Its not efficiency, its dead-end technology. What the USAF (and by extension NASA) developed in the X-15 program directly fed into the development of future US spacecraft. The X-15 used a bipropellant liquid fueled engine, something that can potentially be upgraded to reach orbit. A hybrid rocket, as far as we can tell, can't practically be upgraded beyond what they are doing already (very low energy, sub-orbital millionaire hops).
Typical for a market fundamentalist, you misunderstand Occam's razor and assume the simplest (and thus cheapest) solution is *always* the best.
The spaceship has essentially zero horizontal velocity, it flies directly upwards to gain the required altitude. In order to get to orbit, it would need to do as it does at the moment *in addition to* gaining that huge amount of kinetic energy you correctly calculated. Clearly, these 'SpaceShips' are no where near true orbital craft.
Got a point actually. Especially considering a spokesman for the company said they were going to offer flights *into* the Aurora, with a few millimetres of plastic your only shielding. It'll be a very pretty sight, something that you would tell your grandkids about if the trip didn't sterilise you.
Ah yes, the private sector managing to replicate the X-15 flights of the 1960s, 50 years late! and doing so using demonstrably simpler and less powerful rocket technology (and handholding from NASA when their N20 tanks explode on the ground). Go free market!
100km suborbital is "half" of orbital flight? and this gets modded 'Informative'?
Presumably 'half' is a purely qualitative guess by someone who doesn't understand newtonian mechanics?
Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit. Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit. TSC isn't going to build an orbital spacecraft any time soon, sorry to burst your bubble.
Stupid fucking Tory. The 'output' of the NHS is a population who doesn't have to worry about their healthcare not being covered if they don't have a job. Diseconomies of scale are the price you pay for doing healthcare at this level, but its a tiny, tiny price to pay for the continued health security of British people. Take your idiotic Hannanist view and fuck off to America, kthx.
There is nothing in your post to refute, as it is devoid of informed or factual content. You are just a sad, pathetic human being who gets off spewing factually inaccurate hate on web forums. I stand by my initial assessment, you prick.
1. They promised to ringfence funding for the NHS, and even assuming they keep that promise, that wouldn't mean they aren't going to sabotage it with restructuring.
2. Only a deeply, deeply moronic person would consider the 1997 onward Labour government to be left wing at all. They were also neoliberal just not so extreme as the Tories.
This is why NICE (the real life 'death panels') used a "quality adjusted life year" metric for evaluating which drugs are to be available on the NHS - not because they want old people to die quicker of course, but because they've got a single pool of money to use for drugs and ones that add only a few miserable weeks to a sick persons life have an opportunity cost in terms of the drugs that could help other people live longer and/or happier.
Yes, so the ability to casually drop into the doctor if something is feeling a bit iffy might be a factor here. People with a civilised healthcare system in their country are more likely to err on the side of a visit to the doctor than people who are being held hostage by health insurance companies.
Also bear in mind in the UK we now have a foaming-at-the-mouth radical neoliberal government, the type who says "Government is terrible! And when we get elected we are going to prove it!". They are intentionally gutting the NHS from the inside in order to make it look bad so they can move in after a few years and say "Socialised healthcare doesn't work" and sell the whole think off to their Eton/Oxbridge mates.
Also, the British thinktank who instituted this are a right-wing one, no doubt plotting to destroy the NHS alongside the Tory allies. So they publish a non-peer reviewed piece of 'research' designed to conclude what they want it to conclude. Bullshit.
The Tories recently gutted NICE, the body that evaluates the cost effectiveness of drugs to see if they should be made available on the NHS. They were doing a fine job, but got nothing but shit because they prevented pharmaceutical companies gouging into the state healthcare providers ample budget. When retards in the US talk about 'death panels' they are usually referring to these guys, and they don't get much of a good press in the UK either.
