Sure, but over time engineers are not going to want to live there either as house rates continue to climb.
Housing costs are climbing pretty much anywhere the average person would want to live. California is not unique in this respect.
engineers that want to work on rockets you'd think would be located more around Houston or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida
You'd think that - but only if you didn't know that California is the hub of the aerospace industry, not Houston or Kennedy.
Given they are trying to re-fly these rockets that is a HUGE amount of downtime they could potentially be making money from.
That downtime is balanced against the need to attract engineers and workers to Bumfuck Texas... And separating the BFR activities from the existing management, engineering, technical, and manufacturing base already extant at the Hawthorne facilities a few miles down the road. I'd go for Long Beach too.
Not to mention the fuel costs to go all the way down to the Panama Canal and back, not to mention the fee to use the Panama Canal (probably around $500k for shipping a BFR).
You're talking a rocket costing in the high tens of millions of dollars per unit - a couple of million to ship it from CA to FL is no biggie.
But more than anything, it is the opportunity cost that is the killer shipping them out from CA.
That opportunity cost must be balanced against the costs (tangible and intangible and indirect) of manufacturing them elsewhere.
tl;dr: You have no idea what you're talking about.
Unfortunately, reality blows a hole the size of Texas into your nonsensical fantasy (it's so disconnected from reality, I cannot in good conscience call it a theory): BFR can't be shipped by land, it has to go by sea. The "cheap high volume rockets" you fantasize about don't exist, and F9's are *already* being produced (and being shipped by land) on the west coast. In the same vein, a production facility for capsules and engines (which can also be shipped by land) already exists. As their existing facility (just twenty miles away) has capacity to spare, it makes no sense to build a new one. As land transport provides no significant barrier, it makes no sense to move their existing facility. (And if they wished to ease land transport, they wouldn't be moving to Long Beach in the first place.)
Or, in short, the facility makes no sense whatsoever for any of SpaceX's existing product line.
There's only one product in their line that requires a new facility, and by coincidence that one product also absolutely requires access to sea transport - BFR.
As to why they'd locate it on the west coast rather than the Gulf or east coasts... Why would the locate it anywhere else? Sea transport, even with the added costs of transiting the Canal, is relatively cheap. Just up the road is 100% (or close enough to make no nevermind) of their management, engineering, and manufacturing expertise and capability. Locating the facility elsewhere cuts access to this expertise.
The Trump administration is proposing $19.1 billion for NASA in its fiscal 2018 budget blueprint, a 0.8 percent decrease from 2017 funding levels
The next few lines, if you're familiar with NASA other than through Trump's propaganda, are meaningless puffery - they're more-or-less exactly what NASA has been doing all through the Obama administration and some of it as far back as President Bush. When you read the rest of the article, it's just more of the same - exactly what they have been doing, except with very selective politically motivated budget cuts. There's no significant new initiatives or funding. None. Zero. Zip.
Like so many other of Trump's "accomplishments", his "jump start" of NASA exists only in the minds of the clueless fools who know only what they've been told to think.
Sure we can put up more advanced and brand spanking new sats but the process of fixing something would probably be cheaper in the long run compared to building something new which takes funding, planning, and building
0.o And you think the replacement parts won't need funding, planning, and building - and the replacement process itself won't need funding and planning? And that's setting aside the procurement and operational costs of the "space tow truck".
Launch costs are only a small piece of the puzzle.
Trump hasn't raised NASA's budget. Trump hasn't put a cogent NASA or national space policy in place. (In fact, his "policy" is President Obama's with a couple of lines changed and a whole bunch of puffed chest and meaningless propaganda.) Trump has done shit for NASA except to assemble yet another committee to put their political fingers in the pie.
I feel that by the time Bitcoin becomes "mainstream", all possible Bitcoin will already have been minted, and will basically only be in the hands of the 1% - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.
Oh sweet summer child - how I envy your innocence.
Geeks don't hold any significant stock of Bitcoin now. It's all in the hands of Asian miners and increasingly in the hands of gamblers (err.. investors).
