Posts by MachDiamond

"s that correct? Sounds very complicated! Why can't they just have the moon lander and everything else all in one rocket like Apollo?"

Mission creep. This time they need to bring tents, cookstoves, sporting equipment and more comfortable chairs. I would think it would be easier to pre-position all of the gear and go with as simple of a human transport as possible. They might even want to pre-land something by remote control as a back up. I'd also rather see investigation into what looks like caves more than a landing at the south pole. It those black circles are caves that can be sealed up and used to start a base, trips to look for water can be postponed.

Re: Delay

"The first launch was stacked and waiting for clearance for months. "

Elon spends an inordinate amount of time not going through proper channels. Boca Chica was never approved for Starship testing and flights and sits in the midst of 4 sensitive nature preserves. The Army Corp of Engineers had to close out an application for a flame trench when SpaceX failed to communicate with them at all and SX has no permission to use their "not a flame trench" rocket bidet. There are also mandatory requirements for the government agencies to post notices and give time for public response. This sort of thing is no secret which is why it's a good idea to work closely with the regulators to make sure you understand the timelines and when you need to have studies completed and documents submitted for review.

Re: No-one..

"They got the data they wanted."

At the time nobody seems to have had a clue that Starship had exploded. If they had some data, they would have known this little thing.

Re: No-one..

"And now over a year after that flight still has not managed to do a flight with astronauts?"

There's a huge question mark when it comes to whether hardware will be ready and whose hardware will wind up making the trip(s). Until that's sorted, why would there be any need to send astronauts on a sightseeing trip? There will need to be extensive training for everybody involved as this is all brand new.

Re: Who wants a second hand EV?

"New EV sales are doing quite well. It's the second hand market that is dire. Prices have been falling month on month."

There's not a lot in the US worth buying used right now and not likely much for some time. I was on the brink of getting a job where they had free EV charging and was looking at 1st gen Nissan Leafs. They get around 70miles of range by the time they hit the used market, but they are also dirt cheap. I figured I'd get one to commute to work and back (40miles both ways) and save my ICEV for longer trips. Free fuel and lower maintenance costs would have more than offset buying a second car.

Re: From the inside...

"Musk goes fast, tests out the design by launching it, then going back with lessons on what worked, what didn't work and making changes.

"

You forget to add that SpaceX misses deadlines as well. They were four years late in delivering a qualified capsule to haul astronauts to and from ISS. They are also only slightly cheaper than the Russians.

Re: BIG FAT Problem:

"I presume you're exaggerating for effect, but frankly that's a pretty stupid comment"

The ink thing is a reference to "Snowcrash". The mention of chipping people is already out there. It's being sold as more "convenient" for people to have a chip in their hand to access their workplace, buy from vending machines and unlock their car. I know somebody that sort of DIY'd a chip in their hand to start their car. (They had somebody quasi-medical person do the implanting). Eww.

Yes, your face is out there if you choose it to be, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea for government agencies to be tracking you as a matter of accepted policy. FR has faults so if it's brought into the mainstream and its flaws are constantly mentioned, requiring everybody get chipped as a way to cure those failings is an easy next step. Not required to go about your own daily business, but required if you want to fly or enter a government building, receive benefits etc. For all practical purposes, you might have to get it.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"Burning 3m tonnes of forest is somehow 'Green', at least in the most important sense of keeping the subsidiy money pouring in."

