I had always wondered whether there was a missile that was spin stabilized with minimal control surfaces like this one. They mentioned it only had two control fins, but not whether they are independent. It seems possible to steer a spinning missile using a single actuator if the control pulses are precise enough.
The RAM uses single plane tracking - basically imaging that it's only ever steering in pitch. But because it's constantly rolling, "pitch" will sweep over both axes and control to zero.
Yeah (and apologies if I get this wrong after 30 years) with a rolling airframe, you can have two fins on the same axis that "wiggle" back and forth at the same frequency as the rotation of the missile. Direction control comes from the phase of the movement, so the fins are pushed in the direction you want to go when it rotates to that point.
Vikhr also does this, and Starstreak and M1156 both use a clutch to transfer force from a freely spinning fin assembly at the nose to the rest of the projectile when appropriate, achieving guidance without any movable control surfaces! Missile designers are very clever.
The modern RAM Block 2 has four independently-actuated fins for agility[0], so nowadays the spin stabilization isn't being used to reduce the number of control surfaces.
Spin stabilization is still quite valuable. If an actuator fails (or worse, jams hard over) the missile won't veer off course, it just has reduced control authority.
Last week I watched an old Nova episode[0] about a harrowing attempt to restore a B-29 that had been abandoned 50 years prior a few hundred miles outside Thule. It turns out that Greenland is a difficult place to do basic things, let alone repair a massive decaying old warbird.
1. Start a company
2. Issue 1_000_000 shares to yourself
3. Find a friend who owes you a favor, then issue another share in the company and sell it to them for $1000
This is an extreme example, but most of the people on the world's richest list have been able to similarly inflate their net worth through illiquidity. Market caps are a misleading way to measure wealth. To take another example, the market cap of Tesla is based less on the company's physical assets than the anticipation of earnings over the next 20-30 years. My own net worth would look a lot better if it was calculated using the same methodology.
I'm not trying to argue that inequality doesn't exist, but I think this obsession with the paper value of the 1-percenters is a distraction from the fact that reducing inequality needs to ultimately involve the redistribution of physical assets and labor.
If we get obsessed with confiscating the abstract financial assets of billionaires, we will likely find out they don't have much buying power when being traded for real things like housing or energy.
It's amazing that this argument that the wealth "somehow isnt real" rears its head each time the topic of inequality appears.
The efficient market hypothesis lasts right up until you examine the wealth of billionaires in aggregate, apparently.
Yet when Bill Gates or Bezos want to sell off their stock to fund their various hobbies they have no problem doing so.
And if it is true for a non neglibile number of billionaires, so what? If we tax their wealth and a lot of it turned out to be smoke and mirrors that will, if anything, aid price discovery and lead to more efficient markets. Maybe the middle classes will buy fewer of their crappy assets as a result.
>Yet when Bill Gates or Bezos want to sell off their stock to fund their various hobbies they have no problem doing so.
That's because they don't actually spend that much of their wealth. If Bezos and Musk spent their entire fortune on their space companies, rockets technology would improve, but not to the scale of $300+ billion. Once they approach a certain level, every rocket scientist is working at maximum capacity our pipeline of training becomes bottlenecked.
>If we tax their wealth and a lot of it turned out to be smoke and mirrors that will, if anything, aid price discovery and lead to more efficient markets
I would agree if I could trust politicians with that amount of responsibility, but I don't. The majority of them don't seem to understand basic supply and demand or are intentionally pretending not to so they can pander to their voters.
>That's because they don't actually spend that much of their wealth.
From what I remember Bill Gates is on track to spend almost all of it.
I've always found the idea that billionaire wealth isnt "real" because liquidating it all simultaneously is impractical to be unconvincing in the extreme, verging on dishonest.
>I would agree if I could trust politicians with that amount of responsibility
Politicians are not actually restrained by taxation as decades of persistent deficits prove.
I find it helps to consider a thought experiment: what if every dollar taxed was burned to a crisp and every dollar spent by government was printed?
The answer is nothing. Taxation exerts a deflationary effect and spending exerts an inflationary effect.
The question I ask when I consider if a higher tax is necessary is "are inflationary pressures too high?"
I think it's clear that inflationary pressures in housing and asset markets is off the scale.
> From what I remember Bill Gates is on track to spend almost all of it.
Is he? He's wealthier than he has ever been.
> I've always found the idea that billionaire wealth isnt "real" because liquidating it all simultaneously is impractical to be unconvincing in the extreme, verging on dishonest.
Of course it's real. My point is that it isn't really as much wealth as people make it out to me. Much of it is simply a consequence of the mega-rich already having everything they want. Therefore, it requires a lot of goods and services to "buy" the wealth of the mega-rich.
