing here. So what if the chance of it going BOOM is higher than you want for a pricey satellite? Launch something cheap that you don't care so much if you lose it.
You don't send up a useful payload in a test launch, because it might fail, and useful payloads cost orders of magnitudes more than a $50K used car.
So design a useful payload that costs less than $50K. That shouldn't be a hard problem for a scientist worthy of their PhD. Are you seriously arguing that anything we could design for under the cost of a Tesla car that would have less utility than dead weight?
i.e. this is just a very minor publicity stunt, there are more important things to get angry about.
Who is angry? Just pointing out that it is an opportunity wasted is all.
Useful things that you put on rockets typically are also things that you don't want to explode.
Only if you have an extremely narrow definition of useful. Are you seriously arguing that there is absolutely nothing we couldn't put in the payload bay with more utility than dead weight? Nothing? No simple experiment or device?
No I'm not buying that argument. It doesn't have to be a muilti-million dollar satellite to or probe to be useful.
There is no communication or science satellite that's so "off the shelf" that it's reasonable to launch it & shrug when it is blown to hell. We don't have them just laying around waiting to be launched.
That doesn't mean we couldn't design something that is cheap and useful. I have a hard time believing that there is absolutely nothing useful we could come up with to launch that is less useful than dead weight.
Nobody risks a satellite (which almost always is much more expensive than the rocket that launches it) on the very first launch of a new rocket.
So put some sort of cheap but heavy scientific instrument on board instead. I fail to see the utility in launching dead weight when we could do something useful instead. I'm sure some clever scientist could come up with an experiment that is cheap, useful, and we don't care if it blows up. The risk is understood so you design the payload accordingly.
So launching a car is fun and all but why not use the launch for some sort of useful scientific instrument instead? Something that might not otherwise get into orbit and do it gratis. Doesn't have to be anything sophisticated or expensive. Sure it might blow up and whoever built the instrument will need to understand that going in but then we aren't wasting a launch on something that even Elon will admit is ridiculous. Is there nothing that weighs a ton that could do something useful if it makes it into space and that we can live with losing if it all goes tits up?
Slashdot Mirror
Uber will pay Waymo a 0.34 percent equity stake amounting to about $245 million at Uber's recent $72 billion valuation, the companies said on Friday, after days of courtroom theatrics.
Uber worth $72 billion? For a privately held company that had a loss of $3.8 billion on revenue of $6.5 billion? For a business with limited economies of scale? (providing twice as many rides does not result in major cost savings) Anyone who actually believes Uber is worth that much is a weapons grade idiot. It's like the dotcom boom all over again.
Basically they arrive at a "$72 billion valuation" by someone buying a portion of the company and then extrapolating what that person thinks it is worth. So if I buy 1% of a company for $1 million I'm effectively valuing the company at $100 million. Doesn't mean it is actually worth that because you have to consider the winners curse. Just because someone is willing to overpay doesn't mean others will.
If nothing else, this shows Elon knows nothing about mainframe computers.
I think that comment says more about you than it does about Elon. Do you seriously think Elon doesn't get that it's an imperfect analogy used to make a rhetorical point?
1) more engines is more parts, which is generally a recipe for more failures
Only if you hold everything else in the system constant which is clearly not the case in most real world systems. To use a car example, modern cars have a LOT more parts in them than cars from 40 years ago but they also are demonstrably more reliable. Same with jet engines. Modern ones are more complex and with (usually) more parts but they also are more reliable. The relationship between number of parts and reliability is not a simple linear one. Many of those added parts actually contribute to the reliability of the overall system.
No! There are two extreme cases. One, where the probability of total system failure is the sum of the probabilities of failure of components (bad), the other where it is the product (good) 1% chance of failure + 1% chance of failure = 2% chance of total failure
You can't sum chance of failure like that. That's not how the math of it works. (think about it - if you take that to it's logical conclusion with 200 failure modes each at 1% chance of failure you can end up with a >100% chance of failure which isn't possible) First you have to determine whether the failure modes are genuinely independent or not. But even if you have two completely independent failure modes with a 1% chance of Failure A and a 1% chance of Failure B, the total chance of Failure is NOT F(A)+F(B) = 2% because there is a probability of both failure occurring simultaneously so the real probability will be less than 2%.
1% chance of failure * 1% chance of failure = %0.01 chance of total failure
It doesn't work like that either unless those failure modes are such that both have to occur for a failure to occur.
Friendly reminder, millenials aren't kids anymore.
Yes they are. Get off my lawn!
Use any definition other than "pattern recognition" and we don't have it.