I'll never understand how or why the markets are absolutely eager for anything remotely bad about Tesla Motors so they can let their fear-ridden backbrains take over and sell in a panic.
It's trivially easy to understand - Tesla is insanely overvalued and financially on the edge.
They have a huge backlog of sales.
That's one important metric - equally important is how fast they're working through that backlog and converting potential sales into cash in the bank. (Actually, that's probably even more important.) And Tesla is having particular problems there - the Model 3 is late, and production is lagging behind predictions. It doesn't matter why - it just matters that it's happening.
In orbit destruction is just about the last thing you want to do.
While space powers have the ability to destroy satellites, an operation that is pretty simple in fact, the very act makes a terrible mess, and a big satellite like the Chinese space station will make a hellava lot of debris.
Getting enough of this debris in orbit will make the LEO neighborhood pretty much unusable, and enough of it will act as a barrier to anything trying to get through.
That depends on the altitude of the debris - and at 150 miles the average unboosted orbital lifetime is around 30 days. You'd have to seriously work at it to put (and keep) enough debris at that altitude to pose any significant risk.
Strategically the only real option is to let the thing de-orbit it self, and let the shit fall where it may.
While there's no particular reason to blow it up, concern over debris is no reason not to.
Not sure where the FCC has any authority over a satellite launched from India. Also not sure why the FCC has any say in how big or small a satellite can be?
The satellites are owned and operated by a US company, so (by international treaty) the US government has responsibility over them. One of those responsibilities is to ensure they can be operated safely without posing a hazard to other satellites and don't violate any of the various treaties and agreements regarding satellites.
Translation: I don't have any actual proof that these sources are trustworthy, so I'll use scare quotes so I don't actually say anything that I can be called on.
Unfortunately, that approach requires the people seeing it to be stupid. We aren't. We're quite familiar with how right wing nutjobs (of the type that increasingly infest Slashdot) work. You've gone right down the list of the sites they hate - because they routinely expose the right's lies and corruption. You can't disprove them on facts, so you resort to other methods.
They do help sell the mission and the next mission to the public who are paying for it. It's probably worthwhile doing a bit less science in exchange for pretty pictures to make financing the next mission more likely.
In a world where there was ever any significant public debate on planetary missions, that would be a sensible claim. We don't live in such a world. The general public doesn't give a rats ass about space. They're not going to call their congresscritters and go "I didn't get any pretty pictures from Juno, cancel the Europa lander!". The vast majority of them probably don't even know Juno exists in the first place.
JunoCAM, which is a seriously downgraded camera system (there is barely a zoom on the lens), almost wasn't even included on this mission since NASA felt visual observations were unnecessary and wouldn't provide anything useful scientifically.
Let's take a look at the data sources for the papers as described in their abstracts...
And if that weren't damming enough, the last paper doesn't even belong in this set - it's about the polar storms, not the deep jet streams. (In fact, it seems to imply that the storms are shallow phenomena.)
Just imagine we could have had even better visuals than this if a larger more sophisticated camera was included.
Better visuals are cool and all... But better visuals don't mean better science, they mean different science because a heavier camera would mean downgrading or displacing other instruments.
With Uber, it's not clear that the cost of providing a taxi ride is noticeable different if you have 100 taxis or 1,000. Particularly if you're not actually building things like the centralised maintenance / fuelling facilities that normal taxi companies use to lower their costs.
That's the point - Uber doesn't have any of those costs, they're borne by the individual drivers. Uber doesn't have any costs that reasonably explain where all that money went.
Exchanges like Coinbase and others are only temporary on-ramps until bitcoin has absorbed all the world's fiat.
Because of it's limited total number, it can't absorb the world's total economy. In that, Bitcoin suffers from the same flaw as any hard currency... the maximum size of the currency limits the economy it can support to that size. That's why there are no more hard currencies. The modern world basically wouldn't exist if we were still on the gold standard. Not to mention that even if it did replace all the world's fiat currency it would still face the same problem... Governments can and will regulate real world transactions.