> Politicians are not actually restrained by taxation as decades of persistent deficits prove.
Of course they're restrained. They're just choosing to stretch these restraints as much as they can. If they raise more in taxes, they can delay the eventual problems that arise from our deficit.
> I think it's clear that inflationary pressures in housing and asset markets is off the scale.
I'd agree that we can use a land value tax and higher capital gains tax, but that's not what the Democrats seem to want. Instead, they'd rather punish the productive upper-middle class with higher income taxes (admittedly, this where I am). Meanwhile Prop 18 is going strong in California, and NYC's most expensive apartments have the lowest property taxes as well.
That is not the point. Net worth still gives you power, which is really what is being questioned here. Money itself means nothing, it's the power that gives you that matter.
You can use your net worth to get astronomical loans to reinvest and multiply your income. You can use your shares in too-big-to-fail companies as a leverage to blackmail governments into doing your interest, and so on.
Good point! Though, is it not true that these paper assets can be and are used to take out pseudo-gratis loans, hence in some sense they are real? Maybe the hypothetical billionaire is not worth that much, but the house he got against the paper wealth is definitely real and did not affect his financial power as much as it affects people buying it against 10% upfront.
Agreed, except the aggregation of physical labor and assets is also not that simple. Many tech companies have very few assets on paper, yet nevertheless have an enormous amount of influence.
I think in the end it comes back to comparing capital. Which sounds a bit familiar...
Well thankfully they have a bunch of suggestions if you were to just bother reading past the headline instead of nitpicking it to death with an imaginary scenario that does not apply to any of the 10 mentioned.
I remember seeing a documentary a long time ago called Overland to America that documents similar travails, including a failed attempt at driving across the Bering Strait in one of these things: https://www.arktoscraft.com/
This makes a lot of sense if you consider that increasing the supply of money is not enough to cause inflation on its own- there also has to be scarcity.
Healthcare is scarce because it is tied to the availability of highly skilled labor and has seen significant cost increases in recent years as a result.
Housing has been scarce because the amount of land near job opportunities has decreased as our economy has become more service-oriented.
And this brings me to the one big item that was missing from the list in the OP: the pandemic has eased the housing crisis by encouraging everyone to spread out. The exodus of upper and middle class people moving into smaller cities and towns will bring more opportunities for service jobs to places with lower construction costs and a higher availability of land. The only question is whether the drawbacks of telecommuting are big enough to push everyone back into offices in a few years, reversing the trend.
> the pandemic has eased the housing crisis by encouraging everyone to spread out
AFAIK there were a few weeks in the first wave of the pandemic where people fled the city and landlords would face sudden issues to fill their apartments but this time is over. Speaking from anecdotes by friends trying to get apartments in the big cities thoughout Europe it has not gotten easier at all.
When I played around with 3d printers a number of years back, I tried a few free programs such as Blender, FreeCAD and Sketchup, but I found OpenSCAD for modeling and Meshlab for post-processing to be the best pipeline for my needs.
OpenSCAD is particularly effective for making replacement parts where precision is more important than aesthetics.
However I did find ways to have fun with it, such as building a printable dragon fractal: https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.subalpinetech.com/images/dragon...https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.subalpinetech.com/images/dragon...
I recommend it for anyone who wants to think more deeply about all things, including those which we previously might have considered unworthy of our mind cycles, such as the Taco Bell breakfast menu.
I'm finding the article's arguments pretty unconvincing.
eBook prices might be high, but as I've grown older I've realized that the price of the content is typically well below the opportunity cost of consuming it. If a good portion of that money makes it back into creators' hands, I'm satisfied.
The author spends some time complaining about the lack of first-sale doctrine, which is just a relic from the time when all content came on costly physical media. It would be wasteful to be forbidden from selling a book that you no longer want to read, so the reasoning went.
The arguments get even more nonsensical ("eBooks don't appreciate in value", "You can't photocopy them")
Meanwhile, they totally miss my biggest issue with eBooks: that they give significant power to platform providers, who may demand unreasonable concessions from authors and publishers.
It kind of frustrates me that I keep seeing UBI being described as a sort of unemployment assistance. Unless you drop the "U", a UBI is something EVERYONE receives- the separation between givers/takers would not be obvious, especially if the unemployment rate remains low. And I think the unemployment rate would remain low because workers would be willing to accept lower pay if it is bolstered by a UBI.
A UBI that is aggressive enough would actually create jobs by lowering the cost of labor in this manner.
The thing that prevents people from having jobs isn't a lack of demand for labor- it's the unwillingness of companies to pay for a worker's full cost of living. A UBI could correct for that.
I think it was that same article that inspired me to write an iOS app that displays your running average speed and notifies you if you deviate from it.
