What do you mean? I really don't understand the point you are trying to make. Energy is a matter of national security primarily because our energy sources and distribution are destroying our own country. Quickly, too. Miami will not recognizably exist for the lifetime of the kids growing up in it now.
It is the purpose of the government to serve and protect those "pesky locals" (ew...do you really call your fellow people 'pesky' who want a better world for you?) and the best way the government can do that is to shut down oil/coal/polluting technologies and move to renewables as fast as possible.
I have never heard that in my life. Saudi is one of the scariest places on Earth to me, I don't see anything nice or good there, and neither does anyone I know. What do you mean?
> Iranians are "scary bad guys"
I've never heard this either??
What on Earth does any of this have to do with my post?
>Saudi is one of the scariest places on Earth to me, I don't see anything nice or good there, and neither does anyone I know.
hey great, your opinion here doesn't matter. you were commenting on national security and energy policy, which may or may not reflect your personal opinions.
> What on Earth does any of this have to do with my post?
that energy policy is also related to geopolitical concerns and protecting strategic interests in other areas (e.g. financial system / allegiances in other areas / petrodollars, etc) and, i posit, not simply "because our energy sources and distribution are destroying our own country" as you claim
> goes against the free market economy countries are trying to propel
This is confusing. Canada and other countries are not "trying to propel" a free market. And well they shouldn't be, free markets don't work! They cause significant increased pain in the future as externalities that the market didn't price in come to fruition and hurt everyone.
Costs will be much higher in the future to fix problems that we could solve at reasonable cost today, due to "free markets" running amok and causing problems.
Canada is not pursuing a "free market" and it shouldn't be. Important things like banking, and infrastructure, construction, etc should be heavily regulated and the government should have significant participation to protect the public.
As it stands today, corporations abuse the public's wallets buy polluting our air and water and then assuming we will pay the bill to fix it while our health is failing and our cities sinking.
Free markets are bad and we should not vie for them.
I simplified my response in the context of the nationalization of assets/companies, it doesn't mean there aren't government interests that require protection or regulation of the market economy.
Wiki definition: free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and by consumers.
If you purchased a car, cell phone even a house, chances are that parts and materials, if not the whole product/service, were made elsewhere and were determined in part by your purchasing habits.
A good portion of corporations are polluting in part for personal profits and in part because the government and people living in that country are willing to exchange X for Y (simplified e.g. a little more pollution for a certain number of jobs and revenue)
That would imply that there is no climate change happening, as we would have priced in that externality and resolved the issue by now. Right?
As it turns out, that isn't right, because nobody who has incentive to price the externality right is allowed to be part of the process, and the ones who are part of the process are incentivized to cheat and not price externalities at all, or to price them poorly.
So we have runaway climate change. And we have structures preventing that from improving because the incentive structures are flipped to the opposite right now. There is no indication that will change, in fact the incentives to pollute and remove the externality of pollution from the cost of goods sold and services provided, so that we are actually accelerating this path towards higher pollution (see Trump's coal-and-oil-championing attitude).
> That would imply that there is no climate change happening, as we would have priced in that externality and resolved the issue by now. Right?
Erm, what? I didn't say that the system would price it...if it would...we wouldn't need to price it. I said that we needed to price it. You seem to be arguing against some sort of made up straw man here.
I don't have evidence to support my following claim, but I think that having a stable home life with a supporting family, not subjected to unusual bankruptcies or bad financial surprises, is a key element to startup founder success.
I could be mistaken. But I am a failed founder who disrupted their family and friends lives and lost a lot of goodwill while running the business because of it. So I think I'm at least right some of the time.
Regardless, it's wise to think of your loved ones first, even if it's only a cold business decision to do so; your business will thank you later with smoother revenues and a happier, more capable decision-making process down the road.
I'm not the above poster, but to me the desire to maintain a high standard of living when starting a business for the first time either means someone has a ton of money in reserve or they aren't very serious about starting a business. Now I can partially understand the situation if someone is buying a franchise or some existing business that will almost certainly have revenue from the start, but many of the tech business ideas discussed on HN require a fair amount of R&D before there's any revenue. For a first time entrepreneur I'm not sure 1 year is enough time to get up to speed and learn from mistakes.
OP here. Yes I have 5 years worth of expenses covered in liquid savings. My target is to make enough income to break even with my personal expenses before I run out of savings.
> Today's launch is just a small modification of those ones
No it wasn't. I think you misunderstand what today's mission was about and what it opens for the future. Today's launch was a major departure from Normal SpaceX Activities. Launching a human-rated capsule to space is no "small modification".
> Soyuz is mundanely sending astronauts all the time to ISS.
