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snrplfthon An Indian village that banned shoes

Cool, it's like a nature preserve for hookworm.

snrplfthon Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Today

No worries! I guess I get people's reactions a little - they've heard so many vague plans about "maybe a Mars mission" that never pan out, so when the real thing arrives they're not ready to believe it's serious.

snrplfthon SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

Which is amusing, because @Pinboard absolutely cannot stand SpaceX and mocks them constantly.

snrplfthon Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Today

That's not a criticism. The Mars cult is a very good thing. For forty years, most space programs have been motivated by the burning urge to...uh...send some more people to Low Earth Orbit, I guess, and eke out marginal improvements on technology that never really changes.

The force of the idea of Mars keeps people focused on what really matters.

snrplfthon Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Today

> Like everything behind their breakthroughs, which they had a few - including landing and turnaround times - is meant to enable the Mars mission. They've been explicit about this since day one.

It's not so much a rocket company with a Mars objective, it's a Mars cult with a rocketry front operation.

Somehow, people get the idea that they're "not really serious" about the one driving goal that they've never deviated from.

snrplfthon London’s fatberg on show: ‘We thought of pickling it’

When you're cooking with motorbikes, it tends to accumulate at the bottom of the fryer or pan as a hot liquid which can be put down the drain, but re-solidifies once it hits the cold water in the sewer.

snrplfthon London’s fatberg on show: ‘We thought of pickling it’

You have a kitchen so tiny it cannot find room for a single old tomato sauce jar? My condolences.

snrplfthon The Kessler Syndrome Explained (2014)

The ISS is in a great position, because it's in an altitude with such high drag that small objects and uncontrolled fragments deorbit very quickly. Even the ISS loses 50 - 90 m of altitude a day.

Satellites passing through the ISS's orbit do not tend to spend that many orbits there.

snrplfthon Elon Musk’s $600 Flamethrower Will Be Released into the Civilian Market in April

"Spaceballs: The Flamethrower! The kids love this one."

snrplfthon Conflict vs. Mistake

I've read this blog for years. This is exactly the kind of joke he makes all the time; in describing or referring to something, he folds in a fact which, while not literally true, is a funny way of imagining it to be, and which is expected to be obvious to the readership. It's kind of like the practice of Using Capital Letters to refer to a Self-Serious Idea of Something.

It's just the way he writes.

snrplfthon The Humanity Star

It was a test payload on an experimental vehicle.

snrplfthon Conflict vs. Mistake

I can almost guarantee you that Scott Alexander is aware of who the Jacobites and the Jacobins were and what the difference is. The blog is constantly bringing up all manner of historical and political esoterica. He's making a joke based on the name resemblance.

snrplfthon Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

The impression I'm getting from this and other comments is that San Francisco is basically a bunch of small mountains where people get mugged.

I live in a pretty flat city, but there's so much transit in the inner city (<8 minute frequencies most of the day) that seniors just take it everywhere. It's safe, it's warm, there's room for grocery carts, there's special seating for the mobility-impaired....maybe it's just implementation.

snrplfthon New Zealand startup successfully launches rocket

The fact that certain industries have a lot of foreign ownership doesn't mean that they're not part of the actual economy. They produce in NZ, they employ in NZ, they buy inputs in NZ - they're part of NZ's GDP economy.

And the rest of your statement makes no sense. Some tertiary industries service primary industries, but most don't. Some housebuilding and education services immigrants, but the vast majority isn't, and regardless of that fact, it still counts as part of the local GDP. Services are no less "real" than resource industries.

snrplfthon New Zealand startup successfully launches rocket

Also this is a cryogenic rocket which has to be kept cold and launched soon after fueling. Not terribly good for nuclear launches.

snrplfthon New Zealand startup successfully launches rocket

I'm pretty sure that toomanybeersies means new country as in, "a country from which an orbital rocket has never been launched before", rather than "a country which is new".

Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, agriculture including meats is only 8% of New Zealand's economy. Hardly the "main industry". Like most high-income industrialized economies, most of the economy is in services.

snrplfthon Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country

A lot of stovepipes leak fumes, an in any case most people in the Roman empire had no such thing as a stovepipe. It's absolutely a myth that most premodern people had "clean air". No, it was generally filled with smoke, dung dust, mold spores, etc.

snrplfthon Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country

Haha. They breathed tons of fumes, most of their households' cooking and heating was fueled with either wood, charcoal or dung, in open or not-well-sealed hearths. (Woodsmoke is still the world's deadliest source of pollution.) Roman cities especially were ferociously polluted.

snrplfthon SpaceX BFR [video]

Indeed, a Falcon 9 takes only the amount of fuel used by 2 long-distance 747 flights. BFR might be, say, five to seven times that, though it's a different fuel (natural gas instead of kerosene.)