But it's US forest, not British forest. Totally different.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"I'm still getting some new electronics packaged in expanded polystyrene, and I can't work out why this is allowed, when the cardboard-based packing materials do the job just as well and are compostable)"

The almost universal answer to "why" is money. EPS is dirt cheap, easy to form and cut. To get formed pulp packaging is expensive to tool and requires buying a lot more pieces before it's at parity with EPS. Paper has to be pulped, formed into shape and then dried before being useable. The heat can be quite expensive. To make it much easier and cost effective, it is another business that would do much better if it could buy heat from an adjacent power generation plant.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"For a bit of context 650GWh of storage is about 10 *million* EV batteries. No worries, we'll just get them all to pull over and plug into the grid. "

Many personal vehicles spend most of their time sitting so there's no need to get them to pull over. There just needs to be lots of places to plug them in so they can be used as grid storage batteries. No, you wouldn't get into your car to find the battery totally flat. People would be able to set their car so they have the power that they need and can take advantage of low prices when there is an excess of supply (lots of wind, middle of the night) and also make some money selling power back when there is high demand.

Re: There it is

"cities are going to have to get their heads round the idea that some office property is going to be converted into residential."

The problem is that many office buildings don't lend themselves to being able to be converted. There isn't infrastructure installed to support lots of apartments. If they just want to do one or two flats per floor, that might be possible. I've seen some interviews with builders illustrating how much would have to be done and what the costs might be.

If the jobs leave downtown, why would people want to move in? There might wind up being a reverse commute.

Re: Stick

"OTOH if I weren't retired there's now no way you could pay me enough to commute into London for more than one day. Not one day a week, just one day. "

I can be bought, but it's not cheap. I've taken work outside my normal service area at a premium and it's worked out fine. I wind up making about twice my normal pay and I enjoy long driving trips outside of big cities. I also use the opportunity to do some business on the side picking up things taxed to death in the state I live and reselling them to people I know in town for some extra profit. It's like taking a van to Belgium for ciggies except in the US, there isn't any laws about transporting those cigs across state lines. You are officially prohibited from selling them on without a state tax stamp, but ....... There's plenty more opportunities where that one came from.

Re: Stick

"There is no reason why someone living in the backwoods should be paid lower wage if their work is as good as someone living in London. "

It's a relative thing. I've been badgered by recruiters to consider jobs in the Silicon Valley. The cost of living is so high, that even with a very healthy low six figure salary, I'd have less at the end of the month than I do now working for myself as it pleases me to take on jobs. The bonus for companies to allow people to work from home that can or locate small offices in smaller cities is they can pay lower salaries while at the same time actually compensating those people at a higher effective rate due to the lower cost of living and transportation expenses. A one million dollar home in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco region is a tear down or complete rebuild job on a small lot. If you go by many guidelines on a home cost vs. salary, you'd need to be making more than $1mn a year to buy in those areas if you want something that you can live in right away. Even with a degree from MIT, Oxford, Harvard or Cambridge, you aren't likely going to be offered a position at that sort of starting salary. So you won't be buying a home, you'll be renting a one bedroom flat on the fourth floor with one parking space at $4,000/month if you can find one.

I work about half the time in the field and half at my home office. I don't need enough business wardrobe for 5 days a week in an office and I'm lucky enough that the sort of work I do is mostly nice casual wear rather than a suit/tie. Another big savings.

Re: There it is

"they had better damned well pay me enough to live within walking distance to work."

That's were it's good to dive deep into definitions. What is enough? Just enough to pay very high rents for a tiny flat, ramen noodles and the ability to go to the cinema once a month?

Re: There it is

"Apparently farmland outside Edinburgh has shot up 50% in the last 2 years! All the thousands of houses and the like being built on it means it is worth many millions if you can get permission to throw up a hundred houses "starting from" £400k."

Land zoned for agriculture is usually some of the least expensive. Big companies that own a herd of politicians can buy the land and then get it rezoned for homes which makes them incredible sums of money. The problem is that the biggest keep getting bigger and there is less quality agricultural land for growing food. What's left is further and further away from where's it's needed as well.

Re: There it is

"Trouble is, a lot of them probably pushed our pension pots into them."

That's a big downside to having a pension that you aren't managing yourself.

Having finished making payments on my home a couple of years ago, I see a big advantage to not putting money in a restricted retirement savings account over buying a home and paying down a mortgage. I just wish I'd spotted that when I was much younger. With a pension, you have to live long enough to collect on it. Sometimes you can get an early distribution for hardship reasons without paying big penalties, but that likely means you aren't using the money for enjoyment, but to pay heavy health care bills.

