snrplfth

And because foreign airlines are generally prohibited from providing domestic service inside the US, which is the substantial majority of the overall market.

It depends on what standards they're using. However, drinks and water fountains are frequently available once you've gone through security anyways.

>"huge mess of transporting, storing, unpacking, preparing and disposing of food in all sorts of random ways at various times throughout the flight by the hundreds of hungry sleep deprived passengers."

That's generally handled by having a cart with a garbage bag attached that comes by, and having people opening their food on the small trays provided.

>"Airports would be even less efficient going through security, vendors trying to sell food to go and people congregating to buy things."

Yes. It is called a "post-security food court".

>"I would definitely pay more if even more things was standardized and included for everyone on the flight (like luggage, security, airport seating)."

That's nice for you. A lot of people don't want that, or aren't willing to pay.

What does that even mean?

So 60% of economists disagree, and only 2% agree, with a proposal that would eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid etc, and this is somehow them "going after" these programs? What are you talking about? They are very broadly against this proposal!

Well, they have that, as "food stamps". But of course it gets arbitraged often by people buying storable commodity goods (like soda or detergent) with it, and selling those things at a discount.

Yep, terrible title.

"People disagree with implementing an idea in this specific way? They must not like the idea at all, in any circumstance!"

Of course, the only way you could finance a $13 000 UBI is by getting rid of all those other transfer programs, pretty much.

How tall, though? I'm taller than 95% of the US population, have flown quite a bit, and have never had a problem. They can't build all the seats in the plane for people in the 98th percentile and up. (Or rather, they can build some, and call them 'first class'.)

Yes, it's great if you can manage it. But helium is so pleasingly inert and cold, I can see why it's not always the choice.

Then buy a drink and pack your own food. In any case, it's hardly the airlines' fault that liquids can't come through security. I just do not see what is so bad about unbundling food from ticket price.

Don't know why you're gettimg downvoted for this.

"Having to pay what I deem a high price for a good and/or service I deem insufficient? Help help, I'm being oppressed!"

So instead of bundling into your ticket price the cost of food you may not want or like, they allow people who bring their own to save money, and only charge those who consume that particular good. Apparently this is "extortion", somehow? Nonsense.

Yes, but hardly anybody understands price discrimination. Generally, people think that by requiring services and their prices to be bundled, their overall price will be lower. Which is not true of course.

The Carbon-Overwrapped Pressure Vessels are quite different from the large-scale carbon fiber tanks they're building now. The new large tanks are designed to be able to contain large quantities of propellant at moderate pressures, possibly without a liner, while the COPVs are meant to contain pressurant gas at extremely high pressure, with a metal liner. SpaceX has been using COPVs to hold helium pressurant since the first Falcon 9 back in 2010. This is not a new technology. What is new is the large propellant tanks, which have not been done before at this scale, and have not been used in Falcon 9s at any point.

So no, you shouldn't have been bolder with a public post.

You can use oxygen gas for pressurization of oxygen tanks, but it introduces a new set of problems, since you've got to get a stable pressure of oxygen gas inside a container with a huge volume of sub-cooled liquid oxygen, and you have to have a high-pressure tank in there anyways to pre-load pressurized oxygen gas, so that you can get it into the tank fast enough. Also it means you've got reactive oxygen gas all around, so you have to redesign things for that.

However, this kind of oxygen-gas pressurization is exactly what's planned for SpaceX's next-generation oxygen-methane rockets.

That's what I meant. It was rated for a certain load, but there was a faulty strut in the batch, and it failed well under that rated load.

The insurer took the loss on the satellite, SpaceX took the loss on the vehicle/launch contract, and the pad equipment.

The previous loss was, as far as they can tell, related to a strut that broke under strain and released an otherwise-fine COPV into the oxygen tank. As far as they can tell it didn't have anything to do with aggressive design, just a part failing under its rated strength.

Not just price, but density is the reason. The next noble gas up is neon, which is quite scarce and more expensive than helium, and denser anyways. After that it's argon, which is cheap and plentiful, but about ten times denser, so it's not nearly as good as helium.

The problem is that accurately reproducing this failure case is very difficult. You need to replicate the thermal properties of the loading process and the tanks, at the same speed with the same amounts of propellant and helium, effectively meaning that you have to do it with a full-size tank, and with a large amount of pad equipment. This is all extremely dangerous and almost certainly will result, if successful, in the loss of the testing stand.

It's not liquid helium, it's gaseous helium, which is why it is at such high pressures. It's primarily used as a pressurant for the liquid oxygen and rocket fuel (RP-1) tanks. Since liquid oxygen and RP-1 are being sucked out of the tanks at high speed by the engine turbopumps, it needs some low-density gas to fill the tanks so that they don't crumple from negative pressure.

Falcon-9 has no pressure-fed-only engines, all 10 engines are fed by turbopumps.

I guess so. But they're not even actually that good at being dictators. Even a solely power-maximizing autocrat should realize what does and does not work economically. It's like Venezuela - their incompetence means that their influence is limited and their eventual downfall made more likely.

...but if the government owns all 'capital goods', then you can't use markets to allocate those capital goods between different owners.

But not even that well by global standards of autocrats! I mean, that small group could be like the wealthy, globe-trotting Communist Party of China apparatchiks, or the gilded, pampered princes of the Middle East. But instead they get to sit around their grey concrete bunkers, watch irritating propaganda TV, and drink overpriced imported cognac. Whoopee.

I mean, you have to be truly incompetent to be next door to China for the last thirty years and think "nah, we shouldn't do reforms - wouldn't want to lose our luxuries as members of the political class!"

No, you said that "political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years." Which is not true - in a low-productivity, pre-industrial economy, inherently near the subsistence baseline, food shortfalls (and consequent famines) are frequently caused by weather, pestilence and other non-political-strife events. When it takes 8 or 9 farmers to feed themselves and one non-farmer (and year-to-year food storage capability is very poor) then even a 10% food production decline is a crisis.

We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.

...what?

No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a hundred people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".

"Millions of Americans are currently hungry; we can report that they are moving at speed towards nearby fridges."

But that's a smaller proportion of people than ever before. So not only are we capable of supporting more people total, but a far smaller percentage of those are hungry.

Right, but that's not due to what the chain wanted to do, but due to liability. Allow people to waive liability claims for past-due food, and this problem mostly goes away.

I remember working in a produce warehouse, and due to some clever particularities of our non-profit status, we were allowed to give away surplus produce to employees with no liability. I don't think we ever threw out anything except old bananas; it all got taken home.

"Let's do what North Korea does, that seems to be working out really well," said nobody.