Cue comments about how Elon Musk is doing so much more with his money than everyone else, and how SpaceX/Tesla Motors/SolarCity are so much more valuable than anything else.
Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that everyone is just chasing instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile.
Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997, intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he was essentially fired - unfortunately).
Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing.
Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better.
Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply respect).
Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his Outliers book was right on the money.
Unimportant things just happen to have lower barrier for entry and higher tolerance for risk.
If important things happen to have lower barrier than unimportant things, we'll see important things progress faster, especially combined with higher tolerance for failure.
Failure in rocketry is often very costly, hence low tolerance of risk. This is also the same situation for healthcare. A drug that didn't pan out is a very costly failure. Both of them also requires lot of expertise and red tape on top of normal startup stress.
Heaven forbid that someone complain that diabetes pump research is abysmally retarded due to government distortion of the free market. Heaven forbid that someone complain that longevity research is abysmally retarded due to the same thing. Etc. etc.
People who whine that someone is noticing that things ought to be better than they are suffer from a total lack of vision.
The sad thing is the free market is probably the main reason we have these distortions in the first place, but then again I digress (and I may just be wrong). The government is so easy to blame. It's almost too easy - like taking candy from a baby. What you state sounds like facile thinking mixed together with just the tiniest little bit of bullshit.
> "If only, if only we got rid of those damn bureaucrats, we'd have free markets and lollipops for all!".
But you know what the sad thing is, the truly sad thing? The people in the government have their own customers too, members of free market that elect them and pay for their service. Some more than others - it would seem. The real problem, it would appear, is that those in the government are too damn good at giving the free market exactly what it damn well wants - monopoly profits.
Who exactly do you think paid for those restrictions?
Think more carefully wissler. Your bias is showing. As is mine (or is it? I never quite know myself).
> When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
Things are more than just black and white. The world is no place for idealists and ideologues with clear cut ideas, and simple thoughts. No, no, it's much too messy a place for that.
>The sad thing is the free market is probably the main reason we have these distortions in the first place, but then again I digress (and I may just be wrong).
Not the free market, but entrenched corporate interests. One of the most interesting results from economics in recent years is that in any field where the top four players have a combined marketshare of over 60%, they will act like a cartel.
Free markets are good at solving many problems, but free doesn't mean unregulated; it takes serious government intervention to prevent monopolies taking over and maintain a free market in the economists' sense.
Every example of a harmful monopoly I know about had government backing in some form or another. In a true free market, no one can obtain a harmful monopoly, unless the vast majority of human beings want the harm, in which case I can't see any sense in interfering with their free choices. Who is a government bureaucrat to claim to know better than those who is supposed to be serving?
(To be precise, I mean "harmful" not in the sense of criminal but in non-criminal senses; if we're talking about criminal harm then of course no free market would support that. What a free market might seem to support is e.g. someone who temporarily corners the market on some commodity, or who sells most of the oil).
>In a true free market, no one can obtain a harmful monopoly, unless the vast majority of human beings want the harm, in which case I can't see any sense in interfering with their free choices.
This sounds incredibly naive. Look at the most basic monopolies 101 example, Standard Oil: they kept gas prices uncompetitively high, harming customers. When a competitor opened a gas station they'd temporarily lower prices in neighbouring standard oil stations (subsidised by profits from the rest of the country), until that competitor went out of business.
You can argue that people should have paid more and bought from these competitors, but that undermines the whole economic argument for a free market (that it allows selfish actors who are interested only in their own profits to still allocate resources optimally). And no doubt you can pick some examples of standard oil being involved with government (any sufficiently large company in America does that one way or another), but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have attained their monopoly position in a completely unregulated market.
Just a side note, but Standard Oil wasn't all bad (at least not for the first 20 or so years).
They consolidated kerosene and gas production/consumption under essentially one roof, standardized rail carriages/loading docks for rapid oil dissemination and built hundreds of gas/oil pipes to aggressively reduce costs whilst providing a higher standard of oil (hence the name Standard Oil!) to the masses.
Standard Oil only became as big as it did because it provided a critical service at a lower cost. Problem was - as illustrated by my answer - is that they lost their way in the charge of profits with all the monopoly stuff you reference. This is why totally free markets don't work - they tend towards monopoly - which is my point.
I like free markets, I like innovation and I also like the government. I'm a walking host of contradictions :).
Yes, well, speaking of naive, I'm well aware of the dogmas they fill your head with in public school, so you don't need to go citing the monopoly dogma 101 stuff. What they don't tell you in those classes are the insidious ways in which harmful monopolies were beneficiaries of government privilege; you have to take the time to dig that stuff up yourself.
Different people mean different things by "free market." You mean "free for all", some kind of "law of the jungle" where people see what they can get even if it violates others.
I mean rule of law, where that law is based on a precise idea of individual/natural rights, where no one is violated. (See "For Individual Rights" at Amazon.)
