Sure there is - launch with enough energy to make it to orbit if the Earth were standing still, and you'll get there without any trouble. At least so long as you launch to the east.
My money is on him heading south until the guardians of the Round Earth Conspiracy start remotely messing with his compass, causing it to spin around randomly and keep pointing at the same spot in the middle of nowhere until he finally gives up and goes home.
Ah, I was talking BFR again. Sea Dragon... yeah, that would be a challenge. I'm not sure how exactly how the forces transmitted through the water would work - a zipline to a submerged "submarine bunker" might work - an incredible amount of energy would go toward vaporizing water, which I would think would at least stretch out the impulse so you're dealing with smaller forces over a longer period. And without a rigidly mounted foundation it should take less durability to survive. It would need to be able to withstand crumpling, but it it gets tossed around like a hacky sack... just make sure the walls are well padded and covered in safety netting you can quickly tangle yourself in to avoid being tossed around.
Yep, hand guns and combat rifles are pretty much the two kinds of gun designed specifically for killing people. And hand guns are designed to be covert and convenient as well. Never fails to amaze me how much more violently people react to combat rifles, when handguns are the more dangerous weapon in almost any non-battlefield scenario.
Library, not McDonald's. Your phone/laptop/etc. still announces its uniquely identifiable properties to universe+dog no matter what network its on (though you can *maybe* prevent it if you know what you're doing, and not already under surveillance)
Librarians on the other hand tend to be on the front lines of defending privacy - use their computers, and you can probably avoid leaving an incriminating record tied to you.
Assuming the fueling ship wasn't automated. I'd expect it, and the launch barge, to be built like a bunker in order to survive such a blast anyway though - you don't want to lose an expensive piece of infrastructure in an accident - there'll be plenty more rockets to keep things on schedule.
And if they start offering commercial terrestrial flights? How does the crew complement compare to the number of passengers?
It sounds like they're working hard to make the risk profile of a flight resemble that of an airliner, rather than a traditional rocket.
Sounds like Germany's tax starts at a marginal rate of 14%, you're presumably paying no more than that for a minimum-wage job.
No more full time jobs? You mean a whole lot of people are paying for a whole lot of work that doesn't need to be done? Unlikely. No doubt some jobs of marginal utility will be cut, but all those people making twice as much money (because you doubled the minimum wage) are going to be buying several times as much stuff, now that most of their paycheck isn't going to rent and bare survival. Which means you need a lot more people serving them. The thing about increasing the minimum wage, is that such people tend to spend money as fast as they get it, rather than putting a lot into savings and investments that generate no economic activity.
>What will you do next? Outlaw part time work? Minimum wage isn't about how much you take home at the end of the week - it's about the minimum amount you can pay for one hour of someone else's life. The idea being to keep you from using their desperation for a job to cheat them out of a living wage - that's not an ethical negotiation tactic.
I like how you neatly fail to mention that these "unpopular experiments" that have been so successful have set the minimum wage in Germany to roughly $15/hour, which along with free health care for everyone makes for a pretty reasonable living wage, given modest living expenses of $1000/month.
And nobody said anything about full time with benefits. We're just setting a minimum price that you're allowed to pay when you buy an hour of someone else's life.
If they're not worth paying a living wage for - then do them yourself. Is it not worth your time? Then it's at least worth paying someone else a reasonable portion of what you can sell an hour of your time for, to have them spend an hour of their life doing it for you. And the minimum reasonable portion to pay is what any non-desperate person might agree to - a living wage. Using someone's desperation as a weapon to get yourself a better deal is not an ethical negotiation strategy.
And as I said - I'm specifically NO T talking about "kids jobs" - I'm not inherently opposed to a separate minimum wage for minors. 50%? 30%? What's an hour of unskilled kids time worth compared to an hour of an unskilled adults? Make something up - the closer you get to the reality, the less you distort the adult labor market. But you also need to prevent the exploitation of desperate children. Not every kid has parents, and a dismaying number of them have really good reasons to distrust foster care.
But, if there aren't enough kids willing to do the work? Then you need to start hiring adults, and not cheat them just because they're desperate.
