Are chickens not birds?
5,493 karma · joined July 29, 2010
In reality during the last 200 years classical liberal tradition has thought more about markets and how they work then anybody else. Constitutional economics, institutional economics, law&economics, market process theory are partly built on Smith work and are explorations of the context of markets.
So I don't really know what you are referencing with 'Sure, but "proper functioning markets" in this case means competitive markets, not laissez-faire as such' as I don't know what definitions you for these words.
People like FA Hayek, Armen Alchian, Ronald Coase and many others have done a lot of work and all look back and build on Adam Smith. The idea of some people in this thread that modern libertarians only read the understand Adam Smith as 'invisible hand' is nonsense. 'Invisible hand' was adopted because it is a good shorthand for the idea of processes that are not centrally guided are very important.
There was also a lot of historical work done on English Common law and its evolution and how modern market relations evolved and actually functioned.
And carbon fiber also a had huge amount of development from commercial companies to drive it into 100s of applications. The total amount of investment in carbon fiber is dwarfed 100-1000x compared to government investment. Both are required to actually drive a technology forward consistently.
> the original claim that scientific and engineering progress depends on current US levels of inequality just doesn't fit the history
I don't think that was the claim.
And of course literally any company is based on the whole history of technology.
You might say that SpaceX only exists because rich people in China wanted to see fireworks (and there was likely state involvement).
But equally does SpaceX depend on a long existing private market and centuries of private investment into manufacturing, incremental improvement in all related technologies and millions of experiments and different things tried.
This arguments are kind of tiered by now.
Its true that the way European state bureaucracy works makes companies like SpaceX unlikely. Its equally true that part of US ability to have such company is based on defense spending over the last 100 years.
There are known well understood engineering solution that have been known since the 70s and that work fine.
The real danger is the high pressure that PWR are under and the chemical instability of the elements that were put together in those designs.
Reactors that are not under pressure and do not have chemical instability that lead to explosive cases have a very contained area of effect even in a worst case.
No it isn't. If you have a regulatory structure that makes progress so expensive and counter to the government plan then progress is very hard to make.
Even the regulatory agency themselves have realized this and are changing their structures.
> What has also prevented changes from happening is that nuclear scales down poorly, so the cost of iterating designs is so large.
US regulation allows nothing between fully commercial and university research making any time of prototyping impossible.
Its in fact very possible to make smaller reactors that can teach you a lot and are not absurdly expensive and still useful. That data then could be used for to further inform regulatory agencies.
> The replicated nature of these sources is an advantage in so many ways.
Yes but even if it doesn't scale down well in terms of engineering you can still do factory construction of reactors. If we can mass produce plans, rocket engines, rockets and cars then the same could be done with reactors.
The reality is the government selected one winner and made deploying anything else practically impossible. The change in regulatory agencies has basically made progress impossible beyond marginal improvements.
Space based power generation to me is incredibly dumb. It would be far easier to build solar on earth and transport it around with high efficiency DC lines.
And if you are really looking into the cheapest possible energy a thorium breeder reactor could run for ever with no fuel cost and could be built with 70s technology. These reactor be produced in a factory at a manufacturing line and then dropped into a containment facility.
How this should be more expensive then space based solar makes no sense to me.
The western world has made development of new fission plants practically impossible. Requiring 100s of millions in development before you might get a hint if the government would actually allow you to build a plant.
Thankfully this has finally started to change. Mostly in Canada and that's where we will likely see next generation fission first.
We can just rename fission to #goodenergy or something, that would be cheaper then developing fusion.
People don't even know that nuclear reactors use fission, so the idea that this would change anything is crazy. People opposed will call fusion reactors 'nuclear' just like they do fission.
And you can burn up the waste majority of that waste, the leftover waste after that would not really a huge issue.
Both of these are far more political problems then actual real problems a society based on modern fission would have.
Fission has a absurdly high energy density, the step from oil to fission is far more relevant then the step from fission to fusion.
Fusion would mean basically no fuel cost, but thorium is already a waste product and even uranium fuel is a tiny part of any fission plant.
Some people seem to believe the fusion is inherently prove against weapons, but this is equally not really true. If you had a working fission plant there would be ways to use it to get what you want to make a weapon.
There are some places you might want fusion, mainly in space travel but even there we are not anywhere even close to where we could get to with fission. Open gas nuclear thermal rockets anybody?
In sum, I'm not against this reseach but its not a way to solve our problems anytime soon. Fission you could get to run with 60s tech and amazing reactors could be designed within decades and often with comparatively small teams in the 60-80s and somehow we haven't managed to make it competitive.
Fusion looks to be far more complex to build in every possible way. How this will be cheaper is questionable to me.
This applies for cooperation as well. As soon as you have such an organization the people inside that have the same intensive problem. This equally results in the cooperation itself not being rational.
What forms of cooperation works depends again on how to align interest of the people inside them.
