The biggest cost is the design and manufacturing of the rocket, and those cost have come down a lot with 3D CAD tools, computer simulations, progress in material sciences, and modern CNC manufacturing.
Industrial use of gold only account for 10% of the mined gold. The rest is hoarded in the form of coins, jewelry and bullion bars. The small amount of industrial use does not explain why it's being sold at such a large premium over production cost.
Designing the architecture and logic is fraction of the engineering effort necessary to design and build a modern high end microprocessor.
In addition, a high end processor needs a complicated motherboard to run it, with high speed memory, and various peripheral I/O systems, driven by separate ASICs, or integrated in the CPU. A desktop PC motherboard is a very complex design, which is only made affordable by huge volumes.
The idea is to greatly reduce the administrative costs of running the system and also remove some of the things that disincentivise work.
The problem is that the administrative costs are only a very small percentage of the overall cost. Accurate overseeing of the system easily saves more money than it costs for any reasonable program.
Why should a certain string of digits have a special value just because it sits on a harddisk platter of a bank, even a fancy one ? There is an infinite supply of digit strings, and also an infinite supply of harddisks. The notion of "printing money" is that there is some sort of scarcity involved, but infinite is infinite, NOT scarcity.
The fundamental premise of fiat money is fatally flawed. Just a speculative bubble on the theory that someone will pay a higher price in the future.
it's hard to understand why they aren't the most wealthy people in the world, and pikers like Buffet need to be schooled by them.
Buffett himself is doing quite well. But the ordinary people who agree with his views are not any wealthier than the ordinary people who invested in bitcoin.
Transaction volume of physical gold is also low. That's why people leave it in a vault, and transact the ownership on paper.
Lightning Network (which is being tested right now) allows a similar mechanism with Bitcoin. You move ownership around, and then after a while, you make a settlement to move the real bitcoin, which then combines an arbitrary number of small transactions into one big one.
So far you haven't pointed out why I would care whether more women enter the STEM fields
And why the focus on STEM fields ? There are lots of jobs that have unequal gender participation, but we don't hear nearly as many complaints about those. The elementary school that my kids went to had 15 female teachers and 1 male one. The only male teacher ended up leaving.
However, if you find that the people who are the "right fit" are all white and male, it's indicative of some sort of problem
Maybe, maybe not. Check out people doing hobby projects with "Arduino" boards on youtube. Most of them are white and male. Is that a problem ? Is there anybody trying to stop other groups buying these boards or recording videos about them ? You can mail order them from Amazon for $30. That's not a huge obstacle for anyone. All the information on how to run them is available on the internet, and nobody is prevented from reading it.
We can't even do that on Earth. So while that would be nice and convenient and all, I don't see why that should be a requirement instead of just dealing with the problem like we do currently.
On Earth we have an established transportation infrastructure, and many industrial sites spread out over the planet.
If you want to kickstart a base on Mars, you need to focus on reducing the launch mass from Earth. Sending all your stuff to one site is going to be insanely expensive as it is. Having to build a few dozen sites across the entire planet, with a usable transportation network between them would be completely out of the question.
Interesting. I wonder how well it would work on Mars.
But even if you can locate all the ores, the big problem on Mars would be transportation. There are no oceans and rivers, no suitable atmosphere for flying, and no roads or train tracks. Transporting resources from one side of the planet to the other, across the rugged terrain would be a huge challenge.
On Mars you can build factories and use local resources
How local are these resources ? Can you land in a random location, start digging, and find useful amounts of all elements you need to build an industrial base ?
Slashdot Mirror
For every job that a robot replaces, they must pay someone the equivalent wage of the pre robot job
How many wages for a tractor ?
no real progress in human space flight.
Sending robots instead of humans is progress.
The biggest cost is the design and manufacturing of the rocket, and those cost have come down a lot with 3D CAD tools, computer simulations, progress in material sciences, and modern CNC manufacturing.
Lightning Network is spinning up as we speak, with near zero transaction costs, and without need for trust in centralized parties.
Industrial use of gold only account for 10% of the mined gold. The rest is hoarded in the form of coins, jewelry and bullion bars. The small amount of industrial use does not explain why it's being sold at such a large premium over production cost.
You can store your bitcoin private key on a USB stick, next to your pile of gold coins, and it will be just as secure.
Designing the architecture and logic is fraction of the engineering effort necessary to design and build a modern high end microprocessor.