I was actually specifically referring to the BFR, which seems to have replaced the 7-booster Falcon 9 "supercluster" that Musk mentioned a few times early on as a possible heavy launch vehicle.
The Sea Dragon though - I'm not certain I've ever encountered it before - it's been many years if I have. What a beast! And launched not just from on the water (as planned for the BFR), but *in* the water, floating vertically.
I hate to think of what that sonic blast might do to whales anywhere nearby though.
Just one slight problem: >Even if SpaceX decides to do BFR launches from the sea, I'll be shocked if the majority of their other launches don't use Cape Canaveral. There probably aren't going to be any other launches - thanks to the reusable second stage and lower maintenance requirements, the BFR is expected to cost less per launch than a Falcon 9.
Not per pound, per launch.
Meaning that if they use a F9 to launch a single satellite, rather than launching the same satellite all by itself in an otherwise empty BFR, they'll be losing money. And of course the BFR will easily be able to carry many more satellites to other nearby orbits in the same launch, making the difference far more dramatic.
Of course it does - when talking numbers, "the average" almost always means the arithmetic average, otherwise known as "the mean" - add everyone up, and divide by their count. 1 guy makes $100M, while 100,000 guys make $1, the average pay is $1,001
That's very different than how the term is used in common conversation, where it typically means "the median" - line everyone up from smallest to largest (by whatever measure is being used), and pick the guy in the middle. He's probably fairly typical - "the average guy". In my above example, he'd be making $1.
The mean almost always skews higher than the median, simply because the large values tend to be very much larger than the mid-range values, looking at the difference between mean and median gives you a rough idea of just how uneven the distribution is. For a linear distribution, where someone making more than 80% of the population is making twice as much as someone at the 40% mark, and 4x as much as someone at the 20% mark, the mean and median will be the same.
By contrast, in the U.S. the median household income is $56k - half of all households make more than that, half make less. But the mean (average) income is $79k, 41% higher, thanks to the very few at the top who make massively more money than most. And because the US income is fairly linearly distributed until you get to the top ~10%, that means that (very) roughly 41% of the entire income in the country is being redirected to those at the very top, above and beyond what a you would expect from looking at the income distribution of the rest of the population.
I'll let F.D.R., the president who signed the first federal minimum wage bill into law comment: “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
Minimum-wage jobs are vital to the smooth functioning of our society, we can't just eliminate them - which is what would happen if all the current employees somehow managed to get better jobs. The average age of minimum wage employees is 30, it's not a bunch of high school kids making spending money after school.
If you really want high school kids to be employable at lower wages - put a lower minimum wage for minors into the law, while requiring a living wage for everyone else. See how long it takes before the kids realize they're being cheated and walk out when the adult working next to them is getting twice the pay for the exact same work.
Alternately - poor people are mostly murdered by poor people.
How do the odds of an upper class black man being a murderer compare to those of an upper-class white man?
> This is not bias - it's what creates bias.
Very true. But as soon as you try to apply statistical information to individuals, that bias becomes unjustified discrimination. Especially in a situation like we currently have, where far more blatant historical racism forced most black people in to poverty - which is well known to increase the probability of criminal behavior.
Almost all mass-shootings, in the U.S. are committed white men - and yet, as a white man I don't face automatic suspicion of being a mass shooter. I'm not forced to pay for another man's crimes simply because of the color of my skin. Why should a black man be?
I hadn't realized the Buran was automated. Interesting...
Keep in mind though that the first (and only) flight of the Buran occurred in November 1988, Compared to April 1981 for the shuttle. That's 91 months, or a bit over five Moore's-Law doublings of computer performance. 32x the computing performance (and likely available RAM) makes a HUGE difference in real-time control systems, especially back then when pretty much any software of any complexity was severely hardware-limited.
If we instead look at suborbital prototypes: Buran full-scale prototype: 1984, scale suborbital prototype: July 1983 Shuttle full-scale suborbital prototype: 1977 We're looking at a roughly six-year difference, or 4 doublings, for a 16x increase in computer performance.
And of course, the shuttle program was in many ways an outgrowth of the much older X-11, etc. series of prototype space planes, while Russia basically scrapped their Spiral program and started fresh with the more shuttle-like Buran.