Also, if you throw a ball like that against a normal glass on a truck it might go threw and kill you. The Cybertruck class stopped it and would have saved your live but I guess fuck them for making a saver vehicle.
And the guy in the suit was clearly a joke, unbelievable the hissy fit people are throwing over this.
> Musk is not serious about this. Just like the boring company
Quite the claim. As usual we have the 'look at the very first prototype' its not actually perfect therefore its fake and nothing but marketing.
The Boring company is series and they are doing all kinds of things. Saying they are not series is disrespectful to the engineers that work on those machines.
I'm a shareholder and spending some resources figuring out something like humanoid robot to me is useful R&D if its a product or not.
There is no evidence that this is a significant enough distraction to be worried about leadership. They are doing exactly what they should, expanding production, working FSD and battery production working towards releasing Cybertruck and Semi.
However what happened then is that they effectively corrected their mistake, fixed their production, reached their production targets with excellent unit margins.
They learned from the episode and realized they need to reduce part count and made a whole series of innovation and if you look at how their new Model Y are going to be developed in the new factories you see a huge improvements. They developed a new alloy for casting, worked to put largest casting process into production, totally redesigned the battery for manufacturing and massively simplified the battery pack.
To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing. They already have industry leading unit margins and some of these innovations will only hit next year.
That part of the story somehow is never mentioned when people say 'hahahahha build cars in a tent'.
They are not doing so bad it seems:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E9FARebWUAYd5NI?format=jpg&name=...
You simply can not replace individual cells or individual models.
The level of replacement is a the whole battery pack. Anything else makes very little sense.
Your model is basically, putting a box in a box in box and then adding a huge amount of complexity on all layers to make it possible to cheaply disassembly. You are gone have a far heavier car, that is far, far more complex to build and far more prone to actually breaking.
A fully integrated cell-to-pack architecture where the pack is fully integrated and structural is clearly the best solution for a car.
Otherwise you are just having millions of car driving around far heavier and less efficient then they should be.
Doing everything with lithium is not a great idea as we need that for cars mostly.
But I also always preferred nuclear.
SpaceX also sued Air Force and won that too.
There are literally 100s of videos of the Autopilot doing an avoiding maneuver that prevented potentially accidents, some potentially deadly.
> Maybe they expected a faster rollout of features, maybe they didn't notice that part of the sales pitch at all.
I think its fair to say you expected the features faster, but the claim its not spelled out is false. If people don't read what is very clearly written on the website when you buy it, then that is their fault.
His company simply can't do what he claims it can do. They have proven nothing. They have achieved nothing and take on ever greater challenges.
The have spent 10 or more years for a very simple suborbital craft that is still not flying regularly and claim to be able to build a moon lander in a few years.
They have committed to making a complex engine, BE-4 that is 4 years late and the version they are still working on is not anywhere close to the engine the initially announced.
They are building a gigantic rocket, New Glenn, that includes a new engine, BE-3U. This is claimed to be a version of the BE-3 but is totally different. Initially this rocket was also claimed to have vacuum version of BE-4 that has since been dropped.
This rocket is already 4 years late and is very not even sure to fly in 2023.
They are also working on a new different reusable upper stage for the New Glenn (and likely another new engine to go with it). This is supposed to be reusable as well.
They are also claiming to work on an even bigger rocket.
For the moon lander they didn't just propose a complex lander (that requires another new engine, BE-7), but also claimed to be the leader of a team integrating immensely complex parts from old space contractors, despite them not having any history of being a integrator of complex systems.
They are also have a ISRU division that works on resource production on the moon.
He has 4000 people working for Blue and basically no income. The company literally just burns Amazon stocks and has been for 20 years. There is no prospect what so ever that this can change in the next 5 years. So literally NASA would commit to basically having the whole HLS project be simply paid for by Bezos with a company that has no possibility to survive without private good will.
They existed for 20 years and their only achievement is a single human suborbital flight.
Yet they have the gaul to claim that NASA made a mistake selecting SpaceX who in the same time has achieved literally 100-500x more then them with less money.
P.S: SpaceX also sued NASA but GAO actually sided with them. SpaceX also sued Air Force and won that too. SpaceX opened space for competition and Blue abuses that freedom to delay every program.
No it will not. If it became anywhere even remotely close 100s of lithium projects would be announced.
Lithium is all over the world and it is very common.
> and I could completely see a company like tesla hoarding it
Why would the 'hoard' it? They need to produce an ever increasing amount of vehicles, they need every bit of supply they can get to put it into products.
They are planning to mine it.
First of all it informs you that it is not jet complete. There is a complete list of what features it has and what features it doesn't have.
You very clearly buying the right to have access to the newest features as the role out. This is very clearly spelled out when you buy it.
> But given the accidents where people turn on FSD and go to sleep
Do you have any actual data about people deliberately go to sleep?
I have seen no numbers what so ever to confirm what you are saying.