Yeah, it certainly could have been better. I believe the original plans were for both the booster and orbiter to essentially be planes able to land on a runway. It’s really a pretty awesome design, I mean can you imagine if we had a fully reusable launch vehicle in the 90s?

But the truth is, the shuttle was never really reusable, it was more like… refurbishable. It took a lot of maintenance for the heat shield and the engines after every launch. It was also amazingly complex, there were so many possible failure states, and in many of those scenarios there was just no hope for the crew. With a shuttle and with the future starship, we’d be seriously missing the launch escape system seen in traditional crew capsules. On some level, the last thing I would want would be to lose a whole shuttle crew and two booster pilots. (Though admittedly, these days the booster would certainly be unscrewed). I do also wonder, how much potential payload mass they’d lose by adding all the additional parts they would need to make the booster a landable aircraft.

Anyway, it is possible NASA could do that again, but it would be a serious investment to get that working, and right now I think they just aren’t set up to take on a project of that complexity. Also, it would definitely distract and redirect funds from their ongoing science missions.

So yeah, they could, it would be cool, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)

It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.

You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it’s just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing’s participation).

But it’s been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they’ve been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/

I want to take away everyone’s arms. This country would be safer without guns.

All good.

And yeah for the record, I do think Bitcoin is pretty brilliant and that Etherium has some real unique utility. I think there are definitely some others that are genuine attempts to do something useful, but few that have really achieved much so far.

Well… It’s not being engineered with a driver in mind. I don’t think they can just slap a seat in there later; having vs not having a driver is a major design consideration. This vehicle has no driver, period. If the fsd doesn’t work, he has no vehicle.

So the question isn’t “Will they put a driver in this car?”

The question is “Will they get this cat on the road?”

I make the point that what cannot happen?

I’m sorry, I just didn’t quite understand what you mean.

Knock yourself out, pray as hard as you want.

Cops are always hiding behind the same lame shield, “the officer fired in self defence”, “the suspect appeared to have a weapon”, “the officer fired when there was a credible threat to his life”…

It’s all fucking bullshit. The officer fired because he was a big fucking pussy who was too afraid of black people to do his job, and instead killed an innocent he was supposed to protect.

In war you have rules of engagement, generally it tends to include something like “don’t fire unless you’re fired upon”, as you don’t want to accidentally start a war. That seems like a sensible code to me, and I think it’s pretty crazy that we would say that to soldiers, but not police. A fighter pilot can track another aircraft, knowing full will that it is armed, and if they are not cleared to engage, they still manage to stand down every time. Perhaps police just need clearer rules. Don’t fire unless fired upon, or else it’s murder. That would be clear. Since apparently you can’t take the racist out of the cop, then we can at least take the decision making out of his hands.

Firing because you see someone who might be armed… That’s just deportable, it’s criminally incompetent. I don’t care if you’re afraid for your life, if you were afraid for your life because you thought you saw a gun, quit the force. Today.

Haha, I’ll give you 100 CocoCoins if you can define what makes a cryptocurrency “fake” rather than real.

This headline should probably say “FBI create a cryptocurrency to expose…”

That said there are only a few cryptocurrencies I would call worthy of note or respect.

What driver?

We can’t afford to use SLS. If you want to use SLS for all of the missions we have slated for starship, you’ll need to multiply NASA’s budget by 2 or 3.

Honestly, I’m not worried about starship reaching its goals, it’s moving along. They’re attempting their next major launch tomorrow morning, the first launch to include returning the booster and catching it with the tower.

take the Artemis contract away from this idiot and SpaceX

What? And give it to who? Besos? Boeing? China?

I guess the only workable option would be to have the ESA do every Artemis launch. That could work, but it’ll likely cost 10 times more and take another 20 years.

Also, the primary ways they save money is through reusable rockets and building everything in house. As far as I know, SpaceX isn’t skirting regulation more than any other launch provider. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a higher number of regulatory breaches than other providers, after all, they have a much higher number of launches than other providers.

