snrplfth

9 ms·

1.
by snrplfth 8y ago
Cool, it's like a nature preserve for hookworm.
2.
by snrplfth 9y ago
No worries! I guess I get people's reactions a little - they've heard so many vague plans about "maybe a Mars mission" that never pan out, so when the real thing arrives they're not ready to believe it's seriou
3.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Which is amusing, because @Pinboard absolutely cannot stand SpaceX and mocks them constantly.
4.
by snrplfth 9y ago
That's not a criticism. The Mars cult is a very good thing. For forty years, most space programs have been motivated by the burning urge to...uh...send some more people to Low Earth Orbit, I guess, and eke out marginal improvements on
5.
by snrplfth 9y ago
> Like everything behind their breakthroughs, which they had a few - including landing and turnaround times - is meant to enable the Mars mission. They've been explicit about this since day one. It's not so much a rocket comp
6.
by snrplfth 9y ago
When you're cooking with motorbikes, it tends to accumulate at the bottom of the fryer or pan as a hot liquid which can be put down the drain, but re-solidifies once it hits the cold water in the sewer.
7.
by snrplfth 9y ago
You have a kitchen so tiny it cannot find room for a single old tomato sauce jar? My condolences.
8.
by snrplfth 9y ago
The ISS is in a great position, because it's in an altitude with such high drag that small objects and uncontrolled fragments deorbit very quickly. Even the ISS loses 50 - 90 m of altitude a day. Satellites passing through the ISS&#x27
9.
by snrplfth 9y ago
"Spaceballs: The Flamethrower! The kids love this one."
10.
by snrplfth 9y ago
I've read this blog for years. This is exactly the kind of joke he makes all the time; in describing or referring to something, he folds in a fact which, while not literally true, is a funny way of imagining it to be, and which is expe
11.
by snrplfth 9y ago
It was a test payload on an experimental vehicle.
12.
by snrplfth 9y ago
I can almost guarantee you that Scott Alexander is aware of who the Jacobites and the Jacobins were and what the difference is. The blog is constantly bringing up all manner of historical and political esoterica. He's making a joke bas
13.
by snrplfth 9y ago
The impression I'm getting from this and other comments is that San Francisco is basically a bunch of small mountains where people get mugged. I live in a pretty flat city, but there's so much transit in the inner city (<8 minu
14.
by snrplfth 9y ago
The fact that certain industries have a lot of foreign ownership doesn't mean that they're not part of the actual economy. They produce in NZ, they employ in NZ, they buy inputs in NZ - they're part of NZ's GDP economy.
15.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Also this is a cryogenic rocket which has to be kept cold and launched soon after fueling. Not terribly good for nuclear launches.
16.
by snrplfth 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that toomanybeersies means new country as in, "a country from which an orbital rocket has never been launched before", rather than "a country which is new". Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, agricult
17.
by snrplfth 9y ago
A lot of stovepipes leak fumes, an in any case most people in the Roman empire had no such thing as a stovepipe. It's absolutely a myth that most premodern people had "clean air". No, it was generally filled with smoke, dung
18.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Haha. They breathed tons of fumes, most of their households' cooking and heating was fueled with either wood, charcoal or dung, in open or not-well-sealed hearths. (Woodsmoke is still the world's deadliest source of pollution.) Ro
19.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Indeed, a Falcon 9 takes only the amount of fuel used by 2 long-distance 747 flights. BFR might be, say, five to seven times that, though it's a different fuel (natural gas instead of kerosene.)
20.
by snrplfth 9y ago
For sure - but it's been good enough for a while. Consider the McDonnell Douglas DC-X in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
21.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Correct - they just went down the wrong optimization road, so the incremental development program for Falcon 9 landing is nothing they could have replicated.
22.
by snrplfth 9y ago
They're pressurized with nitrogen generally, just to keep them clean and dry inside. They're quite capable of standing or lying down while unpressurized though.
23.
by snrplfth 9y ago
I believe that the $1 billion figure is for the entire development cost of the Falcon 9 vehicle (stages 1 and 2.)
24.
by snrplfth 9y ago
One big obstacle to established players was the fact that a lot of existing booster stages had been optimized in such a way that they simply could not survive atmospheric reentry, lateral stress, and could not land. Both major operational U
25.
by snrplfth 9y ago
Also the space industry has real utility for poor Indians. Weather forecasting and crop monitoring are really important for farmers in India, and have gotten a lot better since India's been able to put up a constellation of dedicated s
26.
by snrplfth 9y ago
> You haven't solved much of anything with automation if the final word is "don't worry how it works, we'll come over and bill you to fix it" Odd, because that's how almost all "automation" in ev
27.
by snrplfth 9y ago
This is exactly the same argument that has been made hundreds of times. "Oh, they're simple peasants now and forever, they can't work in factories, they'll never learn to read, they can't invent productive industrie
28.
by snrplfth 9y ago
I disagree. Literally billions of people, many of them living on $4 to $10 dollars a day, without indoor running water or reliable electricity, have cellphones - compact computers connecting to a massive global telecommunications infrastruc
29.
by snrplfth 9y ago
The point is that if the robot really is that fast, and that cheap , then you don't compete - you start doing something else where the robot cannot compete at that price. Textile workers aren't robots - they have the capacity to
30.
by snrplfth 9y ago
> I believe you're misharacterising the issue. The trouble with technology is that well, you either have it or you don't. Technology is always a matter of degree. Let's say I have a handloom barn making fabric and clothi

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