Pretty sure the Falcon 9 Heavy was supposed to have launched for real by now. Is this animation supposed to make up for the lack of the real thing?
It will launch when it is ready to launch. Why are you fixated on whether SpaceX actually launches on or before whatever date Elon guesses? It's not as if anything terrible happens if it takes a little longer than expected. Relax. Elon guessed a (probably optimistic) date based on information available at the time. Turned out to take longer. The only people who should give even a theoretical shit are the customers of SpaceX which is pretty much nobody here.
The Democrats really need to figure out how to start winning some elections.
They need to gerrymander the way the republicans have for the last 20 years or even better, get rid of gerrymandering altogether. The party in charge on the years we do the census gets to decide how the political districts are drawn in most of the US. The republicans by happenstance or luck have won the majority in the elections during these years and so they got to draw districts largely favorable to them. Honestly they've been very clever about this and I think they caught the democrats sleeping about the importance of this.
There are other problems too of course but gerrymandering is a HUGE part of the reason the democrats struggle to win elections.
Prisons should only be used for violent people that must be separated from civilized society.
How do you propose to deal with guys like Bernie Madoff then? He robbed people of a lifetime of hard work - made it all mean nothing. Just because he didn't use violence to achieve his ends makes him no less worthy of separation from society. In a way I fear guys like him more than a thug who tries to beat me up.
For everyone else, there are more constructive punishments. For instance, Ajit could wear an ankle tracker will cleaning bedpans in nursing homes everyday for the next 10 years.
How is tracking his whereabouts going to matter? We already know where he is and it's not stopping him from being an asshat. Plus I've cleaned bedpans. While not fun work it isn't nearly awful enough. If you want to do creative punishments you need to get a lot more creative.
If you can define what that means. But that's not even what the guy is saying. He's saying ISPs shouldn't be in charge of securing customers computers or traffic.
That's fine for larger corporate customers who at least in principle should be able to manage to secure their networks. But less sophisticated customers hugely out number the sophisticated ones so there HAS to be some mechanism for helping them to keep their little network and devices secure. If this isn't the ISP then who should it be? I like the idea of smart edges and a dumb network but we cannot assume that every edge has a tech savvy sysadmin on the end of it.
If my video is taken down, that implies I broke the law.
No it does not. It simply is a reflection of someone accusing you of violating their copyright. Furthermore it appears in this case that the person who posted the video likely DID violate copyright - just not Warner Music's copyright.
That's defamation of character.
Insert eyeroll here. No it is almost certainly not defamation of character. For it to be defamation there has to be real and quantifiable damage. While possible in certain circumstances the mere act of issuing a DCMA takedown request or asserting a copyright (even when non exists) would be unlikely to result in provable harm (financial, reputational, or otherwise) to anyone in the overwhelming majority of cases. If there is no provable damage then by definition it is not defamation of character.
There are legal avenues one can take to combat frivolous copyright claims but defamation of character would be a really stupid one in most cases.
Even if it's small claims.
Small claims court is very rarely an appropriate venue for libel cases. Libel cases are difficult to prove and typically require the aid of a lawyer. Small claims courts are for small and simple contractual disputes. While it's theoretically possible to take a libel claim to small claims court it's probably a really dumb idea.
Wolves cannot live healthily without meat. There is literally no supporting evidence for your position.
Not true. We know for a demonstrated fact that wolves are not obligate carnivores which means by definition they can survive without animal protein. Wolves share strong similarities to dogs in their digestive systems. For them to live without animal protein for extended periods obviously takes careful control of their diet to accomplish and would be difficult in the wild but it can be done. There is no particular purpose to doing so but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. It's actually been done for cats which are obligate carnivores (some crazy vegans) so it's quite reasonable to believe it could be done for wolves as well.
Anyway you're kind of missing the point. Dogs and wolves are basically omnivores. If you want to call them carnivores, fine, but with the understanding that they are not obligate carnivores. They are well adapted to consume meat and evolutionarily prefer it but strictly speaking they can survive without it.
Prof Frank Kelly said that while electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tyre dust, for which the government already accepts there is no safe limit.
Sigh. Another example of perfect being the enemy of good. No solution is going to be without some drawbacks. Electric cars are CLEARLY an improvement over internal combustion engines if for no other reason than the fact that they can be powered without fossil fuels. No they don't solve everything but that's not an excuse to not move forward. We're going to be using cars for the foreseeable future so we may as well make whatever improvements we can to them. EVs and hybrids are an improvement. Let's take that step and then take the next one when we are able.
"Our cities need fewer cars, not just cleaner cars."
That's fine but probably not going to happen without some VERY substantial investments in public transit.
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century?
They didn't in much of the world. Passenger rail is alive and well.
Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
Strawman. People don't necessarily like cars better. In many parts of the US they simply don't have a choice. I've lived in cities where passenger rail was an option and it was hugely useful and I generally preferred it to driving in many cases. (traffic jams suck) Whether cars or trains are advantageous is circumstance dependent. It also depends on what infrastructure has been invested in. Trains are economically efficient for a certain set of conditions. They are widely used in Europe and Asia. Honestly I would happily ride a train to work if it were feasible where I live.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
People all around the world ride trains and airplanes and even boats on fixed schedules. Including in the US. The fact that the schedule is fixed is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially when it is as reliable as the trains in Japan. The primary advantage of cars is that they can go point to point rather than having their start and end points fixed. The lack of a schedule with cars is usually a much more minor advantage in the presence of a well functioning passenger rail system. Go to a city like NYC or Chicago and odds are you'll park the car and ride the light rail system + taxis to get around.
It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city.
Which is irrelevant regarding whether hyperloop systems would be cost efficient. A subway in one of the most densely populated cities in the world isn't really a good comparison. If you want to make a proper comparison consider the efforts to put in high speed rail in the US. A lot of land will need to be purchased and right of ways obtained. The reason passenger rail struggles in the US is precisely because 1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper and 2) population density in large parts of the country. But in places where the infrastructure exists and the population density is sufficient, like in the Northeast Corridor or in much of Europe and Japan, trains are popular and heavily used for transport.
I have my doubts that a hyperloop system will make economic sense. I suspect it will fail for much the same reason monorails never really caught on. But there may be specific cases where it makes a lot of sense so I'm withholding judgement until there is more data to work with. Worst case is that it's kind of a nifty technology that might have interesting applications down the road.
Newsflash, In the wild catching prey is hard. wolves will eat fruit and veggies as a 'desperation move' they biologically get very little nutrition out of it. this doesn't mean you should feed fido your strict vegan diet.
Who said anything about feeding a dog a vegan diet? Certainty not me. All I said is that it is a proven fact that dogs (and evidently wolves) can live healthfully without eating animal flesh if necessary. Nobody is recommending this as something anyone ought to do as a routine matter. Wolves are apparently able to do so too and some types of wolves like the Maned Wolf eat nearly 50% of their diet from plant matter. They are well evolved to live on meat but unlike cats they can actually digest plant matter and derive meaningful nutrition from it. Most dog food sold has substantial amounts of plant matter so odds are that your dog is getting a lot of their nutrients from plants. Meat is expensive so dog food manufacturers put in as much vegetation as they can get away with. Don't take my word for it, look on the ingredients label sometime.
Wolves are not dogs and dogs are not wolves. What applies to one does not necessarily apply to the other despite their shared genetic heritage. They are similar but one has to be careful of the differences which are not trivial. There is a lot of idiotic and debunked animal behavior theory based on assuming dog behavior should track closely with wolf behavior when it in actuality does not. For example a lot of pack and dominance theory ("be the alpha in your pack", etc) is demonstrably nonsense but it has held on for years based on long since debunked early studies of wolf behavior that assumed dogs = wolves.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication.
Not true. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Even wolves routinely supplement their diet with fruits and vegetables in the wild.
In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available.
Also not true. All wolf subspecies (including dogs, coyotes, dingoes) have an evolutionary preference for meat but will voluntarily eat vegetation in substantial amounts and if necessary can live without meat indefinitely. The Maned Wolf has a diet that is approximately 50% vegetation. With certain exceptions most of what you eat is also readily digestible by your dog too. Dogs are omnivores in actuality.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
While you can feed cats vegetation successfully, they are in actuality obligate carnivores. Their digestive systems are really designed to break down cellulose, they lack the proper teeth for mastication, and their metabolisms are unable to synthesize certain nutrients which are only found in animal flesh unless you are really breaking out the chemistry set. Your cat might willingly eat fruits or veggies but for the most part they aren't especially good for them. One of my cats years ago loved Doritos but it isn't something I made a diet staple for her.
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons per year. Even if we take the numbers given at face value (and we should not) that's substantially less than 1% of all CO2 emissions.
Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin.
Yeah they eat a lot of the nasty stuff we turn our noses up at. What? You thought Fluffy was getting top sirloin?
Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts.
Evidently they are unaware that while cats are obligate carnivores dogs actually are omnivores and can eat and thrive on most of the same foods you do. They prefer meat (like a lot of humans) and its and important part of their diet when available but dogs can and sometimes do live without meat just fine. Furthermore most dog food sold contains substantial amounts of grains, vegatables and even fruit. So a lot of that poop comes from plants. Pets are little different from any other animal and we are hardly stressing the earth's carrying capacity with a few million dogs.