They have exactly zero (0) vision or plans or constructed spaceships intended to start a Mars Colony. This makes SpaceX activities different from Russia activities in a pretty clear way. When SpaceX achieves a milestone it's a direct stepping stone to colonizing Mars. When Russia sends cosmonauts to the space station, they are sending cosmonauts to the space station and have no future plans. The two things are very different.
That's definitely neat, but why not aim higher? Depending on your age?
I'm in my 30s: My goal here is to live on Mars. SpaceX's colony is aimed at being able to support 1M people, with something like 80,000 leaving Earth each Mars transit window on a BFR/Starship. Save some money now, wait 20-30 years for them to get the initial hard colony built and then buy my ticket.
Might not work, but I think I'll at least get close. You can definitely aim higher than watching them send people to ISS! That'll happen in the next few months/years, but so much more is happening after that, like the 7 people going around the Moon, or the first Mars launches on Starship, etc!
Woo!
(and lol that this is at -3, I'm just excited about stuff okay? no need to bury it deep underground and hate it so much!)
I don't know why you're getting so downvoted. I mean, living on Mars for people in their 30s is probably a stretch goal, but getting to space is realistic.
Realistically, Starship won't fly regularly until around the mid 2020s and even that beast of a ship won't be cheap enough to commercialize space properly. I think you'll have to wait until Starhip's successor or the Blue Origin equivalent (~2040, ~15m diameter) for any chance to go.
If SpaceX manages the feat of launching the Starship for $50 million (unlikely, probably 2-3x more) and carry 100 people, it still means 500k/ticket. And that's just launch, for actual missions you'd need operational support, extra space (ie fewer passengers) for life support etc. So maybe around 2030-2035 you'd be able to ride around the moon for a few days (like the pre Apollo 11 missions) for $1.5 million.
If the successor rockets manage to lower the cost further, maybe around 2045 you'd be able to spend a week on the moon for 500k, or a weekend in low earth orbit for 200k? Maybe that rocket will make it possible to take a trip to mars for $1 million? I'd imagine rent would be pretty expensive there as well.
These are certainly not middle-class prices, but if you sell your house instead of leaving it to your children, or don't have children, or are pretty very well-off it's not unrealistic. You'd also have to make sure you're in tip-top health at 60-something though, so some luck would still be required.
I like you ambition. However I seem to become more conservative and nostalgic with age. The thought of going on a one-way trip to Mars when you are 60 is scary. It is probably too cold and monochromatic for my taste.
But thank you for the idea of longer term goals - "Experience zero-gravity and see Earth from outer atmosphere" is now on the list.
Oh my it's not a one-way ticket! Those people selling 1-way tickets were scammers. A key tenet of SpaceX seems to be that you can come home to Earth whenever you want, or at least when the planets align for a fast journey. They will need to transport a lot of Starships back to Earth, and as long as they are like 30% empty it works out for people to come home any time at all. I'm banking on that too, coming back to visit Earth in the future.
> when you are 60 is scary.
Yeah okay, it is a bit scary to think about now. But I don't think it will be scary then. Should be just like airplanes now - that's the goal for SpaceX anyway.
> But thank you for the idea of longer term goals - "Experience zero-gravity and see Earth from outer atmosphere" is now on the list.
Starship is supposed to carry a couple hundred passengers. That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once; while I share the enthusiasm I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved.
> That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once
Yes, that's the plan as described by Elon! Maybe not "all at once" but over the course of some days/weeks, yes.
> I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved
Every Mars thread someone pops in to say this, but it simply isn't true. There are major economic incentives to go to Mars, and selling tickets is #1 of hundreds. There are basically infinite ways of making money by going to Mars and I'm really upset that the HN crowd is so dedicated to the line that there's no money on Mars. There's trillions of dollars on Mars.
With tickets priced at $200,000 or so as Elon has described, each Starship should have launch-day revenues of $40,000,000 if each ones carries 200 people. Wowza that's solid, no? And it's just tickets so far we're talking about, no science research or other goods or services or plans or anything at all, just consumer tickets.
There's plenty of money to be made.
----
Edit: I guess I've been banned? I'm no longer allowed to post on HN this morning. Here's my response to the post below.
I think we are on different pages here. I'm not talking about tourism, I'm talking about people who will build libraries, write books, dig for oil or whatever, innovate new solar panels, build houses, create industries, make movies, build new spaceships to the stars, go to the poles and think about philosophy, create new electronics, work on particle physics, etc.
Not tourism!!
> (a) people who can afford 200k and (b) people willing to risk a possible one-way trip.
Yes? There ought to be tens of millions of such people in 20-50 years. Why wouldn't there be? Elon gave us half a century notice to save our money. We're doing it. If they build it, we'll be ready to come.