Again, this is basic economics.
If you think there haven't been amazing advances in the past 9 years (bitcoin not exist a decade ago) then you simply haven't been paying attention.
Yep, typical zealot rhetoric - long on vague hand waving, short on facts.
And lastly, economics
Is still something you have no grasp of. Confusing Bitcoin propaganda for an understanding of economics is prima facie evidence of that.
In any event, I think you'll find yourself on the wrong side of history on this one.
When you don't grasp the basic fundamentals of economics and instead harangue me with propaganda.... Your confidence is misplaced.
I gotta admire your bravery in the face of reality - but you're full of shit. The FUD here is coming from your keyboard.
The vast majority of ICOs are scams. Whether or not they're "regulated" by the state is immaterial to bitcoin. Bitcoin has nothing to do with ICOs, and vice versa.
Nobody is talking about ICO's - they're talking about exchanges, and a large number of exchanges deal in Bitcoin. This has everything to do with Bitcoin.
I understand it's a new and confusing concept to understand, but the new way forward is decentralized governance, and the sooner everyone understands it the sooner we can dispense with this sort of poppycock. The government cannot touch bitcoin. They can buy it and survive, or resist it and die. There's no two ways about it.
Bitcoin zealots and neckbeards have been prophesying this for nearly a decade now - and there remains absolutely zero evidence that it bears any relationship with reality. (And even less than it had in the past now that it's an investors toy rather than something uber-geeks occasionally bought pizza and weed with.) And among the many other things that Bitcoin zealots and neckbeards missed in their glorious ignorance of economics and finance is that for Bitcoin to accomplish what they hallucinated it would, it has to interface with the real world economy. And that interface will prevent it from accomplishing what they hallucinate it will... Because that interface can be and is being regulated by national governments.
Also it is normal for a company to run in Debt for a while, as all its money it is taking in from investors is going toward capital investments.
That's true - for companies that require capital investment. One the reasons Amazon took so long to become profitable was they were (and are) investing in their warehouses and distribution network. In the same vein, Tesla has had to spend tremendous amounts of effort and money retooling it's factories to produce the Model 3 and solving production problems.
Uber is neither Amazon nor Tesla. Uber doesn't require significant capital investment. It's a fucking software company, and unless it's federal government levels of fucked up they're not burning anywhere near a billion dollars plus per annum on software development.
Which leaves us with the big question - where exactly is all that money going?
Side note:
Well unlike the Dot COM days. Uber is actual trying to sell a service, and not just an idea.
Nonsense, everybody is trying to sell an idea to investors and and a service to their customers. The problem during the.bomb era is that not many of them were good ideas or services anyone wanted to buy - and investors eager to get in on the gravy train weren't always all that discerning.
Those are not the exlusive routes, especially when the intersection between computer science, the Univerversity of Alberta, and classical Hebrew scholarship is approximately 0.
If they are not exclusive routes, feel free to suggest others. Even with an intersection of approximately 0, it shouldn't be hard to find an expert. If they didn't try or couldn't find one that would participate, that in itself tells us something.
The current publication proves that your statement is false. And they did mark their results so.
Oh? How does the current publication prove me false? Since you have access to the relevant article, please quote me the portion that describes their search and the status of their results.
I lack access to the relevant journal, so I have no way to ascertain if they did so. I would not be surprised to find that they did, and the "journalist" that wrote the Gizmodo article or the original University of Alberta press release (that Gizmodo copy-pasted from and failed to credit) simply left it out.
And now you've invalidated your own thesis. TACL is a peer reviewed journal, and the article passed their publication standards.
First, I allowed for the possibility I was wrong. Second, "peer review" is a process - not a stamp of quality.
You're free to start your own journal and set your own publication standards, but do not pretend that your opinion is representative, authoritative, or otherwise based upon sufficient information to constitute valid criticism.
My opinion is based on my experience and the information I have at hand - and it's quite sufficient to base valid criticism on.