Basically, they talked to terminal patients to find out how much of their life they would be willing to give up to remain in good health for the rest of their life, and used this to calibrate a 'quality adjusted life year' which represented the value of a drug. Thus they could reject a hugely overpriced drug that added 2 weeks to the life of a late-stage cancer patient and spend the money saved on a drug that might allow a very sick child to reach adulthood. That second part *never* got a mention by the rightwing critics. When opportunity costs are being used to make the state healthcare system more efficient whilst forcing drug companies to charge realistic prices based on what their products can actually do, the right suddenly decides to reject economic language and talk shit about 'death panels' and NICE 'killing patients'.
Yes, we ration healthcare in this country - but up until now it has been based on how much extra life (across the whole population) that healthcare can give. The US rations healthcare too - based on how rich or poor you are. Our system is, frankly, better.
Such a society can be seen as admirible, but on the flipside you make it sound like the concept of "work-life balance" would be utterly alien to most Koreans. The notion that you are worthless if you aren't putting in 20 hours unpaid overtime a week is as destructive as the (supposed) sense of entitlement and 'laziness' in western cultures.
I have a 12 week old kitten, recently visited by three small children (aged 5, 3 and 6 months). The 3 and 5 year old were very gentle with her and could basically play with her unsupervised (and did so at several points). These were not unusually well behaved British children.
You don't have to pass the Turing test; you just have to get your robot to simulate as much agency and intention as a small animal and they won't destroy it on purpose. Children raised properly aren't mindlessly destructive.
For a better analysis, lets review the story so far:
1. A group of highly qualified academics publish research showing that hybrid rocket engines *may* have a polluting effect far out of proportion to the emissions they have on paper. The researchers are careful to stress the word *may*
2. They find another expert in the field who says "This is interesting, but not a definitive conclusion" i.e. agrees with the assessment of the original team.
3. Spokespeople for corporations who want to make profits from the use of hybrid rockets say its all bullshit, despite these spokespeople having no real qualifications.
Then you come along with some volcano analogy, despite the fact the entire study is based on the *high altitude* generation of soot particles and I haven't seen any flying volcanos recently.
When science says things you don't like, and you decide to dismiss the academic structures on which science is based just because you don't like the new (possible) reality, that is a bit of a dick move.
Here is the real bitch though; nobody is going anywhere significant in N20/rubber hybrid rockets. They are good for quick-and-easy sub-orbital rides because they are safe and simple to build, but to get into orbit you need more powerful fuels which likely do not have the soot problem - so if space tourism does take off and get some non-pathetic technology, they will have moved on from producing soot-rich exhausts anyhow.
Yeah, this sounds like the kind of crap normally put out by right-wing think tanks to soften up the populace for brutal cuts to public services. Fact is, Birminghams a big city and its IT services are bound to be costly simply due to scale. The deficit hawks always exploit this fact to come up with big, scary sounding numbers to show government 'waste'. After all, which sounds worse, "Government spends £1 billion on X" or "Government spends £16 per person on X"? Both of course mathematically equivalent.
Massaging the numbers doesn't hurt either. Chav-baiter Jeremy Kyle recently whined in The Sun about there being a £192 billion welfare bill and then starts complaining about people without jobs basically being subhuman - as if the entire £192 billion were spent on jobseekers allowance - the reality is that only £2.9 billion is spent on it, and the vast majority of that bill goes to supporting children, people on state pensions, and the disabled. But don't let facts get in the way of scapegoating the unemployed, Kyle.
There is only one source of our current financial woes, and it lives in the City of London. Right-wing think tanks are constantly putting out this bullshit as a misdirection technique. The bankers want us to blame some defenceless underclass instead of marching on their bonus-bought mansions with torches and pitchforks...
Translation into plain English: Even if life-bearing planets need to be volcanically active, volcanically active planets are not necessarily life-bearing because there are other factors required.
You made a good enough point, but did you have to labour it so much? This is science, not postmodernism.
Furthermore, in most English Departments there is broad agreement on when its reasonable to start trotting out 1984 references, and as a response to any academic consensus whatsoever is not such a time.
I'm currently reading The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and it seems to support what you are saying, possibly.
They show that there are strong correlations (and, before anyone starts, explain causes as well) between inequality and negative social outcomes whilst there is no real correlation between average wealth in a society and those same outcomes, when looking at rich nations. They are not talking about 'happiness' per se, but I suspect most people would consider issues of education, crime etc. to be factors in their own happiness.