One of the things that people forget when they complain that the iPhone isn't always on the bleeding edge is the supply chain issues. It's not that Apple cannot make a bleeding edge phone that works great. The "problem" they have is that they sell 200 million phones a year. So any feature they add to the iPhone they have to be able to source potentially 200 million copies of that hardware. For bleeding edge stuff that's often just not possible. That's not to say Apple couldn't be more aggressive than they have been but just remember the supply chain issues when you sell that many of any product.
I respectfully disagree. I think technologically we are much closer than anyone realizes.
Even if for the sake of argument I agree with you that we have some technology that could do the job sitting on the shelf today it STILL doesn't work for economic reasons. The cost to get into space is WAY too high and is likely to remain so even in spite of the efforts of SpaceX and others. Furthermore it's not enough to merely mine (which we cannot do), you also have to be able to process what you are mining. The only place we can do that at economically meaningful scale currently is back here on earth which means you have to drop rocks on earth from orbit intentionally. Dropping rocks from orbit is self evidently a terrible idea. Furthermore as long as it is cheaper to mine the same products here on earth there is no economic justification to go to the expense and risk of getting them from space even if technologically it is possible.
The reality is that we do not have the technology to economically mine in space and it's going to be many years before we get it. I very much doubt we will see economically profitable mining is space during the lifetime of anyone reading this without some sort of massive crash government program. I can conceive of it happening eventually but we're going to have to bootstrap a space economy and develop a lot of non-trivial technology first. I think the time scale for this sort of endeavor is going to be measured in decades or more probably centuries.
So a country that doesn't have a meaningful space program (though does have some space related commerce) passes a law for a hypothetical mining activity that will not take place on a commercial scale during the lifetime of anyone reading this post. Why exactly do we care? I'm as positive about going into space as anyone here but this is simply not news.
We are ridiculously far from having the technology to mine in space on an economically meaningful scale much less the ability to turn mined minerals into useful products. Not saying it will never happen nor am I saying it's a bad idea but we are a looooong way from this being a meaningful thing to worry about. Right now we have the ability to send a smallish probe and maybe bring back a few core shallow core samples or rocks at ludicrous expense per kg. We don't have any equipment or experience in refining mined materials in zero-G into useful products nor any reasonable near term prospects of getting any. Nor do we have energy sources sufficient to do so in meaningful amounts unless you plan to send a very powerful nuclear fission reactor into space of a design that we've no experience building or maintaining. We could bring back the asteroid in whole or parts and drop it onto Earth's surface which is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the fact that it is de-facto a WMD.
Space mining is a cool idea. Let's keep working on it. But perhaps touched with a tinge of realism about the timescale, economics, and technology requirements?
You have to be a special kind of asshat to call in a fake distress call to the coast guard. That isn't a "prank", that is a crime. Pranks are harmless or nearly so. A practical joke is a prank. When you endanger lives it's no longer funny or mischievous. Calling in a fake call should (and probably does) get you a lengthy stay in a federal prison.
Actually, if you're investing $350mm, you generally DO get a good way of knowing about the company you're investing in. That is - they pretty much tell you whatever you ask. You get to look at their plans, their tech, their infra, their people, etc.
I've been involved in several private equity investment deals first hand and that is demonstrably not true in many cases. I've been on both the buyer's side of the table and the seller. It depends on how the power relationships between the investor and the company sits. Sometimes the company doesn't give them nearly as much information as you would think would be appropriate. Sometimes the investor simply doesn't ask the right questions. Sometimes the investor doesn't ask enough questions. Sometimes fraud is involved. See Theranos if you need an example of most of the above. While most big dollar investors tend to do significant amounts of research they do not always do enough nor do they always do it well. This is no big secret.
If you really thing investors throw around that much money on a hunch without some realistic expectations you're naive.
I'm afraid you are the naive one here. I not only think that investors often throw around that kind of cash without appropriate due diligence, I know it for a fact and have seen innumerable cases of it. Private equity funds get money from investors and then they have to go out and find investments for that money with no guarantee that such investments are available for reasonable prices. A lot of the froth in the dotcom era was too many dollars chasing too few good opportunities. Companies got funded that had no business being funded and prices for good companies got bid up so high that a positive return on the investment was very difficult. At any given time there are a finite number of reasonably priced investments to be made and much like any other market sometimes the bidding become irrationally exuberant. Just because people have a lot of money to invest doesn't mean they are necessarily competent at doing so.
Look at it this way. 80-90% of mutual funds under perform the market average in any given year and almost none can do it for multiple years in a row. These are managed by experienced investment professionals with access to all the available information about the companies they invest in. And yet you think these people have some special advantage or insight? Big investors make stupid investments all the time. They just have to hope that some of their investments work out well enough to make up for the bad ones.
Also, if most of your investments break even and 1 in 10 is a huge hit then you are WAY ahead of the game.
