The Merlin engine has proven to be very reliable. The fact that they get to recover most of the engines and inspect them should help to keep reliability high, or even improve it. Also keep in mind the multiple engine configuration also allows the rocket to complete the mission successfully if one of the engines fails.
A bar of gold doesn't generate any income or other value over time, but you can use it as a store of wealth. You can also store your wealth as a pack of $100 bills in a safe deposit box.
You can already short bitcoin, for instance on the bitfinex exchange.
And when a massive number of people short bitcoin, people that are long bitcoin will panic and sell
Maybe not. Maybe they'll buy some more, thanking you for the low prices. And then the shorts have to panic buy. But if you're so sure that it's going to crash, why don't you open a short position yourself ?
Yesterday, a total of 1 million bitcoins were traded on exchanges for a total of $10 billion. Selling one bitcoin is easy. You can open an account on an exchange, deposit your bitcoin, and as soon as your account is credited, you can sell it the next second and get your $10000 (or whatever the price is at that moment)
That seems more like gambling, which adds more bumps to the market.
If you trade in futures without a corresponding hedge in the underlying market, you are gambling, yes. But that's still providing a useful service to the market. You are assuming a higher risk, but you are reducing the risk of the counterparty.
A mining pool could pre-sell their expected coins, but who besides a gambler would pre-buy?
Someone who wants to hedge currency swings. If you do any kind of business with bitcoin in the future, you can use a future contract to minimize the risk of price changes.
The substance is decentralized storage and transfer of wealth. Future contracts are a useful addition to that. Suppose I hire you to do a job, and I offer you to pay in bitcoin when the job is done. You don't mind getting paid in bitcoin, but you're planning to sell the bitcoin as soon as you get them, and you don't want to risk that the price drops between now and when you get paid.
You can solve that by buying a futures contract for next month that will give you a guaranteed sale price.
Sleeping habits of animals are correlated with body size. A cat, being much smaller than us, has a much higher surface area (square of size) to volume (cube of size) ratio, and requires a relatively higher metabolism to stay warm. Sleeping is simply a way to conserve energy by reducing size of exposed skin area (by curling up in a small ball), and lowering body temperature.
The main purpose of future markets is to allow predictable prices in the future, or for hedging other risks. For instance, an airline can get a futures contract for jet fuel for the next summer, so they can already plan their budget without risking sudden price shocks. At the same time, a refinery can sell that jet fuel for next summer with exactly the same benefits.
Speculators that sit in the middle actually help grease the system by providing liquidity. If jet fuel is cheap now, but the future price is high, it becomes profitable to buy some right now, fill up a storage tank, and sell a contract for the summer. Because of these middle men, sharp shocks in the price of the commodity are smoothed.
20% of the energy needs is not a subtle difference that requires a high level of optimization. Just cutting it down to 19% would make a huge difference in survival chances during a famine, which have been fairly common in our ancestor's history. In fact, during our ancestor's history, the brains went through a phase of rapid growth. The extra advantage of the bigger brain must have outweighed the extra energy consumption, since it would have been trivial to avoid going down that path.
That's a uselessly vague argument. Which part in particular ?
And remember that animals tend to have inactive tissue that are inherited from predecessors, think appendix*.
Evolutionary pressure is for a large part driven by energy requirements. The brain is a huge energy drain, even when you're just sitting doing nothing. In comparison, the appendix takes hardly any energy at all. There would be very little pressure to get rid of the appendix (especially not since it appear to serve some purpose).
In particular, because neuron-count is not that important
Our brains eat up 20% of the energy our body needs. If neuron count wasn't that important, we would have smaller brains, and increase our chance of survival by not having to find so much food.
they can't be trained because they're rather stupid
How well can you be trained ? Would you be able to obey simple commands such as sitting on the ground, or fetching a ball, in return for being told you're such a good boy ?
DNA consists of commonly available ingredients, can guide its own self-assembly
DNA needs a complex environment to duplicate itself, and that environment needs to be duplicated as well. It is highly unlikely that both a piece of suitable DNA, and that complex environment just happened to form by chance. Life must have started with something simpler, and gradually evolved towards the current DNA based system.
If another mechanisms was more viable for the basis of life, then why have none displaced DNA on earth, despite 4 billion years of opportunities?
Because DNA has a head start. Nearly all kinds of biologically active molecules would be interacting with current life forms and get broken down before they got a chance to self-organize.
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe
We don't have sufficient data to claim that it's likely. We only have a single data point, and very little understanding of the mechanism that led to evolution of DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
But it worked in Kerbal Space Program...
The Merlin engine has proven to be very reliable. The fact that they get to recover most of the engines and inspect them should help to keep reliability high, or even improve it. Also keep in mind the multiple engine configuration also allows the rocket to complete the mission successfully if one of the engines fails.
the SaturnV was doing 140 tonne payloads into LEO in the 60s and 70s.
It wasn't very good at soft landings, though.
I may sign up for one subscription, but I'm not going to get $10/month subscriptions for 20 different websites that I occasionally visit.
Always resuscitate them, explain what happened, and then if they protest that they didn't want that, just kill them.
With bitcoin, you can memorize a passphrase that will allow you to recreate your full wallet on the other side of the border.