Re: A sizeable chuck of my income comes from rent of the building that my company rents from me.

"No, it's not making money, but it allows to cheat all sort of taxes."

It's not cheating and thinking of it that way isn't doing yourself any good. The tax authority has rigged their calculations so that it's better to earn an income by renting a building you own to a company that you own rather than just having that company own the building itself. Had they done their job right, it would be the same either way, but somebody somewhere that's written the rules is making fist fulls by having it that way.

It's important to understand how certain forms of income are taxed to make better decisions about where you put your money.

Re: There it is

"The council should stick to emptying bins and filling potholes. "

Where I live, they aren't good at either one of those. It's funny you mention these as the road my house is on is really pocked and the trash was failed to be picked up on Friday so the bin is going to be quite full this week (and smelly).

Re: There it is

"More subtly, employers should be looking at the possibility of replacing the city-centre ant-nests with smaller suburban workplaces for those who can't actually work from home for one reason or another."

Precisely. There's no need to have the art department bang alongside accounting. Functional units could be housed in smaller offices or have space available to meet together in different places if many of the staff work from home. If the senior management wants to be on the 40th floor of a downtown high-rise, no problem. They could even have access to CCTV that lets them virtually wander through different offices "to see how everybody is getting on".

With so much outsourcing already going on, companies are already physically divorced from aspects of the things that go into their products and services. If they have staff that don't need to be in a company controlled physical location, having them work from home could be a bonus all around. I work for myself now, but I've had a better home office than when I held an outside job for years now. My electronics bench is also better equipped than where I worked building rockets. If I want to have a creamy chicken, mushroom and garlic pie for lunch (heavy on the garlic), I won't have my colleagues whining about it. (great recipe from John Kirkwood on YT, btw)

Re: Talon

"It fell... with style"

.... and grace.

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

"But the court filing implies that the ads are served based on the user profile."

I don't think any social media company does that 100% of the time. It might be more like 80% of the ads are referenced to the user's generated profile and 20% are not. That lowers the creepy factor and also explores a bit more about the user that the social media company can use to refine the profile. If somebody likes cats and that's all the profile has on them, showing nothing but ads related to cats isn't going to fully exploit that user.

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

"According to X's filing, the pairing was extremely rare and Media Matters had to force it. "

That's why I believe there is far more to it than just what Media Matters is saying. Lots of big companies have staff that do nothing but comb social media to find mentions of the company. If it turns out that those staff members are also finding pairings that their company would object to, that's a problem. Maybe that's what happened, where social media combers were only looking at posts for feedback to the company, they might have also started looking at what sort of ad content was showing up against the company's ads and surrounding user comments too.

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

"Yep, it's strange YT and TikTok get a pass for content/advertising while the focus is on X. "

The difference is you don't see the head of those companies partying with the trolls.

Re: Dan 55's shitty video

"Latency is the problem for geostationary orbit distance from earth, though they are OK for streaming."

Latency from GEO not too bad for most things. Way back I was working as a tech at a Disneyland anniversary getting news agencies sync'd up with their offices via satellite. Due to the way Canada requires sat comms to be done, we had one feed that bounced so many times that there was 4-5 seconds of delay between the broadcast feed and the backhaul. Looked at in terms of total distance, it was around 9.3 million miles. They couldn't do a live broadcast as the delay was too bad. With all of the agencies we had, we were using all of the channels available on the sats and telephone lines.

Re: Memory failure

"And the financial difference is...?"

Elon's big gripe was that people were filling the bins with uneaten food. It's also well known that eating a well balanced meal provides energy to be able to do work and not get "hangry" later in the afternoon and snap at your co-workers. The cost is the same, but the return is different.