So me any form of intelligence that isn't some form of pattern recognition. Hell the entire field of physics and every other science is simply the act of observing patterns and building a model to describe them that has predictive value. At it's most basic form that is just sophisticated pattern recognition.
Low skill labor is still going to be at risk of being automated away, especially as sensors and robotics continue to improve as well.
Probably not to the degree you imply. The reason is simple economics. Automation is in most cases expensive and if you actually do the financial analysis (which I do for a living FYI) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to automate most jobs to such a degree that low skill labor becomes unnecessary. Automation is used in high volume or high content value or high risk jobs. While automation has gotten and will continue to get cheaper, it's unlikely to reach such a low price point that it pushes people out of the work force entirely within the lifetime of anyone reading this. To do that you would have to have near human level intelligence AI that you can sell for less money per unit than a human costs. That is a FAR more difficult goal to reach than most people realize. People are flexible and for low production volumes or ill defined tasks rather inexpensive.
Not a lot of people are interested in automating "ordinary human activities" but they are very interested in automating very specialized activities.
People are VERY interested in automating "ordinary human activities" but automation != AI outside of very specialized niches. A dishwashing machine is automation of an ordinary human activity but it is decidedly not AI. It's not clear what you actually mean by "ordinary human activities" but humans have been automating those since there were humans.
These activities include assembling objects, inspecting objects, moving a vehicle loaded with goods to a destination and estimating risk in the stock market. These aren't ordinary human activities but they'll put half the country out of work.
No it would decidedly not put half the country out of work. First off actually assembling objects does not require the device to be intelligent in the sense of AI. Automation != AI and the two concepts are orthogonal for purposes of most assembly work. Second, the percentage of people doing assembly work in manufacturing in the US is no where close to half the work force. 10-20% tops. I am GM for a company that does this sort of work. Third, automation is EXPENSIVE and you have to do a relatively high volume of work to justify the expense of automation over people. That's not going to change any time soon.
AI isn't going to put transport workers out of jobs anytime soon either. When goods get delivered exactly how do you think they are going to get loaded and unloaded from the truck? Even if the worker isn't driving they aren't going to send goods to their destination without someone to watch over them and facilitate the transaction any time soon. It's not as if UPS is going to be able to magically make packages appear on your door step by teleporting them from the truck.
Estimating risk in the stock market? No that won't take humans out of the loop any time soon either.
We don't have AI, in any form, in the modern world.
Not true at all unless you are narrowing the definition of AI to such a narrow degree as to make it effectively meaningless.
We have nothing even approaching "artificial intelligence," which at the very minimum of the bar would be the level of an "intelligent" Human
Nonsense. Dogs do not as a general proposition approach human level intelligence. Yet do have real and measurable intelligence. A computer with the intelligence of a dog could very fairly be described as intelligent. AI does not have to pass human intellect be classified as intelligence or to be useful.
The problem is that knowledge changes and articles summarizing that knowledge become out of date.
That's true even for primary research. Just because it is primary data doesn't mean that it is actually correct or up to date.
The solution is to change the summation of that knowledge to reflect the current knowledge.
Not with regards to citations it isn't. For citations to be valuable you have to be able to understand the exact context and data they are referencing. A citation that points to a source that can change for ANY reason is effectively useless.
Are you actually stating that we're better off with a world of outdated knowledge?!
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. I'm stating that citations need to be able to point to the exact data/text being cited at the time it was cited. The ultimate accuracy of the data being cited is of no concern here.
You don't cite second-hand hearsay, highly editorialized summaries or quotations of quotations, you go to the actual research article.
Not that simple. It's ok to cite secondary sources (including opinion pieces or editorials) as long as it is made clear that that is what it is and provided that the secondary source cannot change in the future. Primary sources are preferred for obvious reasons but there are sometimes good/useful reasons to cite secondary sources. The biggest problem with citing something like Wikipedia is that there is no straightforward way to cite the specific revision of an article. Citations simply need to be able to unambiguously and reliably point to the exact data/text being cited. You can cite a paper article because there is no chance of it being changed in the future and there is a reasonable chance of it being accessible in the future. This is true even for opinion pieces. Primary sources are to be strongly preferred but it's foolish to categorically refuse to use secondary sources as long as they can be reliably referenced.
The issue there is that anyone can change Wikipedia, so there's no guarantee that the information there is correct.
Even if it couldn't be changed there still would be no guarantee that the information is correct. Correctness isn't the issue for citations and citations make no assurance that the data being cited is correct. Things get cited all the time that either aren't or are later determined to be incorrect. The problem is that because it can be changed there is no way to ensure traceability of the specific version of reference. If it is printed in a magazine you can see exactly the text cited. With a web page that can be changed any time with no version tracking it is impossible to know what data was cited.