I said "break even AT BEST". The at best bit is important. Many of them will lose money, sometimes a lot. Typically private equity funds will see 6-8 of their investments underwater to breakeven. 1-2 will be mild successes and if things go well, 1-2 at best will be big successes.
Welding glass filters may work - but one needs to get the right shade. "Only goggles made for electric arc welding can be used to observe the sun, and they must have a shade scale number of 12 or higher. Shade 13 is ideal for solar viewing, but that shade is typically not sold in stores, Fienberg added."
Fundamentally, and absent interference like government regulations and such, what something is worth is always going to boil down to how much people are willing to pay for it and what the supplier is willing to sell it for. This has been understood for centuries.
The value of something in an open market is not the same thing as the value to one crazy investor. Just because someone is willing to pay an unreasonable price for something does not mean that is the market value of that item to any other buyer. So saying SpaceX is the "4th most valuable private company" doesn't really mean much because there is no objective way to corroborate that the price paid was rational.
$21.2B actually seems insulting for something that is infinitely more useful, and long lasting, say, Twitter or Facebook which have also have valuations in the billion range.
Thank you for making my point. Neither you nor I have any realistic way of evaluating if this one valuation of SpaceX is reasonable. Ask 20 analysts to come up with a valuation and you'll get 20 different prices. Which one is right? Is the price paid too high or too low or about right? People overpay for investments all the time. You only know if the price paid was a reasonable one later on. You are actually arguing that SpaceX should be worth more which might be true but you are just guessing. You need a market or at least an auction with numerous informed buyers to establish a market price.
Not necessarily, but on the whole, I would expect a few private investors with a lot of money to do better than the general public on the open stock market.
Why would you assume that? They're not smarter than the general public and they don't have some special crystal ball that lets them make better than average decisions. Sometimes they have some inside information but they aren't special. In actuality private equity investors invest on a portfolio basis no different from you or me. As a rule of thumb they expect about 1 out of 10 investments it actually pay off significantly. Most of their investments are breakeven at best. They have no way of knowing if SpaceX is that special 1 of 10 that will be a home run.
Presumably the people responsible for the $351 million in funding got a good look at the value before committing the money.
Possibly but sometimes they often don't get as good a look as you might imagine. That's not a huge investment by private equity standards and it's not hard to find cases where investors did not do their due diligence. The dotcom boom around 2000 was a great example of that. I have a lot of friends who are in the private equity world and while they are smart people they are hardly dispassionate and consistently rational. They make investing mistakes same as anyone else.
Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America.
That is a nearly meaningless sentence. There is no good way to meaningfully value private companies unless they sell a piece of themselves and even then you really are only getting one party's opinion of what they are worth unlike in a proper secondary market. So hypothetically if I were to buy 5% of SpaceX for $1 billion, I am implicitly saying that I value SpaceX at $20 billion. That is basically what happened here. But that doesn't really mean it is actually worth that in the wider market because of the problem of the winner's curse. Someone ponied up a lot of money in a funding round but one has to be careful to not extrapolate that one opinion too far.
Yes a piece of welding glass works great but make sure you use at least a #14 glass per NASA recommendations. This is widely available through welding supply companies. Not all welding eye protection is adequate for looking at the Sun.
I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values, but I am aware that they shouldn't be the gold standard
It worries me when I read about people doing science who don't understand basic statistics. This is undergraduate level stuff and it's not terribly difficult to wrap your brain around. Anyone smart enough to be a professional biologist should be able to handle P-values without difficulty.
Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics.
Whether you are passionate about statistics or not is irrelevant. You are advocating mathematical illiteracy because some people aren't "passionate" about math? I'm not passionate about grammar but I recognize its importance. Please tell me how you as a purported biologist plan to conduct population studies or sampling without involving and understanding statistical methods? Do you not want to understand the papers you are putting your name on? How do you know that your conclusion makes sense if you don't understand the math used? Even top journals like Nature recognize the problem of biologists not taking statististics seriously.
There are topics in pretty much every scientific discipline that cannot be properly understood without a solid grasp of statistics. Sure if you run into a technical problem beyond your prowess at mathematics by all means go seek out the math department at your local university for help but for someone to describe themselves as a scientist without understanding something as basic as a P-value is to basically admit they are not competent at their job.
Assuming these sports don't go away completely (and they probably won't) it is incredibly useful to be able to see what difference rules changes, adjustments to protective gear, better treatment protocols, etc., will have on the players.
You don't need to wait for players to die for that. Concussions are a pretty good proxy for future cases of CTE and we can diagnose those today. And we already know for a fact that football helmets are rather useless in preventing concussions. They keep the skull intact but they do little to prevent your gelatinous brain from sloshing around inside your head during an impact. Frankly I don't see any way to reduce the incidence of CTE in football players without substantial revisions to the rules which probably will not happen in my lifetime.
