Moissanite is by far a better buy. It has more fire for 1/100th the price than a natural diamond.
But I feel like the people saying clear stones like diamond and moissanite aren’t pretty have never seen a clear, well cut, multi karat, example in the sun. The rainbow colors and brilliance from a clear high refraction stone like a diamond is frankly insane. You can see the rainbow colors shooting off of it from like 100 yards away if the lighting is right. No colored stone has quite the same wow factor as a good diamond or moissanite in the right light. That’s why diamonds have historically been in such high demand.
Opal, Alexandrite, and many other stones are equally beautiful in their own way. But it’s weird to make that point by putting down clear stones that are absolutely spectacular.
I agree diamonds are dumb and overpriced when you can get a better result from moissanite or lab grown.
That said, I’m curious why you assume it’s a blood diamond? Conflict diamonds only account for ~5% of all diamonds in the trade. Russia and Canada combined account for >50% of all rough diamonds in the industry.
Unless you have access to intelligence that you probably shouldn’t be sharing in an Internet forum, neither of us really knows what is needed to guide the missiles of our adversaries.
That said, my day job is a GNC engineer (guidance navigation and controls) for rockets and spacecraft. It’s absolutely possible to hit a carrier with no radio signals whatsoever
Blue Origin has been around longer than SpaceX and still has yet to get anything to orbit, while smaller companies than either have popped up and managed to in the meantime.
You hear this a lot and it’s pretty misleading. Blue didn’t begin working on an orbital rocket in earnest until ~2019 and in the 2015-2020 era the headcount was on the order of hundreds instead of thousands. That headcount was spread across multiple big ticket space infrastructure projects.
In addition, New Glenn has been held back by the unexpectedly difficult qualification process to deliver engines to ULA, who is contractually entitled to the first flight articles. I’m of the opinion that bidding to be the Vulcan engine provider was a mistake, but the point remains that it’s not at all a fair comparison between SpaceX, the various smallsat launch companies, and Blue. The landscape is very different.
I don't think I'd try to contract them for launching a satellite either if I had one, one would be stuck waiting for development on an unproven launcher when ones with a reliable track record are already available.
To be clear, something like half of the planned Kuiper launches are already contracted to go on New Glenn. The only real competitor on price/kg and turnaround time is SpaceX, whose products are a direct competitor to Kuiper. It’s not a mystery as to why they’d prefer alternate launch providers in that context.
Bezos owning both companies has little to no impact on where the contracts go due to shareholder obligations. The two companies are run as discrete entities. For example, Dave Limp, the new CEO replacing Bob Smith, comes from Amazon and is firewalled from any non-public information about Blue until he is fully transitioned to his new role.
The point I’m trying to make is that absolute risk numbers are far more useful than stating relative risk, especially once we get below the average person’s acceptable risk tolerance. Saying “this country is xx times safer than this country” can be misleading.
For example, if we consider a hypothetical country that has 1 traffic death per 100,000 vehicles you could make the statement that, “the Netherlands has 6x more traffic deaths than hypothetical country!” It would make the Netherlands seem like a dangerous place to live, but I’d wager that the vast majority of people would feel perfectly comfortable with the idea of being in traffic in the Netherlands.
Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.
It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.
Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.
It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:
We are not well equipped for space situational awareness in cislunar space
There are many orders of magnitude more volume to observe in cislunar space than in the space below the GEO belt
The previous two bullets mean it’s difficult to find a non cooperative target once you lose it and the precision of any observations is poor. The sheer volume of space that need to be observed makes this issue nearly impossible to fix.
Trajectories in cislunar space are highly chaotic due to multi-body effects. Combine this with poor estimates of position and velocity, and our predictions of the future diverge rapidly from truth when propagating cislunar orbits.
The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.
Energy storage of solar is promising to be cheaper than nuclear
Nuclear powerplants are very, very expensive when you amortize the commissioning and decommissioning costs into the lifetime expenses. There have been repeated attempts to encourage fission adoption over the last 20 years and almost no new plants are being made because the economics just don’t work.
… what do you think the green energy sector is doing?
There is orders of magnitude more funding being sunk into rolling out existing green energy tech than in researching fusion. This money isn’t going towards fission reactors because they aren’t economically viable when compared to other forms of green energy like wind and solar.
LGBT isn’t a choice and covering their eyes won’t change their sexual orientation.
But, besides that point, how the fuck is it okay to insulate your kid from other cultures? That’s not healthy at all. Eating ramen wasn’t part of my family’s culture growing up, either, but I don’t go around trying to prevent children from learning about Japanese food.
The reason fusion is always 30 years away is because that statement is always accompanied with the subtext of 30 years at the current funding rate. Funding consistently decreased for decades as optimism in the tech fades.
However, this decade will be marked with a number of breakthroughs. Last year we achieved the first net energy gain from fusion ever, there are a number of fairly well funded startups with very promising tech, and ITER will be the closest we have ever gotten to a real working fusion plant with (hopefully) large scale net energy
Now is precisely the right the time to increase funding to fusion to push us over the hump into usable power production
They take your license just for running a red light? In many parts of America that would leave you unable to satisfy basic necessities like getting to work and buying groceries. It’s frankly ridiculous.
I mean, that’s a large part of why it’s illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk and every major bicycle safety advocacy group says to take to the road. It’s pretty well understood that riding on the sidewalk is incredibly dangerous because it’s very difficult to see a fast moving bike when it’s off the road.
If it wasn’t a turn on red it would have been someone turning right into a driveway eventually.
The alternative would be to share the actual lane with cars in the highway, with no room for the bike. There was no bike lane.
Yes this is exactly what you should be doing as a cyclist if you want to be safe and seen. If there isn’t a bike lane you take the entire lane like a car. I have ridden many thousands of miles like this. Even when there is a bike lane it’s often the safest option if the bike lane is in poor condition.
The reason I advocate so hard for dedicated infrastructure is because I want to see more people biking and many people have a hard time feeling comfortable riding in the street. I get that. But in this case it’s the fault of the cyclist for failing to follow the rules of the road.
Moissanite is by far a better buy. It has more fire for 1/100th the price than a natural diamond.
But I feel like the people saying clear stones like diamond and moissanite aren’t pretty have never seen a clear, well cut, multi karat, example in the sun. The rainbow colors and brilliance from a clear high refraction stone like a diamond is frankly insane. You can see the rainbow colors shooting off of it from like 100 yards away if the lighting is right. No colored stone has quite the same wow factor as a good diamond or moissanite in the right light. That’s why diamonds have historically been in such high demand.
Opal, Alexandrite, and many other stones are equally beautiful in their own way. But it’s weird to make that point by putting down clear stones that are absolutely spectacular.