Despite Elon's perpetual over promises, starship is the closest thing humanity has to getting to Mars, and it is an impressive feat of engineering. Elon can be an asshole and also own the best piece of space hardware out there
There is also a big difference between cant get orbital and won't (yet) get orbital. They pretty clearly can get orbital because their current route gets 99% of the way they. They actively choose not to because it's a test vehicle and if something goes wrong they don't want to have uncontrolled reentry.
Also the hydrocarbons you mention are not even a rounding error in any sort of count that matters, so there is no real destruction of ecosystems
I think greekrich92 when talking about "destroying the South TX ecosystem" meant their huge rocket production and launch site right next to some protected ecologically valuable areas in south Texas. The extent of the damage is debatable, they are of course legally required to minimize impacts, and even to do things like monitoring the state of the wildlife in the area, and they passed environmental reviews under both Biden's and Trump's administrations. Anyway, if anyone would want to build a new launch site, it must be on the coast, as near the equator as possible (for launch efficiency because of Earth's rotation), and as far from populated areas as possible, and that correlates with ecologically valuable regions. So that's the cost of progress.
Pretty much everybody know that launch site and exclusion zones for human are great for wildlife. Turns out, what is destroying the environment is humans living in places, large areas with few humans usually do pretty well.
But instead of focusing on that, we need to test if dolphins get hearing damage from rockets.
> So that's the cost of progress
Its actually the benefit of progress. The cost of progress is having to close the beach and having to relocate a small village.
It's obvious that before SpaceX moved in, 6 permanent residents of that little village weren't damaging that environment more than today's thousands of people working on a huge industrial site built in place of that village (and now 500 people are actually living in Starbase). SpaceX activity in that area obviously has some environmental costs, like every other industrial activity or any human settlement. The cost of human progress.
Was the falcon 9 that much faster? They also had issues with the initial launches of falcon 1 and 9. Plus they did not start with reusable rockets like they are here - it took years and many landing failures to get there. And of course the scale is a totally separate ballpark - falcon was in a scale that was well known, starship is in a scale rarely worked with.
Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship would be the N1, and that never successfully flew
By the third flight they were delivering to the ISS
Starship .. it's a bit unclear when they started designing it b/c they kept changing the design. But It's been in design for ~10 years.
> As of August 26, 2025, Starship has launched 10 times, with 5 successful flights and 5 failures.
10 launches.. and not even in orbit. Not to speak of ISS. I'm sure they'll make it work eventually, but I would expect with experience the design time would decrease, not increase. Starting from zero, making the first rocket engine has got to be much much harder than making an improved iteration (even if more complex)
I listened to the Radiolab podcast. I remained fairly unconvinced by the reporting on the show, but the part that really didn't make sense to me was, what is their definition of death? My (limited, non-medical) understand is that death has a bit of a spectrum associated with it. At what point does this light stop emitting? When you flatline exactly?
I came here with a similar thought. Given that we don't have a really precise definition of that transition from living to dead, I wonder if this could be it.
Some parts of the dead mice still emit in that spectrum. There won't be a clear and distinct "the lights went out" moment but a gradual fading, so you'll have to define some threshold to translate from radiation distribution and intensity do dead/alive. I don't think an image of photon emission will help pronounce someone dead.
It would be wild because it would be wrong. We acknowledge someone who has suffered brain death to be truly dead, even if their body can be kept alive (and presumably shining!) for weeks and weeks through modern medicine. If this light is a side effect of biochemical processes then presumably someone who is decapitated will also continue to shine for minutes.
The fading of the light would be sufficient but not necessary for someone to be considered dead, so it would make a poor definition.
This is over simplistic and if everyone knew this is what happens when PE comes into play then no one would lend to PE-backed companies. Often times these debts can work out.
PE strives to make things more efficient from a capital point of view. Business foois making $X in profit, and the PE firm's analysis says the can make X+Y dollars with some changes. This is 'better' because now the capital usage is more efficient and more can be spent in other places - new products, new jobs, new businesses, returns to investors, etc. And of course returns to the PE firm.
In principle an efficient economy is important on a macro scale - if all the business are stuck in how they were doing things 30 years ago then we would have reduced innovation and ultimately less jobs.
In practice there is of course a lot of money that flows back into the PE boss's pockets and.... thats it.
It trades robustness for efficiency. It makes the business/service altogether less robust, unable to withstand shocks, unable to survive the tests of time.
I think what GP is saying is that if I was a homeowner for 30 years, paid HOA fees all those years, then last year sold to someone else, who gets the HOA reimbursement then? I paid thousands over years and would presumably get nothing, while some other guy who just moved in all of a sudden gets a big check? That seems unfair.
I would assume the sale price of your property would be higher if it's part of a well managed HOA with 500k in reserves than if it's part of a dysfunctional, insolvent HOA, so the previous property owner kinda already got paid out for their contributions.
It's like selling shares of a company with significant cash reserves before/after they choose to liquidate a chunk of them into dividends or stock buy-backs, I would hope you priced the shares accordingly and have nothing to be mad about.
Imagine you dissolve a company that has a lot of money in the bank. What do you do with that money? Distributing it to the shareholders seems like the right way to dispose of it. What if somebody sold all their shares a day before? Well, they get nothing, that's how it works. The company's money should be accounted for in the share price, so it all works out, there's nothing unfair.
An HOA is no different. All the owners are also owners of the HOA. When you buy a place in the HOA you also buy into the HOA, and when you sell you also sell your interest in the HOA.