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Pretty sure the Falcon 9 Heavy was supposed to have launched for real by now. Is this animation supposed to make up for the lack of the real thing?
It will launch when it is ready to launch. Why are you fixated on whether SpaceX actually launches on or before whatever date Elon guesses? It's not as if anything terrible happens if it takes a little longer than expected. Relax. Elon guessed a (probably optimistic) date based on information available at the time. Turned out to take longer. The only people who should give even a theoretical shit are the customers of SpaceX which is pretty much nobody here.
The Democrats really need to figure out how to start winning some elections.
They need to gerrymander the way the republicans have for the last 20 years or even better, get rid of gerrymandering altogether. The party in charge on the years we do the census gets to decide how the political districts are drawn in most of the US. The republicans by happenstance or luck have won the majority in the elections during these years and so they got to draw districts largely favorable to them. Honestly they've been very clever about this and I think they caught the democrats sleeping about the importance of this.
There are other problems too of course but gerrymandering is a HUGE part of the reason the democrats struggle to win elections.
Prisons should only be used for violent people that must be separated from civilized society.
How do you propose to deal with guys like Bernie Madoff then? He robbed people of a lifetime of hard work - made it all mean nothing. Just because he didn't use violence to achieve his ends makes him no less worthy of separation from society. In a way I fear guys like him more than a thug who tries to beat me up.
For everyone else, there are more constructive punishments. For instance, Ajit could wear an ankle tracker will cleaning bedpans in nursing homes everyday for the next 10 years.
How is tracking his whereabouts going to matter? We already know where he is and it's not stopping him from being an asshat. Plus I've cleaned bedpans. While not fun work it isn't nearly awful enough. If you want to do creative punishments you need to get a lot more creative.
If you can define what that means. But that's not even what the guy is saying. He's saying ISPs shouldn't be in charge of securing customers computers or traffic.
That's fine for larger corporate customers who at least in principle should be able to manage to secure their networks. But less sophisticated customers hugely out number the sophisticated ones so there HAS to be some mechanism for helping them to keep their little network and devices secure. If this isn't the ISP then who should it be? I like the idea of smart edges and a dumb network but we cannot assume that every edge has a tech savvy sysadmin on the end of it.
If my video is taken down, that implies I broke the law.
No it does not. It simply is a reflection of someone accusing you of violating their copyright. Furthermore it appears in this case that the person who posted the video likely DID violate copyright - just not Warner Music's copyright.
That's defamation of character.
Insert eyeroll here. No it is almost certainly not defamation of character. For it to be defamation there has to be real and quantifiable damage. While possible in certain circumstances the mere act of issuing a DCMA takedown request or asserting a copyright (even when non exists) would be unlikely to result in provable harm (financial, reputational, or otherwise) to anyone in the overwhelming majority of cases. If there is no provable damage then by definition it is not defamation of character.
There are legal avenues one can take to combat frivolous copyright claims but defamation of character would be a really stupid one in most cases.
Even if it's small claims.
Small claims court is very rarely an appropriate venue for libel cases. Libel cases are difficult to prove and typically require the aid of a lawyer. Small claims courts are for small and simple contractual disputes. While it's theoretically possible to take a libel claim to small claims court it's probably a really dumb idea.
Wolves cannot live healthily without meat. There is literally no supporting evidence for your position.
Not true. We know for a demonstrated fact that wolves are not obligate carnivores which means by definition they can survive without animal protein. Wolves share strong similarities to dogs in their digestive systems. For them to live without animal protein for extended periods obviously takes careful control of their diet to accomplish and would be difficult in the wild but it can be done. There is no particular purpose to doing so but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. It's actually been done for cats which are obligate carnivores (some crazy vegans) so it's quite reasonable to believe it could be done for wolves as well.
Anyway you're kind of missing the point. Dogs and wolves are basically omnivores. If you want to call them carnivores, fine, but with the understanding that they are not obligate carnivores. They are well adapted to consume meat and evolutionarily prefer it but strictly speaking they can survive without it.
Prof Frank Kelly said that while electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tyre dust, for which the government already accepts there is no safe limit.
Sigh. Another example of perfect being the enemy of good. No solution is going to be without some drawbacks. Electric cars are CLEARLY an improvement over internal combustion engines if for no other reason than the fact that they can be powered without fossil fuels. No they don't solve everything but that's not an excuse to not move forward. We're going to be using cars for the foreseeable future so we may as well make whatever improvements we can to them. EVs and hybrids are an improvement. Let's take that step and then take the next one when we are able.
"Our cities need fewer cars, not just cleaner cars."
That's fine but probably not going to happen without some VERY substantial investments in public transit.
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century?
They didn't in much of the world. Passenger rail is alive and well.
Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
Strawman. People don't necessarily like cars better. In many parts of the US they simply don't have a choice. I've lived in cities where passenger rail was an option and it was hugely useful and I generally preferred it to driving in many cases. (traffic jams suck) Whether cars or trains are advantageous is circumstance dependent. It also depends on what infrastructure has been invested in. Trains are economically efficient for a certain set of conditions. They are widely used in Europe and Asia. Honestly I would happily ride a train to work if it were feasible where I live.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
People all around the world ride trains and airplanes and even boats on fixed schedules. Including in the US. The fact that the schedule is fixed is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially when it is as reliable as the trains in Japan. The primary advantage of cars is that they can go point to point rather than having their start and end points fixed. The lack of a schedule with cars is usually a much more minor advantage in the presence of a well functioning passenger rail system. Go to a city like NYC or Chicago and odds are you'll park the car and ride the light rail system + taxis to get around.
It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city.
Which is irrelevant regarding whether hyperloop systems would be cost efficient. A subway in one of the most densely populated cities in the world isn't really a good comparison. If you want to make a proper comparison consider the efforts to put in high speed rail in the US. A lot of land will need to be purchased and right of ways obtained. The reason passenger rail struggles in the US is precisely because 1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper and 2) population density in large parts of the country. But in places where the infrastructure exists and the population density is sufficient, like in the Northeast Corridor or in much of Europe and Japan, trains are popular and heavily used for transport.
I have my doubts that a hyperloop system will make economic sense. I suspect it will fail for much the same reason monorails never really caught on. But there may be specific cases where it makes a lot of sense so I'm withholding judgement until there is more data to work with. Worst case is that it's kind of a nifty technology that might have interesting applications down the road.
Newsflash, In the wild catching prey is hard. wolves will eat fruit and veggies as a 'desperation move' they biologically get very little nutrition out of it. this doesn't mean you should feed fido your strict vegan diet.
Who said anything about feeding a dog a vegan diet? Certainty not me. All I said is that it is a proven fact that dogs (and evidently wolves) can live healthfully without eating animal flesh if necessary. Nobody is recommending this as something anyone ought to do as a routine matter. Wolves are apparently able to do so too and some types of wolves like the Maned Wolf eat nearly 50% of their diet from plant matter. They are well evolved to live on meat but unlike cats they can actually digest plant matter and derive meaningful nutrition from it. Most dog food sold has substantial amounts of plant matter so odds are that your dog is getting a lot of their nutrients from plants. Meat is expensive so dog food manufacturers put in as much vegetation as they can get away with. Don't take my word for it, look on the ingredients label sometime.
Wolves are not dogs and dogs are not wolves. What applies to one does not necessarily apply to the other despite their shared genetic heritage. They are similar but one has to be careful of the differences which are not trivial. There is a lot of idiotic and debunked animal behavior theory based on assuming dog behavior should track closely with wolf behavior when it in actuality does not. For example a lot of pack and dominance theory ("be the alpha in your pack", etc) is demonstrably nonsense but it has held on for years based on long since debunked early studies of wolf behavior that assumed dogs = wolves.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication.
Not true. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Even wolves routinely supplement their diet with fruits and vegetables in the wild.
In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available.
Also not true. All wolf subspecies (including dogs, coyotes, dingoes) have an evolutionary preference for meat but will voluntarily eat vegetation in substantial amounts and if necessary can live without meat indefinitely. The Maned Wolf has a diet that is approximately 50% vegetation. With certain exceptions most of what you eat is also readily digestible by your dog too. Dogs are omnivores in actuality.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
While you can feed cats vegetation successfully, they are in actuality obligate carnivores. Their digestive systems are really designed to break down cellulose, they lack the proper teeth for mastication, and their metabolisms are unable to synthesize certain nutrients which are only found in animal flesh unless you are really breaking out the chemistry set. Your cat might willingly eat fruits or veggies but for the most part they aren't especially good for them. One of my cats years ago loved Doritos but it isn't something I made a diet staple for her.
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons per year. Even if we take the numbers given at face value (and we should not) that's substantially less than 1% of all CO2 emissions.
Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin.
Yeah they eat a lot of the nasty stuff we turn our noses up at. What? You thought Fluffy was getting top sirloin?
Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts.
Evidently they are unaware that while cats are obligate carnivores dogs actually are omnivores and can eat and thrive on most of the same foods you do. They prefer meat (like a lot of humans) and its and important part of their diet when available but dogs can and sometimes do live without meat just fine. Furthermore most dog food sold contains substantial amounts of grains, vegatables and even fruit. So a lot of that poop comes from plants. Pets are little different from any other animal and we are hardly stressing the earth's carrying capacity with a few million dogs.