Note: I am aware certain people hate this book and will immediately link to what they consider 'refutations' of its ideas that have been put out by right-wing think tanks. As I said, the book refers to peer-reviewed literature constantly. All the responses so far - yes I have read them - skip over the whole scientific credibility thing and use the word 'probably' a lot.
How does inflation 'know' to make sure that poor people stay on the equivalent of 11k a year? More to the point, how does it 'know' to keep this poverty level different in different countries?
I don't know much about economics, but I realise that inflation isn't some kind of magic reset button that wipes away any changes in incomes. Lets say a country suddenly found valuable natural resources in its territory and used the sale of it to make its citizens wealthier. Would inflation erase that gain? Of course not, because the money corresponds to something that actually has value. This also works in practice as well, as the above scenario is pretty much what happened to Norway when North Sea oil was found, and the result is a country with the highest standard of living on the planet by some metrics, one that has a similar GDP/capita to the US, none of which has been eliminated immediately by inflation as you would suggest.
May depend on what kind of aircraft Ryanair flies, if previous discussions of air safety had any substance to them.
Recall the Air France flight that came down over the Atlantic, and it led to a debate of human vs. computer control in passenger aircraft. Lots of it boiled down to Americans and Europeans beating the our-engineers-are-smarter-than-you drum at each other, despite the fact that both Airbus and Boeing have comparable and very good safety records with their respective approaches. If anything the debate was made more heated because there is so little in it.
Anyhow, this may be a case where it does make a difference. Removing a co-pilot might be a completely different proposition in an Airbus or a Boeing.
Nah, he just plays starcraft 2 on battle.net all day. I've seen him online as a matter of fact. He ragequit on me the other day when I medivac dropped his base and said 'lol bay of pigs gg'
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Its not efficiency, its dead-end technology. What the USAF (and by extension NASA) developed in the X-15 program directly fed into the development of future US spacecraft. The X-15 used a bipropellant liquid fueled engine, something that can potentially be upgraded to reach orbit. A hybrid rocket, as far as we can tell, can't practically be upgraded beyond what they are doing already (very low energy, sub-orbital millionaire hops).
Typical for a market fundamentalist, you misunderstand Occam's razor and assume the simplest (and thus cheapest) solution is *always* the best.
The spaceship has essentially zero horizontal velocity, it flies directly upwards to gain the required altitude. In order to get to orbit, it would need to do as it does at the moment *in addition to* gaining that huge amount of kinetic energy you correctly calculated. Clearly, these 'SpaceShips' are no where near true orbital craft.
Got a point actually. Especially considering a spokesman for the company said they were going to offer flights *into* the Aurora, with a few millimetres of plastic your only shielding. It'll be a very pretty sight, something that you would tell your grandkids about if the trip didn't sterilise you.
Ah yes, the private sector managing to replicate the X-15 flights of the 1960s, 50 years late! and doing so using demonstrably simpler and less powerful rocket technology (and handholding from NASA when their N20 tanks explode on the ground). Go free market!
100km suborbital is "half" of orbital flight? and this gets modded 'Informative'?
Presumably 'half' is a purely qualitative guess by someone who doesn't understand newtonian mechanics?
Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit. Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit. TSC isn't going to build an orbital spacecraft any time soon, sorry to burst your bubble.
Stupid fucking Tory. The 'output' of the NHS is a population who doesn't have to worry about their healthcare not being covered if they don't have a job. Diseconomies of scale are the price you pay for doing healthcare at this level, but its a tiny, tiny price to pay for the continued health security of British people. Take your idiotic Hannanist view and fuck off to America, kthx.
There is nothing in your post to refute, as it is devoid of informed or factual content. You are just a sad, pathetic human being who gets off spewing factually inaccurate hate on web forums. I stand by my initial assessment, you prick.
You are an idiot.
1. They promised to ringfence funding for the NHS, and even assuming they keep that promise, that wouldn't mean they aren't going to sabotage it with restructuring.