The BFR should probably be able to handle that, at least for a small, modular "starter kit" transported in multiple pieces.
There's a *lot* of R&D and infrastructure involved first though. We need a habitat for workers (ISS lessons should mostly translate), and hopefully nimble telepresence robots so that they can do most of their work remotely rather than in unpleasant, dangerous space suits. Then there's prospecting, mining, and refining - a moon-smithy doesn't do you any good until you have raw materials to work with, and at first moon dust will be the only available resource. Fortunately, moon dust could be an excellent resource for building the bulk of habitats and large pressurized assembly hangars, so that as much work as possible can be done indoors, where Earth-based technology will (mostly) translate.
We're on the cusp of finally starting to expand beyond this planet, but there's still probably decades of work to do before we can actually start building large components on the moon. Habitats, fuel, and likely air and water will be the early products.
That might be overkill - at least the further extensions. The very fact that SpaceX has been so successful, and is bringing launch costs down so dramatically (and thus increasing launch frequency) simultaneously makes the launches less of a novelty, and increases the number of opportunities to watch them. If you have one launch a month then everyone who wants to watch a launch that month has to be at that one viewing. If you're launching every few days you can spread that crowd across a dozen different launches. There may be some hard-core enthusiasts that still want to try to watch every launch, and can get time off that frequently, but I suspect they will be a distinct minority.
And then, in a few years, the launches will stop, as it sounds like the plan is to launch the BFR primarily from sea.
Plus, unless the FEC line is completely unused, there's the difficulty of coordinating commuter shuttle trains running at arbitrary times with the tightly scheduled cargo and passenger lines. Is there a nearby siding where the commuters can get out of the way?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more a matter of a DIY rocket enthusiast catering to flat-earthers in order to fund his hobby. Fools and their money and all that.
Sure there is - launch with enough energy to make it to orbit if the Earth were standing still, and you'll get there without any trouble. At least so long as you launch to the east.
My money is on him heading south until the guardians of the Round Earth Conspiracy start remotely messing with his compass, causing it to spin around randomly and keep pointing at the same spot in the middle of nowhere until he finally gives up and goes home.
Ah, I was talking BFR again. Sea Dragon... yeah, that would be a challenge. I'm not sure how exactly how the forces transmitted through the water would work - a zipline to a submerged "submarine bunker" might work - an incredible amount of energy would go toward vaporizing water, which I would think would at least stretch out the impulse so you're dealing with smaller forces over a longer period. And without a rigidly mounted foundation it should take less durability to survive. It would need to be able to withstand crumpling, but it it gets tossed around like a hacky sack... just make sure the walls are well padded and covered in safety netting you can quickly tangle yourself in to avoid being tossed around.
Absolutely. But if we're talking flipping burgers or other supposedly "kid jobs" that are making someone a profit?
My inclination is that it it's a job that involves a formal employment agreement reported to the IRS, it should get a living wage.
If the job isn't worth paying a non-desperate person to do it, then leave it un-done.
Yep, hand guns and combat rifles are pretty much the two kinds of gun designed specifically for killing people. And hand guns are designed to be covert and convenient as well. Never fails to amaze me how much more violently people react to combat rifles, when handguns are the more dangerous weapon in almost any non-battlefield scenario.
Library, not McDonald's. Your phone/laptop/etc. still announces its uniquely identifiable properties to universe+dog no matter what network its on (though you can *maybe* prevent it if you know what you're doing, and not already under surveillance)
Librarians on the other hand tend to be on the front lines of defending privacy - use their computers, and you can probably avoid leaving an incriminating record tied to you.
Assuming the fueling ship wasn't automated. I'd expect it, and the launch barge, to be built like a bunker in order to survive such a blast anyway though - you don't want to lose an expensive piece of infrastructure in an accident - there'll be plenty more rockets to keep things on schedule.
And if they start offering commercial terrestrial flights? How does the crew complement compare to the number of passengers?
It sounds like they're working hard to make the risk profile of a flight resemble that of an airliner, rather than a traditional rocket.
Sounds like Germany's tax starts at a marginal rate of 14%, you're presumably paying no more than that for a minimum-wage job.