I disagree. How do you recruit a classical Hebrew scholar to validate your hypothesis and assist with additional work?
You hit up people you know to see if they know any, or anyone who might know any. You ask around the faculty at the university you're associated with. You reach out to other researchers in the same field to see if they know someone or someone who might know someone. You hit Google and find scholars and reach out to them via email. Etc... etc...
All of these are professional methods used routinely by serious researchers across any number of fields.
You publish your intermediate results and hope that it tickles a suitable person's interest such that they join in the effort.
This is exactly what you don't do unless and until all other approaches have failed to bear fruit. And even then, you plainly mark the results are preliminary and tentative
I lack access to the relevant journal, so I have no way to ascertain if they did so. I would not be surprised to find that they did, and the "journalist" that wrote the Gizmodo article or the original University of Alberta press release (that Gizmodo copy-pasted from and failed to credit) simply left it out.
You may as will declare Linus' work a joke. It's not as if Linux 0.12 was useful for much. It took a boatload of domain experts to bring it up to the capabilities that made people find it useful.
Um, no. Linux was a part-time non professional project, this linguistics research was (at least in theory) a professional project. The two are in no way comparable.
Best thing my father ever did was sell the TV set, back in the 80s. Forced us kids to go and make our own entertainment, and I think I had a much more enjoyable youth as a result.
We had a TV when I was growing up in the 70's - and we went outside and made our own entertainment. TV isn't the problem.
A young adult would choose his/her own fraternal organization such as the Kiwanis or Knights of Columbus or Masons or Odd Fellows.
The only thing worse than having my health benefits tied to a job I could be fired from, would be to have them tied to a fraternal organization that might release me from being a member because my religious or political beliefs vary from theirs.
I assume you're clueless if you don't grasp the difference between lightweight single passenger sport aircraft and commuter aircraft. The former is no more a prototype for the latter than an econobox rice burner is a prototype for a Formula One race car. There's a massive difference in degree and kind.
Slashdot Mirror
Housing costs are climbing pretty much anywhere the average person would want to live. California is not unique in this respect.
You'd think that - but only if you didn't know that California is the hub of the aerospace industry, not Houston or Kennedy.
That downtime is balanced against the need to attract engineers and workers to Bumfuck Texas... And separating the BFR activities from the existing management, engineering, technical, and manufacturing base already extant at the Hawthorne facilities a few miles down the road. I'd go for Long Beach too.
You're talking a rocket costing in the high tens of millions of dollars per unit - a couple of million to ship it from CA to FL is no biggie.
That opportunity cost must be balanced against the costs (tangible and intangible and indirect) of manufacturing them elsewhere.
tl;dr: You have no idea what you're talking about.
Unfortunately, reality blows a hole the size of Texas into your nonsensical fantasy (it's so disconnected from reality, I cannot in good conscience call it a theory): BFR can't be shipped by land, it has to go by sea. The "cheap high volume rockets" you fantasize about don't exist, and F9's are *already* being produced (and being shipped by land) on the west coast. In the same vein, a production facility for capsules and engines (which can also be shipped by land) already exists. As their existing facility (just twenty miles away) has capacity to spare, it makes no sense to build a new one. As land transport provides no significant barrier, it makes no sense to move their existing facility. (And if they wished to ease land transport, they wouldn't be moving to Long Beach in the first place.)
Or, in short, the facility makes no sense whatsoever for any of SpaceX's existing product line.
There's only one product in their line that requires a new facility, and by coincidence that one product also absolutely requires access to sea transport - BFR.
As to why they'd locate it on the west coast rather than the Gulf or east coasts... Why would the locate it anywhere else? Sea transport, even with the added costs of transiting the Canal, is relatively cheap. Just up the road is 100% (or close enough to make no nevermind) of their management, engineering, and manufacturing expertise and capability. Locating the facility elsewhere cuts access to this expertise.
