The difference is that larger rockets, while having a lower dollar per kilogram cost, can only put up a couple of satellites at a time. So while a $60M Falcon 9 for example can put much larger payloads into orbit at an order of magnitude lower $/kg, in reality, you'd only be able to put a couple satellites at most into orbit with a single vehicle. So therefore, you're really paying about $30M per satellite versus the $10M per satellite of the WhiteKnight.
You said it yourself, the NUMMI factory can produce half a million vehicles a year. That's a large number, but that's still only a fraction of several million vehicles per year in Tesla's stated ambition. Last I checked, Fremont doesn't have room to scale that facility up five or ten times. He's going to have to go out and start setting up new factories which is a big task. And again, this is only talking about fabrication and final assembly, he's also going to have to scale up his supply chain, and that may actually be a more difficult proposition whether he in-sources it or goes outside.
This of course is assuming that he can even get his production numbers up, and right now, Tesla is still struggling to scale up from the 500/month they're producing right now. I'm not saying he can't do it, but I say the odds are far against him.
I have tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and Tesla, but ramping up production to that of a top five or even top ten automobile manufacturer is almost unrealistically ambitious. Building up the supply chain for the materials, hiring and training workers, setting up factories, etc... these are things that take years to do even under ideal circumstances. The fact that they're having difficultly with numbers and quality at such a small batch just makes it more complex.
I've also talked with a few industrial engineers that specialize in this type of manufacturing, and at least based on the videos released, the way his assembly lines are setup right now are not going to scale up well. For him to meet his production goals, he's going to have to completely redo the way he does fabrication and final assembly. Should also be pointed out too that the NUMMI plant they're operating out of produced at its peak 6,000 vehicles a week: a healthy number, but an order of magnitude lower than his goals. He will have to expand, probably build more factories, and that will take time. Again, these are just the issues of the factory, it doesn't even go into the other issues.
Easily solved: all one has to do is help local Greenland residents "liberate" themselves from their colonial Danish overloads and create themselves a new, frozen petro-state with quasi-loyalties to its liberators. The United States, Russia, China, Canada... same result.
I think you're better off just going to graduate school, but it's not going to be easy. However, you may need to take some classes at a local university or community college to shore up some fundamentals (advanced mathematics, basic sciences, etc.) depending on what you did and did not take as an undergrad. Another compromise that may be a little bit easier to make is to jump into fields such as systems engineering or industrial engineering. That path may have less resistance compared to fields with technical depth that build up more from undergraduate courses (mechanical, civil, electrical, computer science, etc.).
This is absurd. I would understand if this had been funded by Department of Defense or DHS money, but this is a small grant by the National Science Foundation to study an interesting sociology problem that many people ask. Saying its some grand conspiracy for mind control is like saying the NSF is funding biology research to better understand how to deploy biological weapons, funding chemistry to build better bombs, physics to build better listening devices, or funding computer vision to build a better spy satellite. If you honestly feel the NSF is a front for government mind control, then why do we even bother publicly funding ANY science research since most can have "dual use"?
Also, look at the people who are railing against this particular piece of spending. Congressman Lamar Smith for example, has been aggressively tinkering with NSF and USG scientific funding in general, believing that the US should slash funding of sociological, psychological, and climate change research. I'm sure he threw the mind control one in there to help rile people up for his crusade against what he views as wasteful government spending.
Yet wealthy men and wealthy companies become wealthy because they know how to calculate, and recalculate, risks and financial cases especially after catastrophic losses like this. Hopefully this loss won't tip the balance to less profitable and lead to cancellation.
People forget too that NASA's manned spaceflight is extremely safe and "routine" because it forces its contractors to place layer after layer of redundancy on its programs. NASA paid a premium to buy that extra percentage point of safety.
Problem is, no matter what aircraft manufacturers may say, its the airlines that determine the seating configuration, and sadly, they're going to just pocket that money and cram in one extra row.
I would only point out that the poverty hole the People's Republic of China dragged all those individuals was created directly by poor PRC policies back in the 1960s and 1970s, so if you give them credit for that, you also have to give the United States tremendous credit for ending slavery and desegregation. That, or neither can claim an advantage in that regard.
We do have something similar, although it is called Texas.
Not really. Less than 20% Texans are polled to be in support of secession. That falls in line with the national average of all US citizens who want their states to cede, from New Englanders wanting to join Canada to Silicon Valley types fantasizing about their own libertarian utopia.
The challenge isn't registering for the course but actually passing the course. My undergrad used an equivalent Computer Science intro course as a weed out course for the entire college of engineering. Did a pretty effective job of it too.