No more full time jobs? You mean a whole lot of people are paying for a whole lot of work that doesn't need to be done? Unlikely. No doubt some jobs of marginal utility will be cut, but all those people making twice as much money (because you doubled the minimum wage) are going to be buying several times as much stuff, now that most of their paycheck isn't going to rent and bare survival. Which means you need a lot more people serving them. The thing about increasing the minimum wage, is that such people tend to spend money as fast as they get it, rather than putting a lot into savings and investments that generate no economic activity.
>What will you do next? Outlaw part time work?
Minimum wage isn't about how much you take home at the end of the week - it's about the minimum amount you can pay for one hour of someone else's life. The idea being to keep you from using their desperation for a job to cheat them out of a living wage - that's not an ethical negotiation tactic.
Ah, I had not heard that tidbit. That would definitely change things.
Sadly all I can find on that front is speculation. If the pad can handle it though, it would seem like a natural choice. At least as a starting point.
I like how you neatly fail to mention that these "unpopular experiments" that have been so successful have set the minimum wage in Germany to roughly $15/hour, which along with free health care for everyone makes for a pretty reasonable living wage, given modest living expenses of $1000/month.
And nobody said anything about full time with benefits. We're just setting a minimum price that you're allowed to pay when you buy an hour of someone else's life.
If they're not worth paying a living wage for - then do them yourself. Is it not worth your time? Then it's at least worth paying someone else a reasonable portion of what you can sell an hour of your time for, to have them spend an hour of their life doing it for you. And the minimum reasonable portion to pay is what any non-desperate person might agree to - a living wage. Using someone's desperation as a weapon to get yourself a better deal is not an ethical negotiation strategy.
And as I said - I'm specifically NO T talking about "kids jobs" - I'm not inherently opposed to a separate minimum wage for minors. 50%? 30%? What's an hour of unskilled kids time worth compared to an hour of an unskilled adults? Make something up - the closer you get to the reality, the less you distort the adult labor market. But you also need to prevent the exploitation of desperate children. Not every kid has parents, and a dismaying number of them have really good reasons to distrust foster care.
But, if there aren't enough kids willing to do the work? Then you need to start hiring adults, and not cheat them just because they're desperate.
I was actually specifically referring to the BFR, which seems to have replaced the 7-booster Falcon 9 "supercluster" that Musk mentioned a few times early on as a possible heavy launch vehicle.
The Sea Dragon though - I'm not certain I've ever encountered it before - it's been many years if I have. What a beast! And launched not just from on the water (as planned for the BFR), but *in* the water, floating vertically.
I hate to think of what that sonic blast might do to whales anywhere nearby though.
A link for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You've really thought this through, haven't you?
Just one slight problem:
>Even if SpaceX decides to do BFR launches from the sea, I'll be shocked if the majority of their other launches don't use Cape Canaveral.
There probably aren't going to be any other launches - thanks to the reusable second stage and lower maintenance requirements, the BFR is expected to cost less per launch than a Falcon 9.
Not per pound, per launch.
Meaning that if they use a F9 to launch a single satellite, rather than launching the same satellite all by itself in an otherwise empty BFR, they'll be losing money. And of course the BFR will easily be able to carry many more satellites to other nearby orbits in the same launch, making the difference far more dramatic.
Of course it does - when talking numbers, "the average" almost always means the arithmetic average, otherwise known as "the mean" - add everyone up, and divide by their count. 1 guy makes $100M, while 100,000 guys make $1, the average pay is $1,001
That's very different than how the term is used in common conversation, where it typically means "the median" - line everyone up from smallest to largest (by whatever measure is being used), and pick the guy in the middle. He's probably fairly typical - "the average guy". In my above example, he'd be making $1.
The mean almost always skews higher than the median, simply because the large values tend to be very much larger than the mid-range values, looking at the difference between mean and median gives you a rough idea of just how uneven the distribution is. For a linear distribution, where someone making more than 80% of the population is making twice as much as someone at the 40% mark, and 4x as much as someone at the 20% mark, the mean and median will be the same.
