Everything I read about the police in the US suggests to me that they are an array of paramilitary thugs that are supported by the courts, so not suprised they do this.
Curious if these tricks are allowed in the civilised world too?
In Germany, "means of deception" are listed in section 136a of the Code of Criminal Procedure [1] as one of "prohibited examination methods" among things like induced fatigue, hypnosis, medications or torture. I think that does count as "not allowed".
I do, I've never printed one of those boats, but not everyone's interested.
If you think of it as functional/decorative categorisation first of all, obviously some people will overlap but broadly speaking I think people are interested for one or the other, then within the 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not care about designing your own models. You never wanted to design your own toys, but there's appeal in printing things not available on Amazon, unofficial merch for a film you like, or whatever.
Not to say there isn't functional stuff (which I exclusively print) on these sites, but often it won't be quite what I want, so yeah I end up in Fusion. (And typically starting from scratch eventually, because for some reason people don't share source, and working with imported STLs is hellish.)
Resin printers are HUGELY popular for people that paint miniatures and do tabletop stuff. Most of them never design characters and just buy the cad models to print.
There are several "CAD lite" systems available if you don't actually need dimensional accuracy though. There's a model boom in DnD circles around sharing 3D models, slicing them up, gluing them together, and making your own designs by basically digital kitbashing.
My friend is filling up hard drives with 3D models DMs share.
I live in a small town in a rural area near the centre of the UK.
I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?
"I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing tracks. £350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start towards a living.
SLS is around $ 37000 / kg to Orbit
Falcon 9 is around $ 2700 / kg to Orbit
So in excess of an order of magnitude difference.
Starship build cost is currently estimated at $90 million [1]. Let's call it $100 million to make the calculations simple. So even if they can't reuse anything and the payload is at the low-end of what they expect, so 100t from the 100-150t range, that would be $1 million per ton or $1000 per kilo. So 1/37th of SLS even when fully expendable.
With full reuse, the cost should come down to around $10/kg.
Apples and oranges: a human-rated capsule is a significant additional cost.
Orion alone costs another $1 billion per shot [1]. Project cost is $21 billion.[2]
OTOH: "Since 2020, when Dragon 2 flew its first crewed and uncrewed flights, it has proven to be the most cost-effective spacecraft ever used by NASA." [3]
Nobody is arguing Falcon 9 isn't a good deal but you can't compare SLS to Falcon 9, the comparison would be Starship to Falcon 9, of which, Starship ain't finished! That's all I'm saying.
I just did, so you clearly can. And it is also meaningful.
In theory, a heavier vehicle should have lower cost to orbit, not higher, all else being equal, as some costs are constant overhead. And this theory turns out to be true when you have a comparable vehicle, the Falcon Heavy:
Falcon Heavy: $ 2,100 / kg to LEO (fully expended)
SLS: $ 37,000 / kg to LEO
Payload capacity is 68t and 70t respectively in this configuration, so pretty much identical.
If you only need 50t to LEO, price for the Falcon Heavy drops to $1,800 / kg as they can then reuse various components.
So SLS is already completely outclassed as things stand right now.
Then comes Starship. A fully expendable Starship, which they have pretty much demonstrated already, would be a further incremental improvement. Slightly lower cost, double the payload of Falcon Heavy, so around $1000/kg. Add even partial reuse, and you're probably in the $800/kg range.
And then you have full reuse, which they look to be close to demonstrating, which is a complete game changer. In the $10 / kg cost range. 3700x cheaper than SLS. That's two decades of Moore's Law kind of improvement. Absolutely crazy.
Human with food, water and air for a couple of days would be what, $5000?
Incorrect. I also compared SLS to both (a) Falcon 9 and (b) Falcon Heavy. Both of which dramatically outperform it in regular commercial flight.
Whereas SLS has had exactly one test flight.
And of course Starship exists. It has flown 5 times, which is 4 times more than SLS. And has landed both parts at least once, which is infinitely many times more than SLS ever will.