From the very first fucking line of the article:
The next few lines, if you're familiar with NASA other than through Trump's propaganda, are meaningless puffery - they're more-or-less exactly what NASA has been doing all through the Obama administration and some of it as far back as President Bush. When you read the rest of the article, it's just more of the same - exactly what they have been doing, except with very selective politically motivated budget cuts. There's no significant new initiatives or funding. None. Zero. Zip.
Like so many other of Trump's "accomplishments", his "jump start" of NASA exists only in the minds of the clueless fools who know only what they've been told to think.
0.o And you think the replacement parts won't need funding, planning, and building - and the replacement process itself won't need funding and planning? And that's setting aside the procurement and operational costs of the "space tow truck".
Launch costs are only a small piece of the puzzle.
Trump hasn't raised NASA's budget. Trump hasn't put a cogent NASA or national space policy in place. (In fact, his "policy" is President Obama's with a couple of lines changed and a whole bunch of puffed chest and meaningless propaganda.) Trump has done shit for NASA except to assemble yet another committee to put their political fingers in the pie.
Oh sweet summer child - how I envy your innocence.
Geeks don't hold any significant stock of Bitcoin now. It's all in the hands of Asian miners and increasingly in the hands of gamblers (err.. investors).
Transaction time and costs aren't the real barrier - that would be the lack of any actual reason or economic incentive to switch.
It's trivially easy to understand - Tesla is insanely overvalued and financially on the edge.
That's one important metric - equally important is how fast they're working through that backlog and converting potential sales into cash in the bank. (Actually, that's probably even more important.) And Tesla is having particular problems there - the Model 3 is late, and production is lagging behind predictions. It doesn't matter why - it just matters that it's happening.
That depends on the altitude of the debris - and at 150 miles the average unboosted orbital lifetime is around 30 days. You'd have to seriously work at it to put (and keep) enough debris at that altitude to pose any significant risk.
While there's no particular reason to blow it up, concern over debris is no reason not to.
The satellites are owned and operated by a US company, so (by international treaty) the US government has responsibility over them. One of those responsibilities is to ensure they can be operated safely without posing a hazard to other satellites and don't violate any of the various treaties and agreements regarding satellites.
Translation: I don't have any actual proof that these sources are trustworthy, so I'll use scare quotes so I don't actually say anything that I can be called on.
Unfortunately, that approach requires the people seeing it to be stupid. We aren't. We're quite familiar with how right wing nutjobs (of the type that increasingly infest Slashdot) work. You've gone right down the list of the sites they hate - because they routinely expose the right's lies and corruption. You can't disprove them on facts, so you resort to other methods.
In a world where there was ever any significant public debate on planetary missions, that would be a sensible claim. We don't live in such a world. The general public doesn't give a rats ass about space. They're not going to call their congresscritters and go "I didn't get any pretty pictures from Juno, cancel the Europa lander!". The vast majority of them probably don't even know Juno exists in the first place.
Let's take a look at the data sources for the papers as described in their abstracts...
And if that weren't damming enough, the last paper doesn't even belong in this set - it's about the polar storms, not the deep jet streams. (In fact, it seems to imply that the storms are shallow phenomena.)
Better visuals are cool and all... But better visuals don't mean better science, they mean different science because a heavier camera would mean downgrading or displacing other instruments.
That's the point - Uber doesn't have any of those costs, they're borne by the individual drivers. Uber doesn't have any costs that reasonably explain where all that money went.
Because of it's limited total number, it can't absorb the world's total economy. In that, Bitcoin suffers from the same flaw as any hard currency... the maximum size of the currency limits the economy it can support to that size. That's why there are no more hard currencies. The modern world basically wouldn't exist if we were still on the gold standard. Not to mention that even if it did replace all the world's fiat currency it would still face the same problem... Governments can and will regulate real world transactions.
Again, this is basic economics.
Yep, typical zealot rhetoric - long on vague hand waving, short on facts.
Is still something you have no grasp of. Confusing Bitcoin propaganda for an understanding of economics is prima facie evidence of that.