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

"Often what holds up a money making scheme is ethics, find a figurehead that can make it happen and then you have a point to both applaud when it goes right, and axe when it goes wrong, replace with a different monster and continue."

I'm sure that if I went into weapons R&D, I'd have a much higher net worth, but I made the decision long before Uni that it was a path I would not tread.

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

"But if Twitter can't stand on its own two feet without being propped up by advertisers then surely that's just the capitalist market"

Wait! What?

Propped up?

Advertisers are the customer in the same way that advertisers are the customers for magazines, newspapers, TV channels, etc. Elon is talking about the trove of user submitted content they can sell to train AI, but I'm a bit skeptical about that. Somebody like FaceBook that doesn't have an arbitrary size limit on posts has much better material for AI systems to chew on.

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

"I bet Soros and his Stalinist comrades are grinding their teeth in anger due to the existence of a large public platform that they can't censor."

I don't think they would have to play a particularly long game to allow Xitter to implode and scoop up the bits at auction for pennies.

"Why isn't Elon's other companies filling in the gaps that are left by the leaving advertisers if it is so amazing? /Sarcasm"

I think that some of that has been happening. If Tesla is going to do any advertising, the first place you'd expect to see those ads is Xitter. SpaceX could buy adspace, but since there's no need for SX to advertise, it's a bit more suspicious. The same for The Boring Company (Elon's, not the older Boring Company in Las Vegas.) Neuralink could advertise, but they're still in the R&D phase without a product. It's a way for Elon to move money to Xitter in a way that has a veneer of plausible deniability when the lawsuits are filed.

"So no, an advertiser can not dictate what I can say in public "

Yes and no. They can't dictate what you say in public in the classic form of going outside, standing on something and having your say. What they can do is refuse to fund venues where you might be heard by more than a handful of people. The classic gatekeepers have been newspapers, magazines, radio programmers and TV stations. They've all had to moderate their content even in nominally free countries to keep advertisers happy. That hasn't changed.

Re: It's a conspiracy!

"What's a few billions in losses to Musk when he has the financial support of these autoritarians behind him???"

Elon says he expects to spend a couple of billion in 2024 on Starship. If he can't raise that with other people's money, he'll need to (finally) put in some more of his own. He's taken US taxpayer money to build a lunar lander and if that's not accomplished, even late as it will be at this point, the US Government may take steps which could mean the end of SpaceX as an EM enterprise. A few million can be forgiven, but not $3bn. Elon needs to have some big cash reserves to back up his mouth.

Re: the will of advertisers

"WHy does Musk have to increase Twitter's value for it to be a success?"

A successful business earns a profit. A successful hobby can lose money all year long, but the tax people eventually start to ask questions if the enterprise is claimed to be a business.

Re: Maybe intentional

"The only thing Musk is good at is talking sh!te"

I don't know about that. If he applied himself, he could be good at testing experimental parachutes.

Re: Maybe intentional

"Plus he's been doing the capitalist thing and ruthlessly cutting the fat."

By all accounts, he didn't take any time to make a distinction between the core staff and the fat. He just started in with the scythe and had to go back in with some triage when it came to light that some of those people had contracts he couldn't just terminate at will without some serious compensation.

If he would have immediately started moving operations to other areas with lower costs, I would have applauded that. Why does an internet based company need offices in the most expensive of large city downtowns? Since Elon stopped paying rents, this option isn't an option. Any new landlord would want rents for at least a year in advance although for US$1mn, he could purchase a decent office block in a small city. He'd also only need to pay half the salary to employees for an equivalent standard of living.

"You know it's going to be awful, but you just can't look away."

The suspense is killing me, I hope it lasts.

Re: Why?

"You will need to change the batteries eventually..."

Ok, it's not a problem to change batteries. If the control board has been replaced, there won't be any DRM associated with chipped battery packs where the control board will have a tizzy and reject anything not anointed by Honda. I don't think that it would fall afoul of DMCA legislation about circumventing DRM.