"Things are more than just black and white. The world is no place for idealists and ideologues with clear cut ideas, and simple thoughts. No, no, it's much too messy a place for that."
What you mean is that the world is no place for rational, principled people. And yes, I know you also mean it's not a place for irrational, dogmatic people. But your category includes both in a fallacious "package deal."
Galileo might have agreed based on the consequences he received for finding rational truth, but that didn't change his mind. Yes, the world is mostly comprised of ignorance and barbarism, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to rectify the ignorance and barbarism and move toward a more civilized and prosperous form of society.
> What you mean is that the world is no place for rational, principled people. And yes, I know you also mean it's not a place for irrational, dogmatic people. But your category includes both in a fallacious "package deal."
Yes it includes both. The world isn't rational. It isn't fair. But neither is it completely random. Your writing against the government was very hedgehog like (one idea - clear cut - rational). The world is boundedly rational and it is not a place for both the rational or the irrational - extreme viewpoints do come as a package. I like being pragmatic, complex and contradictory. I also like being idealistic, simplistic and consistent.
You'll notice that thinking along these lines (what some call "fox like") frees one up from past beliefs and allows one to flexibly make decisions under uncertainty whilst limiting bias. I could just as easily argue for your side as I could for mine. I'm the hedgehog and the fox.
Quoting from the link you gave: "foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, ...)"
I don't think your interpretation of "rational" is making much sense if Aristotle isn't included. In any case, I'll classify myself if you don't mind, and I consider myself an Aristotelian and an empiricist not a Platonist, which seems to put me in the "fox" camp if indeed this fox/hedgehog thing has any kind of meaning at all.
As a decade-long reader of Slashdot, who transitioned almost completely to HN several years ago, it's remarkable how good the visible comments on /. seem after a long absence.
On discussions of sufficient size, because of the depth-first nature of HN I almost inevitably bail out around the 2000 pixel mark. I just don't want to wade through that much garbage, and that's about as much space as it takes for HN threads to devolve into a pointless tête-à-tête these days.
I think when I switched to HN, there basically weren't worthless comments, but those days appear to be over. The transition here wasn't noticeable, but going back feels like a breath of fresh air.
I'd suspect the current state of Slashdot is helped by Slashdot not being the "in" thing anymore too. A lot of the noise-makers have moved on, or aren't finding the site in the first place any more.
2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s
Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. This was truly a huge success despite the challenging odds.
Looking forward to the future Grasshopper mission. Perhaps it will fail at its first few attempts just like the Falcon1, but with Elon's determination and his excellent team of engineers, I believe they can do it. They have already proven themselves during the darkest times in SpaceX history. Skip to [38:30] to hear it from Elon himself. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-b... And his reaction after Falcon9 successfully launched on the very first try. [39:12] All that hardship and pain, totally worth it.
yeah, that's totally the biggest news here for me. Is there actually a decent half hour video program of technology news that's not just a beauty pageant for new consumer electronics?
That's a good way to describe it. There's been a lot of crappy 30 minute tech shows, with CNET TV (has local versions produced in suprisingly many countries) being the latest one I've been exposed to (and one of the worst.)
The same was once true of game-review shows. But in Australia at least, the show "Good Game" (and the for-kids spinoff "Good Game Spawn Point") have completely amazed me with it's quality and the hosts being the kind of people who would watch the show.
Sorry for the long-winded post, but I find it hard to articulate the huge shift that happens going from a technology show that's basically shows paid-for advertising to ones that are GOOD.
I hope somebody can make the weekly 20-30 minute show that I crave, but can't articulate :)
This video reminds me of another of Elon's strengths, beyond just a technical mind and an entrepreneurial mind: he's very well-spoken, and he's very charismatic -- and it comes off as very natural, so it helps to close the gap with his audience whenever he speaks. He doesn't come off as some egghead academic or engineer -- though clearly he can think like one. Instead he talks like he's a friend speaking casually and calmly, off-the-cuff, with a mixture of what you might call British-style humility. But backed by confidence and a sense of persistance. One of his repeated phrases across many interviews is that he's determined to make X thing happen, and he's confident he can, that they can. If they can't make something happen the first time perfectly out of the gate, then they'll learn, adjust and try again until they do.
He probably has a one-in-a-million combination of both a strong technical mind, a strong business sense, and strong personal charisma. There are a ton of folks out there that have maybe one of those things, and rarely two, but it's extremely hard to find all three. Plus he scored big early with Zip2 and PayPal. Arguably this fourth thing -- a huge war chest to draw from, beginning in the late 90's or so -- has made him even more rare. Indeed, a Tony Stark of his age.
Agreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a single entity which can accomplish both.
I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX pull this off.
Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.
Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that everyone is just chasing instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile.
Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997, intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he was essentially fired - unfortunately).
Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing.
Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better.
Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply respect).
Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his Outliers book was right on the money.
"Big things have small beginnings" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk).