whatislovecraft
whatislovecraft on Hacker News
Yes, really.
> Then how come Saudi's are "nice good guys"
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?
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.
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.
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).
I'll be here to talk to Republicans, or anywhere really. But they'd have to meet halfway and stop the intentional causing of pain on minorities before that can happen.
The last time I sat in a restaurant with Republicans they both encouraged me to stop breathing and kill myself, because "that would be the best thing for the environment right?" as I wouldn't be exhaling CO2 any more. No thanks. I've tried hard but it's too dangerous.
The author is the troll.
Really? Why though? I would assume they do. Robocalls are the maximum free-market ideal communication / ad mechanism. Aren't Republicans constantly trying to get less regulation in the US? Constantly removing laws around protecting consumers from this stuff?
I would assume most Republicans are in favor of Robocalls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Woo! You are welcome!
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!)
> People where the fracking is are pro-fracking. People in far away cities that aren't affected are against.
We are all affected. This is one world, one planet. We are all on it together.
And anyway, why would it matter if opinions are divided on this topic based on where we live? That speaks more to the education, opportunity, circumstance, political mood, etc, than it does to the issue at hand. It's a logical fallacy to argue that fraking is good for the environment (or good at all?) because people close by support it and people far away don't.
It sounds like with #1 you are suggesting that Republicans would prefer to poison the water of local communities and refuse to look at better alternatives. And the reason seems like money, from what I read online.
(EDIT: Also, investment in technology like fraking that DO POLLUTE means a longer leadtime before real solutions are offered at the right price. This fraking is done not to reduce climate change effects - it will make things worse - but to make money for oil people.)
You are straight-up ignoring Methane leaking from fraking sites directly making short-term climate change much, much worse. Methane is pollution too, and very bad pollution for our atmosphere right now.
> 2) The best carbon-free technology that we currently have, and can deploy at scale, is nuclear power. Republicans for. Democrats against.
There is a lot more to the world than carbon. I'm in favor of Nuclear energy by the way. I thought most democrats were? Literally 100% of Democrats I know in person are in favor of Nuclear energy. So I'm not sure what you mean here. But anyway,
Nuclear power has a long-lead-time and a huge capital investment, while many renewables are lower cost to start up and produce mostly pollution-free power immediately. I'm more in favor of actual renewables but I'll take nuclear power any day.
I think most democrats would love large-scale nuclear power, to be honest, and I'm quite surprised that you think otherwise. I'll have to look into this.
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.
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.
Yikes.
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. :)
Usually more competition results in higher quality products and service for consumers; and usually, more conglomeration results in less incentive for the service to improve and therefore lowers the quality for the consumer.
> If show X is only available on service Y, and you don't agree, don't watch it.
This is not how society works. When things get big and popular, their existence pervades through society and all people are affected, not just those who purchase the service or product directly.
> It's mindless entertainment anyway.
This is surely a logical fallacy. Not only is it not likely true, you are dismissing the valid concerns of a person by belittling the importance of the topic itself.
Citation needed? How do you know this? And if they don't have that, it seems like they might not have that due to totalitarian rule and a fear of the population to speak opinions. That's not a society we should emulate.
> I also highly doubt the US 'setting an example' will change any of their minds.
Why not? I think that it would. Demonstrating the economic impact of focusing these developments on useful, productive concerns would leave them in the dust. Seems like they would like to keep up? I don't follow your logic.
> If none of the United States tech giants sign with the Government, it's very likely that the US's technology used for an upcoming world war will be inferior to that of the US's enemies.
Again, I disagree and view it as the opposite. Also, if we are so bent on preparing for this future war - without conversation or allowing any kind of other ideas at all - it seems like the war will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The United States must set positive examples for the world. A country that effectively forces corporations and their employees for the military is fascist. The public pressure for Microsoft to work with the military is disconcerting. Opposing people like the OP make it sound like anyone who holds a differing opinion is mentally ill or something.
This isn't an okay state of affairs.
Choosing to not do work, or requesting to not do work, that is mostly (entirely?) unrelated to the work you were expecting to be doing at a software company in the US is not "sabotaging" the US military.
It is also no indication of intent to help the Russian or Chinese military. Your words are very nearly slanderous to the protesters, as you have placed a false intent to commit some kind of treason? on them, an intent for which they have shown no evidence of having.
Seems super valuable and interesting to me to have Reddit AMAs, and I'm just not seeing this "platitudes" thing or "just another media outlet" attitude. Sure, he's on a talking tour or whatever, but he's on reddit answering real questions with real answers not seen elsewhere.
Seems interesting enough to me, and not at all like what OP is decrying here for being "platitudes"/"non-answers".
> Clearly, that is not the case.
when it "clearly" is the case.
Edit: I mean, look at this answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aunv58/im_bill_gates_...
Seems solidly real to me.
No. Such panic-inducing tactics are not likely to make someone a better negotiator.
Learned helplessness is a real problem.
How do you propose the no-spying part? With laws passed by country? Nothing in your setup prevents spying, and spying is extremely lucrative in a capitalistic society, so people will still find a way to spy.
You are putting all your trust in the server. But those servers are where the spying would move to if it needed to. You cannot create a technological system that prevents spying, since you have not removed the incentive to spy.
Make it illegal to do targeted marketing and then you will have a dramatic reduction in spying. You'll also have a short-term dramatic drop in economic efficiency, something the HN crowd is likely to decry as equal to the end of the world. But I think it's much more likely that we build a sustainable society with good, long-term-growth economics if we put more limits on capitalism.
Edit: Facebook doesn't care if you're reading those documents on some simple text-web. They'll find out anyway, either via your absence from the 'regular web' or any other clue they can find. The spying won't stop just because you're using some primitive technology.