>Do you base every conversation on "what would the dumbest Redditor think"?
Sadly, the mentally reddited are too numerous and widespread—including on HN—to always blightely ignore.
4,655 karma · joined August 18, 2015
Sadly, the mentally reddited are too numerous and widespread—including on HN—to always blightely ignore.
You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world:
>the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it.
"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
(No, "payment to launch this satellite" != "subsidy".)
Using the Our World in Data figures, a Singapore-born person is about four times more likely to move to China than a China-born person is to move to Singapore.
That does not seem like an unreasonable ratio, given that a) Chinese are not nearly as free, whether economically or politically, to emigrate, b) those Chinese who have the money and connections to leave are likely going to be in the large cities that offer good living standards, and c) China is going to have, from sheer size, aspects that will appeal to Singaporeans regardless of per-capita economic disparity. Put another way, if Chinese were as free to move around the world as Singaporeans, there would surely be many more China-born people in Singapore ... perhaps four times as the current 530K.
By contrast, the US and Spain are fairly comparable in terms of their citizens' freedom to move about, so that factor can be eliminated from the comparison.
In any case, don't be too sure about your claim. According to <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>, 170K Spanish-born live in the US. By contrast, 69K US-born live in Spain <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>. Given that the US (341 million) has 7.25 times Spain's population (47 million), this means that a Spaniard is 17-18 times more likely to move to the US, than an American is to move to Spain.
And before you or someone else claims otherwise, the US did not request activating Article 5, repeatedly said it did not need NATO resources, and never took the invoking seriously. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_NATO_Article_5_contingenc...> But feel free to continue to brag about how the deployment of seven NATO aircraft for a year, and a few ships in the Mediterranean, totally saved the USA.
(No, ISAF was not an Article 5 operation, thus the participation of the likes of Mongolia.)
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
* How plug-and-play is compiling dBASE code in Clipper? Compiles and runs immediately, needs minor edits, or more work than that?
* How much of a speed improvement does compiling provide?
* How grateful were clients for the speed improvement?
"I was wearing them on the street. What's wrong with wearing them on the air? I wore 'em on airplanes. It was the era of the miniskirt. Everybody wore miniskirts" —Nichelle Nichols, 2001 <https://web.archive.org/web/20011115192358/https://www.bbc.c...>
Am I the only ignoramus who did not know the above? Until now I indeed thought that the lack of persistence in the world was indeed "fixed" in newer video models by some sort of "remember the objects you just displayed"/"remember the objects behind the camera" code/storage.
>Baudrillard had a word for this, back when the most advanced simulation available was Disneyland. A simulacrum: a copy with no original. The 2 in that cell is not a copy of a computation. There was never a computation to copy. It is a symbol that refers to nothing except what a 2 usually looks like in that position, and it happens to be right.
We've all heard the saying "fake it 'til you make it".
We're now approaching the point where the "fake" is more real than "reality".
A similar rule existed for the 100-year Wolfskehl prize established in 1906 for solving Fermat's last theorem; two years after publication.
"Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?"
—Scott Crossfield, 1954 <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/01/computer/>
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
So, just how outraged is she about Lindsay Clancy not having been acquitted?
FTFY
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://np.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_francis...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.
Yes, thus my posting it.
His underlying tone is that reusability is "a dream" (his words). Without reusability, Starlink as a network of tens of thousands of satellites would not be practical.
He said this in 2013, two years before the first Falcon 9 booster landing.
By contrast, there was essentially no inflation in England from 1614 to the start of WW1.