2. Only a deeply, deeply moronic person would consider the 1997 onward Labour government to be left wing at all. They were also neoliberal just not so extreme as the Tories.
Maybe when you move out of your mothers basement you will have more sympathy for human life, you prick.
People opt not to have procedures. US healthcare is rationed by wealth, this is an empirical fact.
This is why NICE (the real life 'death panels') used a "quality adjusted life year" metric for evaluating which drugs are to be available on the NHS - not because they want old people to die quicker of course, but because they've got a single pool of money to use for drugs and ones that add only a few miserable weeks to a sick persons life have an opportunity cost in terms of the drugs that could help other people live longer and/or happier.
Yes, so the ability to casually drop into the doctor if something is feeling a bit iffy might be a factor here. People with a civilised healthcare system in their country are more likely to err on the side of a visit to the doctor than people who are being held hostage by health insurance companies.
Also bear in mind in the UK we now have a foaming-at-the-mouth radical neoliberal government, the type who says "Government is terrible! And when we get elected we are going to prove it!". They are intentionally gutting the NHS from the inside in order to make it look bad so they can move in after a few years and say "Socialised healthcare doesn't work" and sell the whole think off to their Eton/Oxbridge mates.
Expect more of these lies in the future.
Also, the British thinktank who instituted this are a right-wing one, no doubt plotting to destroy the NHS alongside the Tory allies. So they publish a non-peer reviewed piece of 'research' designed to conclude what they want it to conclude. Bullshit.
The Tories recently gutted NICE, the body that evaluates the cost effectiveness of drugs to see if they should be made available on the NHS. They were doing a fine job, but got nothing but shit because they prevented pharmaceutical companies gouging into the state healthcare providers ample budget. When retards in the US talk about 'death panels' they are usually referring to these guys, and they don't get much of a good press in the UK either.
Basically, they talked to terminal patients to find out how much of their life they would be willing to give up to remain in good health for the rest of their life, and used this to calibrate a 'quality adjusted life year' which represented the value of a drug. Thus they could reject a hugely overpriced drug that added 2 weeks to the life of a late-stage cancer patient and spend the money saved on a drug that might allow a very sick child to reach adulthood. That second part *never* got a mention by the rightwing critics. When opportunity costs are being used to make the state healthcare system more efficient whilst forcing drug companies to charge realistic prices based on what their products can actually do, the right suddenly decides to reject economic language and talk shit about 'death panels' and NICE 'killing patients'.
Yes, we ration healthcare in this country - but up until now it has been based on how much extra life (across the whole population) that healthcare can give. The US rations healthcare too - based on how rich or poor you are. Our system is, frankly, better.
The level of work ethic he suggested strongly implied it. Don't try to project your racism on me!
Such a society can be seen as admirible, but on the flipside you make it sound like the concept of "work-life balance" would be utterly alien to most Koreans. The notion that you are worthless if you aren't putting in 20 hours unpaid overtime a week is as destructive as the (supposed) sense of entitlement and 'laziness' in western cultures.
Would your children disassemble a cat?
I have a 12 week old kitten, recently visited by three small children (aged 5, 3 and 6 months). The 3 and 5 year old were very gentle with her and could basically play with her unsupervised (and did so at several points). These were not unusually well behaved British children.
You don't have to pass the Turing test; you just have to get your robot to simulate as much agency and intention as a small animal and they won't destroy it on purpose. Children raised properly aren't mindlessly destructive.
This offends your worldview so you dismiss it.
For a better analysis, lets review the story so far:
1. A group of highly qualified academics publish research showing that hybrid rocket engines *may* have a polluting effect far out of proportion to the emissions they have on paper. The researchers are careful to stress the word *may*
2. They find another expert in the field who says "This is interesting, but not a definitive conclusion" i.e. agrees with the assessment of the original team.
3. Spokespeople for corporations who want to make profits from the use of hybrid rockets say its all bullshit, despite these spokespeople having no real qualifications.
Then you come along with some volcano analogy, despite the fact the entire study is based on the *high altitude* generation of soot particles and I haven't seen any flying volcanos recently.
