LesserAbe @ LesserAbe @lemmy.world

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65

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1,010

Joined

2 yr. ago

Airbud

It sucks! I'd guess this was an attempt to get something on the books and maybe they go back for exemptions later. Article says an earlier bill only applied to wheelchairs and then later they expanded to include agricultural equipment.

Tough crowd for this one! I think I get it though - like magic in the sense there are unseen forces that do amazing things, but also like a wizard in the sense that if you study giant books, gather various artifacts and take the right steps in the right order you can harness the unseen forces.

Good for them!

You wouldn't say this if you were following the industry at all. Please see my other comment in this thread. SpaceX is dominating, for good reason, and seemingly in spite of musk.

Please see my other comment in this same thread. It's not like Tesla or Twitter where they're clearing slipping and releasing bad product. Look at the actual accomplishments!

As much as we on lemmy might look down on consumers of conservative news, I'm really surprised by how similarly reflexive and uninformed a lot of the comments here are.

Meaning no disrespect, it's clear from your response you're not familiar with space history. And that was my point - a lot of people are jumping in here and making negative comments just because of the Musk association without knowing or caring about the reality.

The space shuttle (the U.S.' s previous manned "reusable" vehicle) was retired in 2011, and the Crew Dragon was ready in about 2020. NASA was not forced to use Soyuz because of a delay in the Crew Dragon, it was because the Space Shuttle had two previous fatal disasters, was way more expensive than planned, and would be even more expensive to keep running. I didn't know this until looking at the wikipedia just now, but early safety estimates put the chance of catastrophic failure and death of the crew between 1 in 100 to as low as 1 in 100,000. After those two disasters they re-evaluated and put the risk as high as 1 in 9.

NASA was willing to take a chance on other contracts for commercial vehicles because it had no other options. It awarded contracts both to SpaceX and ULA. The first is doing dozens of uncrewed launches per year and has flown 12 crewed missions. The other is doing like 3 launches per year, has yet to fly Starliner with a crew, and costs more per launch.

The space shuttle vehicle itself was re-usable. The "external tank" was discarded and not re-used. The solid rocket boosters would fall into the ocean, and then would have to be recovered, examined and refurbished. Those tanks/boosters represented a huge portion of the cost. While the space shuttle was slightly more re-usable, other rocket launches would be single use. What SpaceX did that no one else had before was a controlled vertical landing of the booster. In other words, it landed under power and standing up. That's very difficult, and a game changer since it skipped the recovery step, and they didn't require the time and cost of examination / refurbishment the way the space shuttle components did.

What is it you want to say about Artemis?

You're right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.

I think around here most people agree that billionaires don't earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don't we recognize those people's work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia's soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn't have anything that could launch people into orbit.

Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They're still around and still for the most part suck)

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn't and still doesn't really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn't much of a private market in space.

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.

And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can't speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.

Elon Musk didn't do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I'm concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I'm hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.

Good lord, everyone please learn a tiny bit about spacex and the state of the space industry instead of letting your (justified) hatred of Elon do the typing.

Rattlesnake setting healthy boundaries

Guess we're getting pretty far from the "things to place" idea, but there's always "preaching to the choir"

Yeah, I've only ever heard it in the "he could sell..." formulation.

I don't know that this article really explained how the U.S. waged psychological warfare, but sparked my interest enough that I pre-ordered the book.

What does the phrase mean?

This argument is going to crush in court!

I'm a millennial too. You're right, there were definitely people saying we suck, aren't hard workers, it's our own fault for not doing well financially, etc. I'm just saying that wasn't all the boomers in the same way all millennials aren't giving gen z shit. But those sorts of claims drive engagement, from upset people in both demographics, so that's why the narrative keeps popping up.

Hmm sensing similarities to that other thread where the gen z person was saying millennials always complain about them. What if some predictable percentage of people regardless of the time they were born are assholes?

Not going to gaslight you and say no one is making those comments, I'm sure they are. That said, there are millions of people in the world who don't give a fuck about gen z fashion, or who aren't rude, and then there are millions of people who are dicks, or insecure about their own appearance or place in the world.

As a millennial I remember the manufactured controversy between boomers and millennials, and similar comments about appearance, work ethic, etc. Now that millennials are "old" some of them see new stuff coming along and feel compelled to complain. Whatever age group someone belongs to they'll complain about things they see, age related or otherwise, so I wouldn't focus too much on it.

Nice, I didn't know the story but that's great. "No Till" is a good practice.

Don't have an answer but I'd be interested in something like that too. I know Microsoft released a freely available lightweight LLM that's supposed to make it easier for people to run it locally, called Phi3. Decent article from ars technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/microsofts-phi-3-shows-the-surprising-power-of-small-locally-run-ai-language-models/