One of the things that people forget when they complain that the iPhone isn't always on the bleeding edge is the supply chain issues. It's not that Apple cannot make a bleeding edge phone that works great. The "problem" they have is that they sell 200 million phones a year. So any feature they add to the iPhone they have to be able to source potentially 200 million copies of that hardware. For bleeding edge stuff that's often just not possible. That's not to say Apple couldn't be more aggressive than they have been but just remember the supply chain issues when you sell that many of any product.
I respectfully disagree. I think technologically we are much closer than anyone realizes.
Even if for the sake of argument I agree with you that we have some technology that could do the job sitting on the shelf today it STILL doesn't work for economic reasons. The cost to get into space is WAY too high and is likely to remain so even in spite of the efforts of SpaceX and others. Furthermore it's not enough to merely mine (which we cannot do), you also have to be able to process what you are mining. The only place we can do that at economically meaningful scale currently is back here on earth which means you have to drop rocks on earth from orbit intentionally. Dropping rocks from orbit is self evidently a terrible idea. Furthermore as long as it is cheaper to mine the same products here on earth there is no economic justification to go to the expense and risk of getting them from space even if technologically it is possible.
The reality is that we do not have the technology to economically mine in space and it's going to be many years before we get it. I very much doubt we will see economically profitable mining is space during the lifetime of anyone reading this without some sort of massive crash government program. I can conceive of it happening eventually but we're going to have to bootstrap a space economy and develop a lot of non-trivial technology first. I think the time scale for this sort of endeavor is going to be measured in decades or more probably centuries.
So a country that doesn't have a meaningful space program (though does have some space related commerce) passes a law for a hypothetical mining activity that will not take place on a commercial scale during the lifetime of anyone reading this post. Why exactly do we care? I'm as positive about going into space as anyone here but this is simply not news.
We are ridiculously far from having the technology to mine in space on an economically meaningful scale much less the ability to turn mined minerals into useful products. Not saying it will never happen nor am I saying it's a bad idea but we are a looooong way from this being a meaningful thing to worry about. Right now we have the ability to send a smallish probe and maybe bring back a few core shallow core samples or rocks at ludicrous expense per kg. We don't have any equipment or experience in refining mined materials in zero-G into useful products nor any reasonable near term prospects of getting any. Nor do we have energy sources sufficient to do so in meaningful amounts unless you plan to send a very powerful nuclear fission reactor into space of a design that we've no experience building or maintaining. We could bring back the asteroid in whole or parts and drop it onto Earth's surface which is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the fact that it is de-facto a WMD.
Space mining is a cool idea. Let's keep working on it. But perhaps touched with a tinge of realism about the timescale, economics, and technology requirements?
You have to be a special kind of asshat to call in a fake distress call to the coast guard. That isn't a "prank", that is a crime. Pranks are harmless or nearly so. A practical joke is a prank. When you endanger lives it's no longer funny or mischievous. Calling in a fake call should (and probably does) get you a lengthy stay in a federal prison.
Actually, if you're investing $350mm, you generally DO get a good way of knowing about the company you're investing in. That is - they pretty much tell you whatever you ask. You get to look at their plans, their tech, their infra, their people, etc.
I've been involved in several private equity investment deals first hand and that is demonstrably not true in many cases. I've been on both the buyer's side of the table and the seller. It depends on how the power relationships between the investor and the company sits. Sometimes the company doesn't give them nearly as much information as you would think would be appropriate. Sometimes the investor simply doesn't ask the right questions. Sometimes the investor doesn't ask enough questions. Sometimes fraud is involved. See Theranos if you need an example of most of the above. While most big dollar investors tend to do significant amounts of research they do not always do enough nor do they always do it well. This is no big secret.
If you really thing investors throw around that much money on a hunch without some realistic expectations you're naive.
I'm afraid you are the naive one here. I not only think that investors often throw around that kind of cash without appropriate due diligence, I know it for a fact and have seen innumerable cases of it. Private equity funds get money from investors and then they have to go out and find investments for that money with no guarantee that such investments are available for reasonable prices. A lot of the froth in the dotcom era was too many dollars chasing too few good opportunities. Companies got funded that had no business being funded and prices for good companies got bid up so high that a positive return on the investment was very difficult. At any given time there are a finite number of reasonably priced investments to be made and much like any other market sometimes the bidding become irrationally exuberant. Just because people have a lot of money to invest doesn't mean they are necessarily competent at doing so.
Look at it this way. 80-90% of mutual funds under perform the market average in any given year and almost none can do it for multiple years in a row. These are managed by experienced investment professionals with access to all the available information about the companies they invest in. And yet you think these people have some special advantage or insight? Big investors make stupid investments all the time. They just have to hope that some of their investments work out well enough to make up for the bad ones.
Also, if most of your investments break even and 1 in 10 is a huge hit then you are WAY ahead of the game.