> curious to hear examples
Okay. The Mars Colony seems like the first stepping stone into future solar system exploration. There will be significant opportunities there to build new products and drive new frontiers. I'll come back and write some specific examples soon, but I see it as far more economically interesting than Europe coming to North America in the long run: the possibilities are seriously endless, given the resources available, the lack of commercial claim to them, and the incredible rarity and quantity of those resources can change our ideas about what can be reasonably built by humans/robots in our lifetimes.
You may be right that there are many ways to make money beyond tickets (I don’t know—curious to hear examples), but I don’t think your ticket math quite adds up.
200k might be an ok ticket price for some, but you’re talking about the overlap of: (a) people who can afford 200k and (b) people willing to risk a possible one-way trip.
You’re talking about tickets as if this is space tourism: space tourism is a loop around the moon. We’re not going to have Mars “tourism” in the near future. These proposed hundreds of passengers are in for high-risk exploration.
"Musk thinks the ticket price could eventually dip below $100,000, cheap enough that "most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth and move to Mars if they want."
Ok, Falcon 9 costs 62M$ just to bring something on earth orbit.
Why you would ever think that 40M$ worth of tickets to bring a BFR on Mars would be profitable?
> Ok, Falcon 9 costs 62M$ just to bring something on earth orbit.
That is false. Where are you getting your info? Falcon 9 costs a lot less than that to deliver cargo to LEO! And the price is dropping every day.
> Why you would ever think that 40M$ worth of tickets to bring a BFR on Mars would be profitable?
There's no need to be condescending. First, I did not state at any point that $40M per launch would be profitable! Please don't make things up and say I said them. I merely stated a large source of revenue. I said there would be other sources as well, I made a big point about that!
Elon has stated many times that the Starship/BFR would cost less to launch than the Falcon 1, amortized over many reusable launches. Falcon 1, not even Falcon 9. So the cost of launching a Starship would be dramatically lower than your made-up numbers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
If you have a better source feel free to update the page.
However I think that it will be much more costly a travel of more than 50M km rather than less that 50K.
No, because those aren't 'idea people'. The phrase is meant for people who only come up with ideas and nothing else, it's not meant to describe anyone who has ideas.
The 'creative thinking industry'. :-) That sounds suspicious.
I once bought a book called Ideas Generation. I think it was this one.[0] A couple of years later one of the authors was in the news for plagiarism. Whoops!
You can only use Dark Patterns with a Twitter account?
Is this some kind of intentional irony or something? Social Login force-tied to a specific company is Dark Pattern #1 in my books.
Edit: They define "dark pattern" at the top of their site:
> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to.
That's exactly with Login With Twitter is. The user is presented with a simple option for logging in, but then is tricked by giving their metadata and account info that will 'sign them up' to be analyzed and targeted by Twitter for whatever purposes. Yes the TOS is probably there on social login, but aren't Long TOSs that are prompted in the middle of a user flow also Dark Patterns, as no user is likely to read them?
Can't possibly take that site seriously.
Edit 2: The darkest pattern from their site:
> We aren't great at responding to email — Twitter is best.
That's not what they're doing - they aren't saying login with twitter - there is no login for darkpatterns - they just want you to spread the word using their alias and hashtags.
>Use Twitter to spread the word about Dark Patterns. It's the most effective way to put pressure onto companies to stop using Dark Patterns.
>Retweet, quote and favorite other people's tweets about Dark Patterns.
>@mention the offending brands and tell them what you think about their practices.
>When you see a Dark Pattern, take screenshots and tweet it. Mention @darkpatterns or use the hashtag #darkpattern.
>If you've got an example that doesn't fit into a tweet, you can use a platform like medium or imgur, then tweet it.
not good at email, "Twitter is best" -> if we aren't publicly able to show how responsive we are, and what our answer is, its a much lower priority for us...?
> Using a neural network trained on widely available weather forecasts and historical turbine data, we configured the DeepMind system to predict wind power output 36 hours ahead of actual generation.
Interesting. Something I've long wondered about:
- Many wind farms are located in very specific places that have measured high winds and are otherwise good places to locate a wind farm.
- Global climate change is changing local climates too. Are the studies that were done 10-20 years ago to discover ideal wind farm locations no longer as accurate as they used to be?
- How are wind farm locations decided today? Is there is skill in predicting where a wind farm might be optimally located in 5 years rather than where it should be located today? Or if not (since probably not) what are the right risk mitigation actions to take if you are planning a wind farm but unsure about location?
- Since Machine Learning is useful in improving the value of the existing wind power, could it also be useful in this endeavor, finding optimal wind power generation locations?
- Lastly, is this something a person could research at home with open data and code? Just curious. :)
It is the purpose of the government to serve and protect those "pesky locals" (ew...do you really call your fellow people 'pesky' who want a better world for you?) and the best way the government can do that is to shut down oil/coal/polluting technologies and move to renewables as fast as possible.