If Wikipedia had some reliable way to reference a specific version an article being cited then it would be reasonable to cite Wikipedia. You just have to be able to unambiguously identify the specific text being cited. It's not a primary reference but there is nothing inherently wrong with citing non-primary sources as long as you can look up exactly the data being cited later on.
But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don't tend to admit it.
Oh they'll admit it. They just don't cite it. There is nothing wrong with that. My wife could fairly be described as a scientist and she has several peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters to her name. She uses Wikipedia (and will freely admit as much) as a way to get her bearings on a topic she isn't deeply familiar with. Then if needed she jumps off to primary data or more authoritative sources when she needs to go deeper. She's under no illusion about the fact that Wikipedia isn't always reliable but it's certainly useful in many circumstances.
Encyclopedias have value even to subject matter experts because nobody is an expert in everything. If you need a quick primer on a topic Wikipedia can be a great place to start. No it won't and shouldn't be cited as a reference but it's a useful tool to avoid repeating the task of getting an overview on a topic.
Good for you, but I'm more than happy to connect my vulnerable TCL to my home network.
And just how confident are you that your home network is some impregnable fortress? Unless you are an anal retentive network security professional I'm dubious you have it locked down tight.
but there's nothing you can do with my TV that concerns me.
If you honestly believe that then you don't understand the problem or what some clever asshat might do with it.
And I like what the Roku interface can do.
That's nice but not of concern here.
Best thing to do is return the product.
A) That will never happen in any meaningful scale.
B) A better thing to do is to simply not connect the device to a network if you don't have a compelling need to do so. Can't be hacked if it can't be reached.
C) Another better thing to do is for some enterprising lawyer(s) to sue them until they get the message. EULA be damned lawsuits will cost them money even if they win so eventually it becomes cheaper to actually provide real security.
D) EULA that you don't agree to prior to purchase are on thin legal ground. There is plenty of precedent for holding such agreements invalid when they cannot be examined prior to handing over money. Expecting someone to bear the cost of returning a large TV is arguably unreasonable when the terms of purchase/use weren't available prior to purchase.
Why go pubic? you need a viable business plan and other annoyances like profits and disclosure to do that.
You demonstrably do NOT need a viable business plan. Just the ability to convince others that your plan is viable. There are plenty of companies that go public without profits too.
It's much more comfy to be bank rolled by VCs and stay in dreamland.
"Comfy"? I'm guessing you have never dealt with VCs. Working with them is anything but comfy. And it typically is a VC that pushes the company to go public (or to be bought out) because that is where a VC makes their profit. VCs are rarely long term investors. They generally demand a return on their investment within a period of a few years and the return they demand is not a small one.
Going public is expensive, and there is unlimited liability for a company’s owners.
Yes it is expensive but no there is decidedly not unlimited liability for company owners. The ENTIRE point of incorporation is to limit liability to a company's owners. If you own shares in a company you are an owner of the company and I assure you that you do not have unlimited liability. There are some limited circumstances where the corporate veil can be breached but these are the exception and difficult to litigate (though not for lack of trying).
Public companies may have an easier time raising large amounts of capital by selling securities.
Sometimes but it depends on the company and its circumstances. It's not unusual for companies to be able to raise large amounts of capital without needing to go public. The stock markets are not the only and often not the best source of capital. Equity capital is generally very expensive compared to alternatives. Cost of capital for loans (bonds) is generally less. Eventually if companies get big enough they are often forced to go public by law but no company wants to go public unless they have to. It brings a lot of administrative burden and distraction to management, not to mention cost.
Investors are more likely to invest in a public company because there is less risk and more potential to reap large rewards.
"Less risk"? In what parallel universe is that true? There is zero difference in the amount of risk to an investor. Nor does being publicly traded grant any special ability to garner large profits. That can be done with or without being publicly traded. Small investors are more likely to invest in a public company because they don't have the option to invest in private ones as a general proposition. But large investors aren't restricted to the public markets.
Public companies can return to the stock market and raise more capital via a secondary stock offering or by issuing a bond.
Private companies do the exact same thing. They just don't do it in a public market. You do not need a stock market to sell shares in the company nor do you need one to take out a loan (a bond).
You sound like you have never worked in the space industry. You cannot make a 50K payload that does anything useful.