Each type of coin has its own strengths...
Good one.
How many gold coins can you memorize in your head while you cross the border ?
with magic hindsight glasses the best investment would have been to buy a few thousand coins back when they were effectively worthless
Even if you had made the fortunate decision to buy them for pennies, what's the chance you would have sold them for $5 or $10 or even $100 ?
The dictionary defines it as "an abundance of valuable possessions or money", which is also the meaning I intended.
A bar of gold doesn't generate any income or other value over time, but you can use it as a store of wealth. You can also store your wealth as a pack of $100 bills in a safe deposit box.
You can already short bitcoin, for instance on the bitfinex exchange.
And when a massive number of people short bitcoin, people that are long bitcoin will panic and sell
Maybe not. Maybe they'll buy some more, thanking you for the low prices. And then the shorts have to panic buy. But if you're so sure that it's going to crash, why don't you open a short position yourself ?
Yesterday, a total of 1 million bitcoins were traded on exchanges for a total of $10 billion. Selling one bitcoin is easy. You can open an account on an exchange, deposit your bitcoin, and as soon as your account is credited, you can sell it the next second and get your $10000 (or whatever the price is at that moment)
That seems more like gambling, which adds more bumps to the market.
If you trade in futures without a corresponding hedge in the underlying market, you are gambling, yes. But that's still providing a useful service to the market. You are assuming a higher risk, but you are reducing the risk of the counterparty.
A mining pool could pre-sell their expected coins, but who besides a gambler would pre-buy?
Someone who wants to hedge currency swings. If you do any kind of business with bitcoin in the future, you can use a future contract to minimize the risk of price changes.
The substance is decentralized storage and transfer of wealth. Future contracts are a useful addition to that. Suppose I hire you to do a job, and I offer you to pay in bitcoin when the job is done. You don't mind getting paid in bitcoin, but you're planning to sell the bitcoin as soon as you get them, and you don't want to risk that the price drops between now and when you get paid.
You can solve that by buying a futures contract for next month that will give you a guaranteed sale price.
There's a small difference between being a good boy for fetching a ball, or being a good boy and getting a million dollar paycheck.
Sleeping habits of animals are correlated with body size. A cat, being much smaller than us, has a much higher surface area (square of size) to volume (cube of size) ratio, and requires a relatively higher metabolism to stay warm. Sleeping is simply a way to conserve energy by reducing size of exposed skin area (by curling up in a small ball), and lowering body temperature.
It's not lazy, it's smart.
The main purpose of future markets is to allow predictable prices in the future, or for hedging other risks. For instance, an airline can get a futures contract for jet fuel for the next summer, so they can already plan their budget without risking sudden price shocks. At the same time, a refinery can sell that jet fuel for next summer with exactly the same benefits.
Speculators that sit in the middle actually help grease the system by providing liquidity. If jet fuel is cheap now, but the future price is high, it becomes profitable to buy some right now, fill up a storage tank, and sell a contract for the summer. Because of these middle men, sharp shocks in the price of the commodity are smoothed.
20% of the energy needs is not a subtle difference that requires a high level of optimization. Just cutting it down to 19% would make a huge difference in survival chances during a famine, which have been fairly common in our ancestor's history. In fact, during our ancestor's history, the brains went through a phase of rapid growth. The extra advantage of the bigger brain must have outweighed the extra energy consumption, since it would have been trivial to avoid going down that path.
Read up on evolution and evolutionary pressure
That's a uselessly vague argument. Which part in particular ?
And remember that animals tend to have inactive tissue that are inherited from predecessors, think appendix*.
Evolutionary pressure is for a large part driven by energy requirements. The brain is a huge energy drain, even when you're just sitting doing nothing. In comparison, the appendix takes hardly any energy at all. There would be very little pressure to get rid of the appendix (especially not since it appear to serve some purpose).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In particular, because neuron-count is not that important
Our brains eat up 20% of the energy our body needs. If neuron count wasn't that important, we would have smaller brains, and increase our chance of survival by not having to find so much food.
they can't be trained because they're rather stupid
How well can you be trained ? Would you be able to obey simple commands such as sitting on the ground, or fetching a ball, in return for being told you're such a good boy ?
There's a species of dolphin that has 37 billion, so we're only half as smart as a dolphin!
DNA consists of commonly available ingredients, can guide its own self-assembly
DNA needs a complex environment to duplicate itself, and that environment needs to be duplicated as well. It is highly unlikely that both a piece of suitable DNA, and that complex environment just happened to form by chance. Life must have started with something simpler, and gradually evolved towards the current DNA based system.
If another mechanisms was more viable for the basis of life, then why have none displaced DNA on earth, despite 4 billion years of opportunities?
Because DNA has a head start. Nearly all kinds of biologically active molecules would be interacting with current life forms and get broken down before they got a chance to self-organize.
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe
We don't have sufficient data to claim that it's likely. We only have a single data point, and very little understanding of the mechanism that led to evolution of DNA.
With robots, we won't need seven billion, we can reduce the number to a half billion or so, that's a manageable number.
Why wait ? Without robots we don't need 7 billion either.
Now, what's your proposal to select the 6.5 vs 0.5 billion people ? And what will the exact method of culling ?