While it is a bit complex on the surface, the USPTO's metrics are pretty straight forward: an X level patent examiner should be able to examine Y number of patents in a given quarter. Some patent applications take longer than others, but it all averages out in a year. Meet the minimum requirements, and you get paid. Exceed those requirements, and you get a bonus. In my opinion, its probably one of the most meritocratic agencies in the entire Federal government. All the time tracking issues revolves around the second time card they keep to try and fine tune what Y should be for X, but I didn't get a feel that the situation was so bad that it would significantly impact the numbers.
As foreign policy goes, the US' policy on Cuba is probably one of the single most stupid and short-sighted foreign policies there is.
All politics is domestic, and Cuba is the same. As long as there is a very vocal community of Cuban expats that have an axe to grind with the Castro-created regime, the United States will not be lifting sanctions. I think as that generation gets older and fades away, we'll see an easing, but while they're still alive and politically active, change will not happen. Cubans Americans after all make up a large and politically active faction in a crucial swing state (Florida).
The Chinese love to call hypocrisy, about "Well, the US does blah blah blah..." However, look at the Gulf of Mexico, a good comparative example to the South China Sea situation. See, in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States may actually have a strong position than the Chinese, with greater amount of shoreline touching the water and greater military superiority over its neighbors. There's oil in those water, rich fisheries, and its a critical body of water for American security interests. Yet unlike the Chinese, the Americans didn't scoop up the entire region like a hollowed out grapefruit and tell its neighbors FU. Instead, they sat down, from a position of power no less, and negotiated equitable maritime boundaries, not just with friendly nations like Mexico, but with hostile states like the Cubans. However, the Chinese are different, proving quite greedy and trying to essentially annex other nations' EEZ from Malaysia and Brunei up to Korea and Japan. It's a sad state of affairs, and it only serves to unite China's neighbors against it. With actions like that, they really shouldn't question why their neighbors fear them.
Unfortunately, that paradigm for large manufacturing employment doesn't work anymore. Even if you could convince every executive in the United States to follow it, the costs would be so high that they would no longer be competitive globally. They would be driven out of business by more nimble and cheaper foreign competitors that either use advanced automation or dirt cheap third world labor. What an automated factory like Tesla is doing is salvaging what it can, keeping what few jobs are left in the United States.
The problem is that Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of human knowledge, and the community has created an environment that is hostile to fifty percent of the human species. Now one could argue this doesn't matter as much when it comes to topics that are dominated by men or, a bit more of a stretch, topics that are gender neutral, but if they are finding hostility from men on articles about female sexuality, womens' clothes, gender in the workplace, etc. then there's something seriously off right now.
1. SAS wasn't created as an undergrad project, it was a large, multi-university and government agency collaboration with Professor Goodnight, at that time a member of the faculty, one of the researchers.
2. Universities spinoff new companies all the time: this is hardly the first or last time that students and faculty at a university have used their research to start new companies. Nor is NC State particularly unique in this IP clause, and this clause hasn't stopped start ups in the past or present.
3. Goodnight was a statistician, not an engineer (different colleges).
4. Despite your implications that there's bitterness between the two, Goodnight and NC State have very strong relations and a history of collaboration; just this past year, he's got at least a million in scholarships for future statisticians at the university. There's also a lot of research funds, support and materials that flow between him and the university, the Statistics department in particular. I would go so far as to argue that the Statistics department's reputation and ranking are in part driven by the success of SAS.
No, these guys are copping a whole lot of shit for trying to offer no-standards transport in nations that have minimum standards for their public transport services... The EU has a lot of consumer protection laws designed to look after their residents (now there's a thought), a concept that is completely foreign in the US where it seems that only company profits matter.
Gross oversimplification for someone trying to score cheap points and apparently has not been following the adventures of Uber in the United States. The constant, very public fights that Uber has been having in cities across the United States are those very same types of "minimum standards for public transport" that you refer to in the EU.
In particular, I don't know if the Democratically-controlled Senate really wants to create an opening for Republicans to go after their wounded and weakened Democratic White House.
Who knows, maybe the President will come out and say that Senator Feinstein and her congressional staff are connected to foreign terrorists and thus a legitimate intelligence target. Why else would he continue to stand up for Director Brennan? Even in the political cynic in me is surprised that the White House didn't sacrifice him just to make the attention go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, reminds me more of this movie. Better buy a ticket soon!