Kind of doesn't matter. There is no mission Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy couldn't do.
The moon architecture has been designed so that it requires SLS, not the other way around.
No rational planner would ever even consider SLS if they had a choice.
You would much rather launch distributed into LEO, assemble and go from there. The 2 billion $ a year could be spent on important things for the transition and the lander.
As far as I understand the super heavy launch market doesn’t yet exist. Even if in payload mass capacity Starship can do it, we still need to see one with a payload door rather than a pez-satellite dispenser.
Just imagine how differently you can do space exploration when launch costs are not in the multi billion (SLS) or hundred million (Falcon Heavy) dollar range, but more like a million dollars.
You can send much bigger, heavier and cheaply constructed probes. And you can give them lots and lots more fuel, especially if you refuel them in-orbit, so less travel time.
Have a heavily shielded/armored Starship that launches small nuclear propulsion units into orbit that are then connected to the probes.
When launching a super heavy ($1 million for 100-150t to LEO) costs a small fraction of what a Falcon 9 launch costs today ($90 million), you can take over that entire segment as well, even without ride sharing.
Or consider CubeSats. They currently weigh around 2kg and ride share with a primary launch.
At $1 million per launch and 100 tons, you could launch 1000 CubeSats at 100 kg each, for $1000 per CubeSat. Though I am not sure if that would work out logistically.
Maybe 200 CubeSats at 500 kg each would be easier, $5000 a pop. Still very doable.
An obvious use case is just ridesharing. Multiple companies want to launch midsize satellites? Rather than paying for multiple Falcon 9 launches group up a few into one Starship launch and save a lot of money.
Trump has also proposed devaluing the dollar, on top of tariffs.
Imposing tariffs, and starting a trade war, will surely mean that imports will shoot up in price for the consumer. Exports will suffer, which is likely why he'll also try to devalue the dollar - to make exports be more attractive amid the receiving countries tariffs.
So that's a double-whammy as far as prices go, for the consumer.
His grand plan is of course to bring back manufacturing to the US - or that foreign companies will set up plants in the US. But that doesn't happen overnight, and there's no automatic mechanism that will make the companies do so.
And Trump has been clear about imposing the highest tariffs on all Chinese imports. Now look around you, and try to estimate how many things you see that are made in China.
Then you have the other countries, too, which will get hit with tariffs.
Oh, it's gonna send inflation through the roof. Trump's economic policies are likely disastrous, and I am fretting about my 401k.
That said, I have been contending that people experience prices and talking about lowering inflation when prices have recently gone up is net negative for the incumbent administration.
It always amazes me that a country that cares so much about being the 'best', cares so little about what people think of them.
Voting in this guy, and his policies reduces the legitimacy of the US. If Trump withdraws from Nato, then members may not pay so much to US for weapons any more. Protection money only works while you get Protection. Maybe the Visa and Mastercard tribute taxes we all pay back to the US will be less welcome.
Maybe, in the new protectionist world, tax dodging US tech companies will be less welcome too.
No mention that the British Cunard liners, like the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, were subsidised by the government.
The government loved having big fast ships it could requisition as troup carriers. The two queens were too fast to be intercepted by uboats. Mary moved 800k troups in WW2
As late as 1982 the Canberra was requisitioned and sent to the Falkland Islands conflict.
I would also find developers who could take the slightest vague term, misunderstand it in a 'technically correct' but to everyone else, outrageous way.
To counter this I used to hold short meetings with them every single morning to pull them back into line! We also shortened every build into bite sized chunks so the humans could check they didn't go off-piste. We called this Agile.
Poor communication between humans is seemingly insoluble. Perhaps a computer misunderstanding you in real time so you can correct is the best solution?
Indeed. This one reason why when humans describe what they want from their software, developers build something entirely different from what was requested.
Everything I read about the police in the US suggests to me that they are an array of paramilitary thugs that are supported by the courts, so not suprised they do this.
Curious if these tricks are allowed in the civilised world too?
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