In addition, a high end processor needs a complicated motherboard to run it, with high speed memory, and various peripheral I/O systems, driven by separate ASICs, or integrated in the CPU. A desktop PC motherboard is a very complex design, which is only made affordable by huge volumes.
We're going to five connectors.
And two aloe strips.
Anyone can take the bitcoin app, change a few bytes, and grow unlimited tokens at very low cost. No different than tulips.
Sure, but the value of Bitcoin is not the the token. It's the network.
The mining cartels are the new government/banker. Transaction fees, collusion to prevent an increase in block size.
The mining cartels were in favor of increasing block size. It's the bitcoin developers and owners that were against it.
The ordinary people who are Berkshire shareholders are doing just fine, thanks
Ordinary investors in Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple did a lot better.
Bitcoin with its fixed supply seems like a great idea, but you then realize it's a static economy. It cannot grow.
Right. We don't run the economy on gold either. Does that mean it's stupid to own some gold ?
The idea is to greatly reduce the administrative costs of running the system and also remove some of the things that disincentivise work.
The problem is that the administrative costs are only a very small percentage of the overall cost. Accurate overseeing of the system easily saves more money than it costs for any reasonable program.
You can't cough up the $20 million expenses of this program with everybody doing nothing.
If the gold standard, which BTC is supposedly modeled after, was such a great thing, the majority of the world would still be doing it
Central banks still keep gold reserves in their vaults. If gold was such a useless thing, why don't they sell it to the greater fools ?
Why should a certain string of digits have a special value just because it sits on a harddisk platter of a bank, even a fancy one ? There is an infinite supply of digit strings, and also an infinite supply of harddisks. The notion of "printing money" is that there is some sort of scarcity involved, but infinite is infinite, NOT scarcity.
The fundamental premise of fiat money is fatally flawed. Just a speculative bubble on the theory that someone will pay a higher price in the future.
But if you were sane, you'd have cashed out by now
Would you also have recommended cashing out at $1000 or $100 ?
it's hard to understand why they aren't the most wealthy people in the world, and pikers like Buffet need to be schooled by them.
Buffett himself is doing quite well. But the ordinary people who agree with his views are not any wealthier than the ordinary people who invested in bitcoin.
Transaction volume of physical gold is also low. That's why people leave it in a vault, and transact the ownership on paper.
Lightning Network (which is being tested right now) allows a similar mechanism with Bitcoin. You move ownership around, and then after a while, you make a settlement to move the real bitcoin, which then combines an arbitrary number of small transactions into one big one.
Cars can be towed already without requiring a driver.
Possibly the car could be controlled through an app on your phone.
So far you haven't pointed out why I would care whether more women enter the STEM fields
And why the focus on STEM fields ? There are lots of jobs that have unequal gender participation, but we don't hear nearly as many complaints about those. The elementary school that my kids went to had 15 female teachers and 1 male one. The only male teacher ended up leaving.
However, if you find that the people who are the "right fit" are all white and male, it's indicative of some sort of problem
Maybe, maybe not. Check out people doing hobby projects with "Arduino" boards on youtube. Most of them are white and male. Is that a problem ? Is there anybody trying to stop other groups buying these boards or recording videos about them ? You can mail order them from Amazon for $30. That's not a huge obstacle for anyone. All the information on how to run them is available on the internet, and nobody is prevented from reading it.
We can't even do that on Earth. So while that would be nice and convenient and all, I don't see why that should be a requirement instead of just dealing with the problem like we do currently.
On Earth we have an established transportation infrastructure, and many industrial sites spread out over the planet.
If you want to kickstart a base on Mars, you need to focus on reducing the launch mass from Earth. Sending all your stuff to one site is going to be insanely expensive as it is. Having to build a few dozen sites across the entire planet, with a usable transportation network between them would be completely out of the question.
Interesting. I wonder how well it would work on Mars.
But even if you can locate all the ores, the big problem on Mars would be transportation. There are no oceans and rivers, no suitable atmosphere for flying, and no roads or train tracks. Transporting resources from one side of the planet to the other, across the rugged terrain would be a huge challenge.
On Mars you can build factories and use local resources
How local are these resources ? Can you land in a random location, start digging, and find useful amounts of all elements you need to build an industrial base ?
Probably because of the dream of Terraforming, which is theoretically possible on Mars, but not on the Moon.
And if you're just looking for a simple base to launch rockets, then the Earth is much cheaper and simpler.