snrplfthon How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

For sure - but it's been good enough for a while. Consider the McDonnell Douglas DC-X in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

snrplfthon How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

Correct - they just went down the wrong optimization road, so the incremental development program for Falcon 9 landing is nothing they could have replicated.

snrplfthon How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

They're pressurized with nitrogen generally, just to keep them clean and dry inside. They're quite capable of standing or lying down while unpressurized though.

snrplfthon How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

I believe that the $1 billion figure is for the entire development cost of the Falcon 9 vehicle (stages 1 and 2.)

snrplfthon How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

One big obstacle to established players was the fact that a lot of existing booster stages had been optimized in such a way that they simply could not survive atmospheric reentry, lateral stress, and could not land. Both major operational US rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V, have exterior insulation (which would burn away upon reentry), relatively thin walls (meaning they're not very strong against aerodynamic buffeting or fin torque), and single engines (meaning that it's very hard to throttle down to land). Adapting these rockets for reusability testing would have meant basically redesigning them from the ground up.

snrplfthon India's workhorse rocket fails for the first time in decades

Also the space industry has real utility for poor Indians. Weather forecasting and crop monitoring are really important for farmers in India, and have gotten a lot better since India's been able to put up a constellation of dedicated satellites for this task.

snrplfthon New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

> You haven't solved much of anything with automation if the final word is "don't worry how it works, we'll come over and bill you to fix it"

Odd, because that's how almost all "automation" in everyday life works. How many people actually understand the operation of, or could fix, their dishwashers? Their cars? Even their coffee-makers? Yet dishes are washed, cars are driven and coffee is made, mostly uneventfully.

Is industrial technology different? A little, but not that much - if it doesn't work, there's someone out there who can fix it, for a cost. If communications are too difficult, you might keep them in-house and pay them a wage. If not, maybe they work for another company, and you pay them for their time. Or just buy a new machine when the old one stops working.

snrplfthon New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

This is exactly the same argument that has been made hundreds of times. "Oh, they're simple peasants now and forever, they can't work in factories, they'll never learn to read, they can't invent productive industries" and so on.

You seem to be implying that training for jobs is somehow something that's done mainly by the governments of countries - that people are just passive receptors of whatever training and education the state can provide, and can't seek it out, or create it for themselves. This is of course wholly wrong, and almost none of the specialized skills developed by people in the course of industrialization are gained through formal education.

You don't have to make lots of roboticists in Bangaldesh anyways (and there aren't many of those in industrialized economies either) - people can and will move into the sectors that have been small simply because labour was more valuable elsewhere - services, like health care, education, retail, et cetera. These are useful tasks no less than textile work, and largely don't require a massive "training program".

snrplfthon New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

I disagree. Literally billions of people, many of them living on $4 to $10 dollars a day, without indoor running water or reliable electricity, have cellphones - compact computers connecting to a massive global telecommunications infrastructure. Computing capacities (and hence, productivities) which would have had their own floors of buildings and dedicated staff in the 1950s are now semi-disposable consumer goods. Because technology got better.

How do they operate them? Well, through the relatively simple, user-friendly interfaces. How do they maintain them? Well, they're modular and inexpensive - if a single component, like a battery, breaks, you replace it. If too many components break, you just get another one. Of course this does require a certain level of local support and expertise, but no, I absolutely don't think it's that much more difficult than maintaining 19th C. industrial assets, especially because of how fast and affordable modern telecommunications and transportation are. Is it broken? Call an expert on another continent, or have one fly in. Do you need new parts? Already ordered, and they'll be here next week, for a low freight charge. Sure beats waiting for the steamship to come in, or the telegraph boy to bring a message from head office reading "Could not replicate the engine malfunction, please try halting and re-starting the steam boiler."

snrplfthon New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

The point is that if the robot really is that fast, and that cheap, then you don't compete - you start doing something else where the robot cannot compete at that price. Textile workers aren't robots - they have the capacity to shift to other work, and there's an enormous amount of work to be done.

This objection to automation has been brought up every time anything's been invented, for hundreds of years - if we do something with less human labour, then humans won't have work or incomes. But actually, they just end up finding other useful things to do that weren't getting done before.

snrplfthon New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

> I believe you're misharacterising the issue. The trouble with technology is that well, you either have it or you don't.

Technology is always a matter of degree. Let's say I have a handloom barn making fabric and clothing. Is that already "technology"? If not, then what if I install a diesel generator to power the looms? Then I get some treadle sewing machines to replace hand-stitching? Then I get a laptop to replace hand-accounting? Do I "have technology" yet? As a handloom barn owner, I certainly couldn't have developed or manufactured a diesel generator, a sewing machine, or a laptop, yet I can buy and maintain (or just replace) them quite easily. Doing the same with robots is just a matter of degree and difficulty. Compared with getting humans to do the same work, is it worth it or not?