The difference is that larger rockets, while having a lower dollar per kilogram cost, can only put up a couple of satellites at a time. So while a $60M Falcon 9 for example can put much larger payloads into orbit at an order of magnitude lower $/kg, in reality, you'd only be able to put a couple satellites at most into orbit with a single vehicle. So therefore, you're really paying about $30M per satellite versus the $10M per satellite of the WhiteKnight.
You said it yourself, the NUMMI factory can produce half a million vehicles a year. That's a large number, but that's still only a fraction of several million vehicles per year in Tesla's stated ambition. Last I checked, Fremont doesn't have room to scale that facility up five or ten times. He's going to have to go out and start setting up new factories which is a big task. And again, this is only talking about fabrication and final assembly, he's also going to have to scale up his supply chain, and that may actually be a more difficult proposition whether he in-sources it or goes outside.
This of course is assuming that he can even get his production numbers up, and right now, Tesla is still struggling to scale up from the 500/month they're producing right now. I'm not saying he can't do it, but I say the odds are far against him.
I have tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and Tesla, but ramping up production to that of a top five or even top ten automobile manufacturer is almost unrealistically ambitious. Building up the supply chain for the materials, hiring and training workers, setting up factories, etc... these are things that take years to do even under ideal circumstances. The fact that they're having difficultly with numbers and quality at such a small batch just makes it more complex.
I've also talked with a few industrial engineers that specialize in this type of manufacturing, and at least based on the videos released, the way his assembly lines are setup right now are not going to scale up well. For him to meet his production goals, he's going to have to completely redo the way he does fabrication and final assembly. Should also be pointed out too that the NUMMI plant they're operating out of produced at its peak 6,000 vehicles a week: a healthy number, but an order of magnitude lower than his goals. He will have to expand, probably build more factories, and that will take time. Again, these are just the issues of the factory, it doesn't even go into the other issues.
what does the labor market of the future offer for the common person? I couldn't say. But it will be something. It is always something.
Soylent Green?
Easily solved: all one has to do is help local Greenland residents "liberate" themselves from their colonial Danish overloads and create themselves a new, frozen petro-state with quasi-loyalties to its liberators. The United States, Russia, China, Canada... same result.
I think you're better off just going to graduate school, but it's not going to be easy. However, you may need to take some classes at a local university or community college to shore up some fundamentals (advanced mathematics, basic sciences, etc.) depending on what you did and did not take as an undergrad. Another compromise that may be a little bit easier to make is to jump into fields such as systems engineering or industrial engineering. That path may have less resistance compared to fields with technical depth that build up more from undergraduate courses (mechanical, civil, electrical, computer science, etc.).
This is absurd. I would understand if this had been funded by Department of Defense or DHS money, but this is a small grant by the National Science Foundation to study an interesting sociology problem that many people ask. Saying its some grand conspiracy for mind control is like saying the NSF is funding biology research to better understand how to deploy biological weapons, funding chemistry to build better bombs, physics to build better listening devices, or funding computer vision to build a better spy satellite. If you honestly feel the NSF is a front for government mind control, then why do we even bother publicly funding ANY science research since most can have "dual use"?
Also, look at the people who are railing against this particular piece of spending. Congressman Lamar Smith for example, has been aggressively tinkering with NSF and USG scientific funding in general, believing that the US should slash funding of sociological, psychological, and climate change research. I'm sure he threw the mind control one in there to help rile people up for his crusade against what he views as wasteful government spending.
Yet wealthy men and wealthy companies become wealthy because they know how to calculate, and recalculate, risks and financial cases especially after catastrophic losses like this. Hopefully this loss won't tip the balance to less profitable and lead to cancellation.
People forget too that NASA's manned spaceflight is extremely safe and "routine" because it forces its contractors to place layer after layer of redundancy on its programs. NASA paid a premium to buy that extra percentage point of safety.
Problem is, no matter what aircraft manufacturers may say, its the airlines that determine the seating configuration, and sadly, they're going to just pocket that money and cram in one extra row.
I would only point out that the poverty hole the People's Republic of China dragged all those individuals was created directly by poor PRC policies back in the 1960s and 1970s, so if you give them credit for that, you also have to give the United States tremendous credit for ending slavery and desegregation. That, or neither can claim an advantage in that regard.
New incentive to buy rigid cases. Time to go buy Otterbox stock!
We do have something similar, although it is called Texas.
Not really. Less than 20% Texans are polled to be in support of secession. That falls in line with the national average of all US citizens who want their states to cede, from New Englanders wanting to join Canada to Silicon Valley types fantasizing about their own libertarian utopia.
The challenge isn't registering for the course but actually passing the course. My undergrad used an equivalent Computer Science intro course as a weed out course for the entire college of engineering. Did a pretty effective job of it too.