Don’t get me wrong Elon is a complete asshole, an addict, and at this point a detriment to society. But SpaceX is probably doing the most important work on the planet right now. Fully reusable rockets could usher in a whole new era of humanity. This could easily be just as transformative as the automobile.

I mean, the speaker part makes sense. The vacuum has a speaker so it can make an alert sound of something’s wrong. The most common ones I hear are “please charge Roomba” and “error, please move Roomba” (that’ll happen if it rolls over a grate or something and the wheel gets stuck).

But a cheap speaker is a pretty sensible feature.

That sure is a divisive opinion…

I truly believe that social media, and I mean all social media should be banned. People should not be allowed to spew their bullshit. We as a people are really not ready for this. Maybe China is right with their “social score” system. Maybe stuff like the bilderberg group is really needed. We seem to need guidance. We, the normal civvies, seemingly are too hell bend on watching it all burn. And are too stupid to stop it. People like trump, inciting hate, spraying unlimited bullshit, should be thrown in jail. That’s not politics. That’s rage baiting.

Haha, that sounds like something I would say. I wonder if it’s an IT guy thing to say “fuck it, this is broken, no more doing this for anyone anymore” " and by the way, how did you even break this?".

But yeah, this is probably an overreach. If you banned all social media, you’d have to ban all forms of Internet mass communication, forums and message boards, comments sections, all the way down to group emails…

Also, practically, you’ll never get any law that limits speech that much passed in the US, is just not going to happen.

I wish I knew what would work to start addressing this problem…

your chances of doing well in education decline dramatically with greater social problems.

And that’s because we don’t spend enough on education… If the schools could provide sufficient support for all their students, then it wouldn’t just be the ones with means who succeed.

The suggestion that spending more on schools won’t fix a whole lot of problems, that’s just ridiculous. It’s pretty obvious, but it’s also demonstrably untrue. For instance, it’s well documented that smaller classrooms result in better outcomes for students. If schools could afford more teachers, they could have smaller classrooms. Similarly, better and newer materials result in better outcomes. And like in any field, paying higher salaries can attract a higher caliber of employee, so higher pay for teachers would also mean better teachers. As it is, public school teachers need a master’s degree and you can’t really expect teachers to spend more time in college racking up debt when they can only hope to pay it off after 30 years of teaching, you know unless they made more money.

You know there’s a simple and humane way to do it.

Heroine executions.

I realize now the spelling error I made, but I’m keeping it this way.

Oh, we haven’t been in any wars in the last 70 years. There were some “police actions” and we’ve deployed “peacekeeping” forces…

Right?

Seriously though, we need to do away with the “Authorization for Use of Military Force”. If Congress doesn’t have the consensus to declare war, then we shouldn’t be fighting.

and using WP to improve WP is… not a good idea.

That is not inherently true. For example, there was an instance when I read a Wikipedia article, and a chart was simply incomplete, there were entries in the chart left blank, when I knew that data existed. All I had to do was look up those exact items in Wikipedia and the correct numbers were there, readily available.

I think that was when I first created a Wikipedia account for editing. There was an article clearly missing information and I knew it would be both non controversial and quite easy to fill in that information.

My point is, that first article could definitely be meaningfully improved, using only information already available on Wikipedia.

Yeah, I agree with that. And their solution instead of actually fixing the problem is throwing money and computing power at it in the hope that brute force will make it “better.”

Haha, well to be fair, that usually works… Most big problems could be solved by throwing effort and money at them. Hell, when I think about a lot of national issues, education, infrastructure, energy, crime, poverty, most of these could be solved by throwing money at them. And it would take less money than you might guess.

Call it a conspiracy, but I think with nobody ever telling the truth on the internet, LLM’s have only taught themselves to bullshit everyone into believing them.

And yeah, you’re definitely not imagining that. I’d say there’s something to that theory.