By contrast, in the U.S. the median household income is $56k - half of all households make more than that, half make less. But the mean (average) income is $79k, 41% higher, thanks to the very few at the top who make massively more money than most. And because the US income is fairly linearly distributed until you get to the top ~10%, that means that (very) roughly 41% of the entire income in the country is being redirected to those at the very top, above and beyond what a you would expect from looking at the income distribution of the rest of the population.
https://wallethacks.com/averag...
I'll let F.D.R., the president who signed the first federal minimum wage bill into law comment:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
Minimum-wage jobs are vital to the smooth functioning of our society, we can't just eliminate them - which is what would happen if all the current employees somehow managed to get better jobs. The average age of minimum wage employees is 30, it's not a bunch of high school kids making spending money after school.
If you really want high school kids to be employable at lower wages - put a lower minimum wage for minors into the law, while requiring a living wage for everyone else. See how long it takes before the kids realize they're being cheated and walk out when the adult working next to them is getting twice the pay for the exact same work.
Well, maybe that part - not so much reading between the lines though :-D.
My understanding of legal maneuverings has been in decline ever since Groklaw went silent.
It doesn't count unless you admit your intentions to the proles...
Alternately - poor people are mostly murdered by poor people.
How do the odds of an upper class black man being a murderer compare to those of an upper-class white man?
> This is not bias - it's what creates bias.
Very true. But as soon as you try to apply statistical information to individuals, that bias becomes unjustified discrimination. Especially in a situation like we currently have, where far more blatant historical racism forced most black people in to poverty - which is well known to increase the probability of criminal behavior.
Almost all mass-shootings, in the U.S. are committed white men - and yet, as a white man I don't face automatic suspicion of being a mass shooter. I'm not forced to pay for another man's crimes simply because of the color of my skin. Why should a black man be?
I can't take credit for that - Wired has an article with a good breakdown of what's going on.
I hadn't realized the Buran was automated. Interesting...
Keep in mind though that the first (and only) flight of the Buran occurred in November 1988, Compared to April 1981 for the shuttle. That's 91 months, or a bit over five Moore's-Law doublings of computer performance. 32x the computing performance (and likely available RAM) makes a HUGE difference in real-time control systems, especially back then when pretty much any software of any complexity was severely hardware-limited.
If we instead look at suborbital prototypes:
Buran full-scale prototype: 1984, scale suborbital prototype: July 1983
Shuttle full-scale suborbital prototype: 1977
We're looking at a roughly six-year difference, or 4 doublings, for a 16x increase in computer performance.
And of course, the shuttle program was in many ways an outgrowth of the much older X-11, etc. series of prototype space planes, while Russia basically scrapped their Spiral program and started fresh with the more shuttle-like Buran.
The BFR should probably be able to handle that, at least for a small, modular "starter kit" transported in multiple pieces.
There's a *lot* of R&D and infrastructure involved first though. We need a habitat for workers (ISS lessons should mostly translate), and hopefully nimble telepresence robots so that they can do most of their work remotely rather than in unpleasant, dangerous space suits. Then there's prospecting, mining, and refining - a moon-smithy doesn't do you any good until you have raw materials to work with, and at first moon dust will be the only available resource. Fortunately, moon dust could be an excellent resource for building the bulk of habitats and large pressurized assembly hangars, so that as much work as possible can be done indoors, where Earth-based technology will (mostly) translate.
We're on the cusp of finally starting to expand beyond this planet, but there's still probably decades of work to do before we can actually start building large components on the moon. Habitats, fuel, and likely air and water will be the early products.
That might be overkill - at least the further extensions. The very fact that SpaceX has been so successful, and is bringing launch costs down so dramatically (and thus increasing launch frequency) simultaneously makes the launches less of a novelty, and increases the number of opportunities to watch them. If you have one launch a month then everyone who wants to watch a launch that month has to be at that one viewing. If you're launching every few days you can spread that crowd across a dozen different launches. There may be some hard-core enthusiasts that still want to try to watch every launch, and can get time off that frequently, but I suspect they will be a distinct minority.
And then, in a few years, the launches will stop, as it sounds like the plan is to launch the BFR primarily from sea.
Plus, unless the FEC line is completely unused, there's the difficulty of coordinating commuter shuttle trains running at arbitrary times with the tightly scheduled cargo and passenger lines. Is there a nearby siding where the commuters can get out of the way?