While it is a bit complex on the surface, the USPTO's metrics are pretty straight forward: an X level patent examiner should be able to examine Y number of patents in a given quarter. Some patent applications take longer than others, but it all averages out in a year. Meet the minimum requirements, and you get paid. Exceed those requirements, and you get a bonus. In my opinion, its probably one of the most meritocratic agencies in the entire Federal government. All the time tracking issues revolves around the second time card they keep to try and fine tune what Y should be for X, but I didn't get a feel that the situation was so bad that it would significantly impact the numbers.
As foreign policy goes, the US' policy on Cuba is probably one of the single most stupid and short-sighted foreign policies there is.
All politics is domestic, and Cuba is the same. As long as there is a very vocal community of Cuban expats that have an axe to grind with the Castro-created regime, the United States will not be lifting sanctions. I think as that generation gets older and fades away, we'll see an easing, but while they're still alive and politically active, change will not happen. Cubans Americans after all make up a large and politically active faction in a crucial swing state (Florida).
If Cuba had oil . . . the embargo would be over really fast.
Ask the Iranians who continue to be under tight US sanctions. Oil hasn't helped them escape thirty years of US economic embargo.
The Chinese love to call hypocrisy, about "Well, the US does blah blah blah..." However, look at the Gulf of Mexico, a good comparative example to the South China Sea situation. See, in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States may actually have a strong position than the Chinese, with greater amount of shoreline touching the water and greater military superiority over its neighbors. There's oil in those water, rich fisheries, and its a critical body of water for American security interests. Yet unlike the Chinese, the Americans didn't scoop up the entire region like a hollowed out grapefruit and tell its neighbors FU. Instead, they sat down, from a position of power no less, and negotiated equitable maritime boundaries, not just with friendly nations like Mexico, but with hostile states like the Cubans. However, the Chinese are different, proving quite greedy and trying to essentially annex other nations' EEZ from Malaysia and Brunei up to Korea and Japan. It's a sad state of affairs, and it only serves to unite China's neighbors against it. With actions like that, they really shouldn't question why their neighbors fear them.
Unfortunately, that paradigm for large manufacturing employment doesn't work anymore. Even if you could convince every executive in the United States to follow it, the costs would be so high that they would no longer be competitive globally. They would be driven out of business by more nimble and cheaper foreign competitors that either use advanced automation or dirt cheap third world labor. What an automated factory like Tesla is doing is salvaging what it can, keeping what few jobs are left in the United States.
The problem is that Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of human knowledge, and the community has created an environment that is hostile to fifty percent of the human species. Now one could argue this doesn't matter as much when it comes to topics that are dominated by men or, a bit more of a stretch, topics that are gender neutral, but if they are finding hostility from men on articles about female sexuality, womens' clothes, gender in the workplace, etc. then there's something seriously off right now.
1. SAS wasn't created as an undergrad project, it was a large, multi-university and government agency collaboration with Professor Goodnight, at that time a member of the faculty, one of the researchers.
2. Universities spinoff new companies all the time: this is hardly the first or last time that students and faculty at a university have used their research to start new companies. Nor is NC State particularly unique in this IP clause, and this clause hasn't stopped start ups in the past or present.
3. Goodnight was a statistician, not an engineer (different colleges).
4. Despite your implications that there's bitterness between the two, Goodnight and NC State have very strong relations and a history of collaboration; just this past year, he's got at least a million in scholarships for future statisticians at the university. There's also a lot of research funds, support and materials that flow between him and the university, the Statistics department in particular. I would go so far as to argue that the Statistics department's reputation and ranking are in part driven by the success of SAS.
No, these guys are copping a whole lot of shit for trying to offer no-standards transport in nations that have minimum standards for their public transport services... The EU has a lot of consumer protection laws designed to look after their residents (now there's a thought), a concept that is completely foreign in the US where it seems that only company profits matter.
Gross oversimplification for someone trying to score cheap points and apparently has not been following the adventures of Uber in the United States. The constant, very public fights that Uber has been having in cities across the United States are those very same types of "minimum standards for public transport" that you refer to in the EU.
In particular, I don't know if the Democratically-controlled Senate really wants to create an opening for Republicans to go after their wounded and weakened Democratic White House.
Who knows, maybe the President will come out and say that Senator Feinstein and her congressional staff are connected to foreign terrorists and thus a legitimate intelligence target. Why else would he continue to stand up for Director Brennan? Even in the political cynic in me is surprised that the White House didn't sacrifice him just to make the attention go away.