I call bullshit. You can get the components to build a microsat for $25K so you absolutely could design something to do some task more useful than being dead weight for under $50K. But even if it cost 5X that much it still would be a bargain and much more useful than launching a fracking car. And it certainly wouldn't cost SpaceX a thin dime more than what they are already doing.
Oh and FYI in my day job I am the lead engineer and GM for a company that has made equipment that has been sent into space to the ISS.
Active payload is designed and tested like you wouldn't believe and this alone costs oodles of money.
That is for something that is expected to be reliable. Not necessary to test something to have absurd levels of reliability and safety in this circumstance. It will be lucky to even make it to orbit. The usual expectations don't apply here. You merely would have to do some rudimentary checking to ensure it wouldn't screw up the primary mission (testing the launch vehicle) which doesn't need to cost vast sums.
The fact that you say it shouldn't be a hard problem to come up with a sub 50K payload for any scientist proves to pretty much anyone who has worked in the space industry that you are clueless when it comes to payload development.
You sound like someone who works for a cost+ contractor who cannot imagine that things can be done for less than millions of dollars. I don't have a doubt in my mind that someone could develop some sort of payload to do something scientifically interesting for less money than a luxury car.
You need something sufficiently heavy that someone would be willing to sacrifice.
Yes and? I'm pretty sure that's not a hard problem to solve. Just ask literally every professor on earth for their best proposal. Pretty sure someone can come up with something that would fit the mission parameters and be more useful than dead weight.
Or do you have any payload costing less than several millions (or alternatively are you willing to take the risk of losing more than several millions) and weighing at least two tonnes or so to in order to match the conditions for the planned FH missions? I'm pretty sure SpaceX would have been able to accommodate you if you paid for it.
Why would SpaceX need to charge for it? Especially given the risk of KABOOM? Right now it's just a cost to them to even put dead weight on it. You think that Elon's car was free? It's a sunk cost so it costs SpaceX nothing to put something other than dead weight in place as long as they don't foot the bill. They would be no worse off if they offered to launch something for free to anyone willing to take the risk.
Testing a launch vehicle that is supposed to launch billion dollar payloads in the future before you put said billion dollar payloads on top of it is not "waste" or "a dumb stunt" or "nonsense", it's the reasonable thing to do.
Who said the payload has to cost a billion dollars? Launch something of equal or lesser value than the car with any amount of scientific utility and you have a net gain. I'm pretty sure we can design a payload that costs very little and still has more utility than dead weight.
They aren't "wasting a launch", they are testing a rocket.
Those are orthogonal concepts. You can both waste a launch and test a rocket in the same launch. And that is what they are doing here. So what if the chance of it going BOOM is higher than you want for a pricey satellite? Launch something cheap that you don't care so much if you lose it.
You don't send up a useful payload in a test launch, because it might fail, and useful payloads cost orders of magnitudes more than a $50K used car.
So design a useful payload that costs less than $50K. That shouldn't be a hard problem for a scientist worthy of their PhD. Are you seriously arguing that anything we could design for under the cost of a Tesla car that would have less utility than dead weight?
i.e. this is just a very minor publicity stunt, there are more important things to get angry about.
Who is angry? Just pointing out that it is an opportunity wasted is all.
Useful things that you put on rockets typically are also things that you don't want to explode.
Only if you have an extremely narrow definition of useful. Are you seriously arguing that there is absolutely nothing we couldn't put in the payload bay with more utility than dead weight? Nothing? No simple experiment or device?
No I'm not buying that argument. It doesn't have to be a muilti-million dollar satellite to or probe to be useful.
There is no communication or science satellite that's so "off the shelf" that it's reasonable to launch it & shrug when it is blown to hell. We don't have them just laying around waiting to be launched.
That doesn't mean we couldn't design something that is cheap and useful. I have a hard time believing that there is absolutely nothing useful we could come up with to launch that is less useful than dead weight.
Nobody risks a satellite (which almost always is much more expensive than the rocket that launches it) on the very first launch of a new rocket.
So put some sort of cheap but heavy scientific instrument on board instead. I fail to see the utility in launching dead weight when we could do something useful instead. I'm sure some clever scientist could come up with an experiment that is cheap, useful, and we don't care if it blows up. The risk is understood so you design the payload accordingly.
So launching a car is fun and all but why not use the launch for some sort of useful scientific instrument instead? Something that might not otherwise get into orbit and do it gratis. Doesn't have to be anything sophisticated or expensive. Sure it might blow up and whoever built the instrument will need to understand that going in but then we aren't wasting a launch on something that even Elon will admit is ridiculous. Is there nothing that weighs a ton that could do something useful if it makes it into space and that we can live with losing if it all goes tits up?