I said "break even AT BEST". The at best bit is important. Many of them will lose money, sometimes a lot. Typically private equity funds will see 6-8 of their investments underwater to breakeven. 1-2 will be mild successes and if things go well, 1-2 at best will be big successes.
Welding glass filters may work - but one needs to get the right shade. "Only goggles made for electric arc welding can be used to observe the sun, and they must have a shade scale number of 12 or higher. Shade 13 is ideal for solar viewing, but that shade is typically not sold in stores, Fienberg added."
NASA recommends #14 welding glass.
Fundamentally, and absent interference like government regulations and such, what something is worth is always going to boil down to how much people are willing to pay for it and what the supplier is willing to sell it for. This has been understood for centuries.
The value of something in an open market is not the same thing as the value to one crazy investor. Just because someone is willing to pay an unreasonable price for something does not mean that is the market value of that item to any other buyer. So saying SpaceX is the "4th most valuable private company" doesn't really mean much because there is no objective way to corroborate that the price paid was rational.
$21.2B actually seems insulting for something that is infinitely more useful, and long lasting, say, Twitter or Facebook which have also have valuations in the billion range.
Thank you for making my point. Neither you nor I have any realistic way of evaluating if this one valuation of SpaceX is reasonable. Ask 20 analysts to come up with a valuation and you'll get 20 different prices. Which one is right? Is the price paid too high or too low or about right? People overpay for investments all the time. You only know if the price paid was a reasonable one later on. You are actually arguing that SpaceX should be worth more which might be true but you are just guessing. You need a market or at least an auction with numerous informed buyers to establish a market price.
Not necessarily, but on the whole, I would expect a few private investors with a lot of money to do better than the general public on the open stock market.
Why would you assume that? They're not smarter than the general public and they don't have some special crystal ball that lets them make better than average decisions. Sometimes they have some inside information but they aren't special. In actuality private equity investors invest on a portfolio basis no different from you or me. As a rule of thumb they expect about 1 out of 10 investments it actually pay off significantly. Most of their investments are breakeven at best. They have no way of knowing if SpaceX is that special 1 of 10 that will be a home run.
Presumably the people responsible for the $351 million in funding got a good look at the value before committing the money.
Possibly but sometimes they often don't get as good a look as you might imagine. That's not a huge investment by private equity standards and it's not hard to find cases where investors did not do their due diligence. The dotcom boom around 2000 was a great example of that. I have a lot of friends who are in the private equity world and while they are smart people they are hardly dispassionate and consistently rational. They make investing mistakes same as anyone else.
Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America.
That is a nearly meaningless sentence. There is no good way to meaningfully value private companies unless they sell a piece of themselves and even then you really are only getting one party's opinion of what they are worth unlike in a proper secondary market. So hypothetically if I were to buy 5% of SpaceX for $1 billion, I am implicitly saying that I value SpaceX at $20 billion. That is basically what happened here. But that doesn't really mean it is actually worth that in the wider market because of the problem of the winner's curse. Someone ponied up a lot of money in a funding round but one has to be careful to not extrapolate that one opinion too far.
Yes a piece of welding glass works great but make sure you use at least a #14 glass per NASA recommendations. This is widely available through welding supply companies. Not all welding eye protection is adequate for looking at the Sun.
I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values, but I am aware that they shouldn't be the gold standard
It worries me when I read about people doing science who don't understand basic statistics. This is undergraduate level stuff and it's not terribly difficult to wrap your brain around. Anyone smart enough to be a professional biologist should be able to handle P-values without difficulty.
Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics.
Whether you are passionate about statistics or not is irrelevant. You are advocating mathematical illiteracy because some people aren't "passionate" about math? I'm not passionate about grammar but I recognize its importance. Please tell me how you as a purported biologist plan to conduct population studies or sampling without involving and understanding statistical methods? Do you not want to understand the papers you are putting your name on? How do you know that your conclusion makes sense if you don't understand the math used? Even top journals like Nature recognize the problem of biologists not taking statististics seriously.
There are topics in pretty much every scientific discipline that cannot be properly understood without a solid grasp of statistics. Sure if you run into a technical problem beyond your prowess at mathematics by all means go seek out the math department at your local university for help but for someone to describe themselves as a scientist without understanding something as basic as a P-value is to basically admit they are not competent at their job.
Assuming these sports don't go away completely (and they probably won't) it is incredibly useful to be able to see what difference rules changes, adjustments to protective gear, better treatment protocols, etc., will have on the players.
You don't need to wait for players to die for that. Concussions are a pretty good proxy for future cases of CTE and we can diagnose those today. And we already know for a fact that football helmets are rather useless in preventing concussions. They keep the skull intact but they do little to prevent your gelatinous brain from sloshing around inside your head during an impact. Frankly I don't see any way to reduce the incidence of CTE in football players without substantial revisions to the rules which probably will not happen in my lifetime.