Except the HOA governing docs say the money goes to the State and it’s expected that the State provides the same amenities and services that the HOA was providing.
If State doesn’t then a non profit corporation is formed that does
Where I'm from we call a HOA a body corporate, and every home owner in the scheme has a % ownership in the BC. The title deed includes the ownership share. So if the house ownership is transferred, so is the share in the BC.
Size of the share is determined usually by the dwelling floor area divided by the sum total of all dwellings in the scheme.
So if you sell your house after decades of contributions, and then the BC is dissolved, then too bad, you sold your share in a going concern and lost your say in it's affairs.
Arguably you benefitted from the contributions from someone who came before you, and now someone will benefit from yours.
Hoa funds practically never get redistributed back to owners. I've never heard of such a case. We are only talking about it here because a legislature is talking about changing something state wide (and realistically this won't happen anyways).
So there is no realistic scenario where hoa reserves factor into home price
Reserves are money available for HOA expenses which would otherwise require new money from the owners. For that to factor into home prices, you just need buyers and sellers to be aware of this and what it means for their wallet in the future. Which may not be the norm since people are often clueless, but it doesn't seem completely absurd.
What you are saying is not typically in HOA governing documents nor State law so law would have to be changed and / or governing docs updated which would take a majority vote by all homeowners (60% in some cases per State law)
Very cool & pretty, but I feel a little let down. There is a huge leap from the basics of 3d plotting & spheres to the crazy pattern you tease and then show at the end. I understand it as someone who kind of knows this stuff already, but I think its way too big of a leap for someone who doesn't have the background.
I think the crazy plot at the end is not intentionally constructed to be exactly that way, just an example of what you can get if you vary the parameters of cosines and sines in parametric equation setups similar to the ones shown earlier (instead of seeking to align them so they wrap a sphere exactly).
Yeah, but a nation state server farm can probably cut that down to minutes because their budget can buy a lot of processors. You only need a few hundred to really shrink it down to manageable numbers. And it turns out that nation starts aren't the only ones that have this budget
It's trivial to force a collision. Here's the same UUID twice:
6e197264-d14b-44df-af98-39aac5681791
6e197264-d14b-44df-af98-39aac5681791
Typically, you don't care about UUIDs that aren't in your system and you generate those yourself to avoid maliciously generated collisions. Your system can't handle 2^61 IDs. It doesn't have the processing power, storage, or bandwidth for that to happen. Not to mention traditional rate limiting.
>2^61 is still a very large number of course, but much more feasible to reach than 2^122 when doing a collision attack. This is the reason that cryptographic hashes are typically 256 bits or more (to make the cost of collision attacks >= 2^128).
I'm not sure. 6ghz is around 2^61 CPU cycles in 12 years. I.E. basic CPU instructions; counting, not computing a cryptographic hash. Otherwise, where is the cluster that's bruteforcing ~122 bit cryptographic hash collisions in minutes?
For what it’s worth generating a random UUID for the purposes of collision isn’t generally much more complicated than a few arithmetic instructions which is why I used counting as an example. And as the other poster mentioned generating a UUID collision isn’t a security problem since the UUID tends to be generated within your infrastructure where you can’t really go full blast at generating UUIDs for all sorts of reasons anyway.
For cryptographic applications it is really small because the previous poster is correct that 2^64 is very small for that purpose - a small supercomputing cluster or two could decrypt such a cipher in a reasonable amount of time, which is why symmetric keys are all 256 bits and up to guarantee there’s no way to attack them.
I don't think that's quite right. A 128-bit UUIDv4 having a 50% chance of having any collision after 2^61 generations is very different from finding a specific 128-bit symmetric key. The best cryptanalysis of AES-128 is 2^126; nowhere near 2^64. Which is why standards bodies like NIST still recommend AES-128 as a baseline.
You're right that AES-128 is fine. Normally the birthday paradox only applies to cryptographic hashes.
The only way it would apply to symmetric keys is if you have a server that stores 2^64 encrypted messages, and can somehow find out which messages used the same symmetric key (normally not possible unless they also have the same IV and plaintext), and can somehow coerce the user who uploaded message #1 to decrypt message #2 for you (or vice versa). Obviously that isn't realistic.
Yes but it's a question of finding targets. Why was Ukraine able to decimate the Russian Air Force? Partly because they are all based out of big, well known bases. Even in wartime they have to be in a big base.
A jet like the Gripen can move basically instantly to basically anywhere and then it's hard to find, especially because it can just move again
True, but the Gripen is not a big strategic bomber and Sweden doesn't have nukes to threaten other countries with. They do air policing and would employ guerilla tactics in case of war, like put a gripen in a cattle shed somewhere and operate it from a road¹. It's a good strategy for a smaller country with lower population density to defend itself. Possibly not such a great option for Benelux, but for most of the EU, save for the big boys it's great. Even Germany could employ it, with the amount of sheds and the highway network that they have. Russia and the US needs aibases to operate strategic bombers from.
They hit a substantial fraction of the Russian long range bombers and assorted other aircraft. Quite a bit of that is at least for the moment impossible for Russia to replace.
There is also a big difference between cant get orbital and won't (yet) get orbital. They pretty clearly can get orbital because their current route gets 99% of the way they. They actively choose not to because it's a test vehicle and if something goes wrong they don't want to have uncontrolled reentry.
Also the hydrocarbons you mention are not even a rounding error in any sort of count that matters, so there is no real destruction of ecosystems
reply