When science says things you don't like, and you decide to dismiss the academic structures on which science is based just because you don't like the new (possible) reality, that is a bit of a dick move.
Here is the real bitch though; nobody is going anywhere significant in N20/rubber hybrid rockets. They are good for quick-and-easy sub-orbital rides because they are safe and simple to build, but to get into orbit you need more powerful fuels which likely do not have the soot problem - so if space tourism does take off and get some non-pathetic technology, they will have moved on from producing soot-rich exhausts anyhow.
Yeah, this sounds like the kind of crap normally put out by right-wing think tanks to soften up the populace for brutal cuts to public services. Fact is, Birminghams a big city and its IT services are bound to be costly simply due to scale. The deficit hawks always exploit this fact to come up with big, scary sounding numbers to show government 'waste'. After all, which sounds worse, "Government spends £1 billion on X" or "Government spends £16 per person on X"? Both of course mathematically equivalent.
Massaging the numbers doesn't hurt either. Chav-baiter Jeremy Kyle recently whined in The Sun about there being a £192 billion welfare bill and then starts complaining about people without jobs basically being subhuman - as if the entire £192 billion were spent on jobseekers allowance - the reality is that only £2.9 billion is spent on it, and the vast majority of that bill goes to supporting children, people on state pensions, and the disabled. But don't let facts get in the way of scapegoating the unemployed, Kyle.
There is only one source of our current financial woes, and it lives in the City of London. Right-wing think tanks are constantly putting out this bullshit as a misdirection technique. The bankers want us to blame some defenceless underclass instead of marching on their bonus-bought mansions with torches and pitchforks...
Translation into plain English: Even if life-bearing planets need to be volcanically active, volcanically active planets are not necessarily life-bearing because there are other factors required.
You made a good enough point, but did you have to labour it so much? This is science, not postmodernism.
Furthermore, in most English Departments there is broad agreement on when its reasonable to start trotting out 1984 references, and as a response to any academic consensus whatsoever is not such a time.
I'm currently reading The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and it seems to support what you are saying, possibly.
They show that there are strong correlations (and, before anyone starts, explain causes as well) between inequality and negative social outcomes whilst there is no real correlation between average wealth in a society and those same outcomes, when looking at rich nations. They are not talking about 'happiness' per se, but I suspect most people would consider issues of education, crime etc. to be factors in their own happiness.
Note: I am aware certain people hate this book and will immediately link to what they consider 'refutations' of its ideas that have been put out by right-wing think tanks. As I said, the book refers to peer-reviewed literature constantly. All the responses so far - yes I have read them - skip over the whole scientific credibility thing and use the word 'probably' a lot.
How does inflation 'know' to make sure that poor people stay on the equivalent of 11k a year? More to the point, how does it 'know' to keep this poverty level different in different countries?
I don't know much about economics, but I realise that inflation isn't some kind of magic reset button that wipes away any changes in incomes. Lets say a country suddenly found valuable natural resources in its territory and used the sale of it to make its citizens wealthier. Would inflation erase that gain? Of course not, because the money corresponds to something that actually has value. This also works in practice as well, as the above scenario is pretty much what happened to Norway when North Sea oil was found, and the result is a country with the highest standard of living on the planet by some metrics, one that has a similar GDP/capita to the US, none of which has been eliminated immediately by inflation as you would suggest.
May depend on what kind of aircraft Ryanair flies, if previous discussions of air safety had any substance to them.
Recall the Air France flight that came down over the Atlantic, and it led to a debate of human vs. computer control in passenger aircraft. Lots of it boiled down to Americans and Europeans beating the our-engineers-are-smarter-than-you drum at each other, despite the fact that both Airbus and Boeing have comparable and very good safety records with their respective approaches. If anything the debate was made more heated because there is so little in it.
Anyhow, this may be a case where it does make a difference. Removing a co-pilot might be a completely different proposition in an Airbus or a Boeing.
Nah, he just plays starcraft 2 on battle.net all day. I've seen him online as a matter of fact. He ragequit on me the other day when I medivac dropped his base and said 'lol bay of pigs gg'