When you don't grasp the basic fundamentals of economics and instead harangue me with propaganda.... Your confidence is misplaced.
I gotta admire your bravery in the face of reality - but you're full of shit. The FUD here is coming from your keyboard.
Nobody is talking about ICO's - they're talking about exchanges, and a large number of exchanges deal in Bitcoin. This has everything to do with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin zealots and neckbeards have been prophesying this for nearly a decade now - and there remains absolutely zero evidence that it bears any relationship with reality. (And even less than it had in the past now that it's an investors toy rather than something uber-geeks occasionally bought pizza and weed with.) And among the many other things that Bitcoin zealots and neckbeards missed in their glorious ignorance of economics and finance is that for Bitcoin to accomplish what they hallucinated it would, it has to interface with the real world economy. And that interface will prevent it from accomplishing what they hallucinate it will... Because that interface can be and is being regulated by national governments.
- 13% Since two weeks ago
- 55% since three months ago
But "anyone who knows anything about Bitcoin" doesn't much like publicizing those numbers.
And I don't know where in your ass you're pulling your numbers from, because they don't match the numbers on the chart you link to...
Currently $9,880
-1.39% past hour
-7.41% percent from yesterday.
-7% from last week
+43% from last month
+705% from last year
That's true - for companies that require capital investment. One the reasons Amazon took so long to become profitable was they were (and are) investing in their warehouses and distribution network. In the same vein, Tesla has had to spend tremendous amounts of effort and money retooling it's factories to produce the Model 3 and solving production problems.
Uber is neither Amazon nor Tesla. Uber doesn't require significant capital investment. It's a fucking software company, and unless it's federal government levels of fucked up they're not burning anywhere near a billion dollars plus per annum on software development.
Which leaves us with the big question - where exactly is all that money going?
Side note:
Nonsense, everybody is trying to sell an idea to investors and and a service to their customers. The problem during the .bomb era is that not many of them were good ideas or services anyone wanted to buy - and investors eager to get in on the gravy train weren't always all that discerning.
If they are not exclusive routes, feel free to suggest others. Even with an intersection of approximately 0, it shouldn't be hard to find an expert. If they didn't try or couldn't find one that would participate, that in itself tells us something.
Oh? How does the current publication prove me false? Since you have access to the relevant article, please quote me the portion that describes their search and the status of their results.
First, I allowed for the possibility I was wrong. Second, "peer review" is a process - not a stamp of quality.
My opinion is based on my experience and the information I have at hand - and it's quite sufficient to base valid criticism on.
You hit up people you know to see if they know any, or anyone who might know any. You ask around the faculty at the university you're associated with. You reach out to other researchers in the same field to see if they know someone or someone who might know someone. You hit Google and find scholars and reach out to them via email. Etc... etc...
All of these are professional methods used routinely by serious researchers across any number of fields.
This is exactly what you don't do unless and until all other approaches have failed to bear fruit. And even then, you plainly mark the results are preliminary and tentative
I lack access to the relevant journal, so I have no way to ascertain if they did so. I would not be surprised to find that they did, and the "journalist" that wrote the Gizmodo article or the original University of Alberta press release (that Gizmodo copy-pasted from and failed to credit) simply left it out.
Um, no. Linux was a part-time non professional project, this linguistics research was (at least in theory) a professional project. The two are in no way comparable.
You presume one exists. You presume wrongly. (Seriously, are you that stupid?)
We had a TV when I was growing up in the 70's - and we went outside and made our own entertainment. TV isn't the problem.
The only thing worse than having my health benefits tied to a job I could be fired from, would be to have them tied to a fraternal organization that might release me from being a member because my religious or political beliefs vary from theirs.
The problem isn't the cost of the rocket fuel needed - it's that Mars is much colder (MUCH colder) than Earth and receives half the sunlight.
I assume you're clueless if you don't grasp the difference between lightweight single passenger sport aircraft and commuter aircraft. The former is no more a prototype for the latter than an econobox rice burner is a prototype for a Formula One race car. There's a massive difference in degree and kind.