Why can't the western nations seaze all assets of the oligarchs. For example take their super yachts and drive them out to sea and blow them up as a symbolic gesture?
Take control of all their appartments etc. Drive all russians out of their countries (yes it will hurt "normal" russians but so what, this is war, maybe they would start to think about their leaders a little bit more).
What have these two people actually done, except lying all the time? And abusing their workers?
Also, these "magical" landings have been made 60 YEARS AGO! Go Musk! Hyperloop! FSD! Robotaxis! Semi! VTOL with pressurized air! Tesla robot! Pedo guy!
Not sure if you’re interested in feedback, but your angry and extreme feelings about Musk and everything connected with him make your opinions too easy to disregard: you’ve made yourself the HN equivalent of the angry crazy guy shouting on a street corner.
I know it’s the trend in the world, the established media, social media, etc. but it’s possible have have a more nuanced view on things than ALL VERY BAD or AMAZING AWESOME.
For example, one can reasonably criticise Musk for his stupid outbursts on Twitter and elsewhere (and of course, also criticise the media for breathlessly reporting every bit of nonsense he spouts for clicks.) He is notoriously bad at predicting the timing of when things will happen. Robotaxis are probably 5+ years away, if ever. Tesla delivers their new models much later than promised, and has poor customer service. Hyperloop was a concept that would probably have been ignored were it not for the outsize attention that Musk gets. Etc.
But… these views can reasonably coexist with also acknowledging that two of his companies have revolutionised their parts of our world within a very short space of time. SpaceX has revolutionised the commercial rocket space, and Tesla has driven the whole automotive industry towards building EVs by leading from the front. And it’s almost guaranteed that neither of those would have happened without them being led by Musk (and Shotwell).
Your comments about rocket landings just speak of your own ignorance. Even the guy who made video you linked wouldn't agree with your terrible opinion.
> Hyperloop
What lie? Have you actually done any research.
Musk said he worked on something, he is not gone develop it as he has no time, but if somebody else wants to, they can. And to help that he opened up this BluePaper:
That's literally it. No produce was ever promised. The only thing that was promised was to deliver a BluePaper and they did.
> Semi
A produce they are delivering in slow numbers and there is no question that they will deliver more. Its a question of battery availability and business strategy.
> VTOL with pressurized air!
Again not true. You keep mixing up things talked about and things promised.
For the new Roadster they said they would work on a SpaceX package that would be able to for a small time hover a vehicle. They have neither sold that package only talked about that they are working on it.
> Pedo guy!
So guy was an asshole to him, and then he was an asshole back. They are both not the nicest people. So what.
> FSD! Robotaxis!
Like many others he was wrong in their prediction. Like many others were on the same topic. Ok, fair. But the rest of your comment is nonsense.
> And abusing their workers?
More nonsense. Tesla workers with stock options have done far better then any autoworkers. Many SpaceX engineers retired as millionaires. Overall working at SpaceX its highly likely that you would have made more then comparable engineers specially of comparable seniority.
You have a fundamental scientific misunderstanding of the difference in difficulty of landing a rocket that goes straight up and down and landing a rocket that has just put something into an orbital trajectory.
Go look at any analysis of launch prices over the last 20 years, they have gone down.
SpaceX came in with a very aggressive price and they have lowered it a bit since. However since they have no competition they have increased their own margin rather then lower the price further.
That has made them a highly valuable company capable of investing in next generation.
> And reusability has its own problems, like lowering the amount of payload by 25% (you need to save fuel for re-entry).
That argument is equally dumb for all other types of transportation as it is for rockets.
> You can maybe get 10-20% savings if you ever get it working (see previous failed attempts...).
Complete nonsense. Hardware on a large rockets is above 80% of the cost and large fixed cost can be improved also by higher flight rates that re-usability make possible.
Anybody that has studied that space seriously understand that massively lower cost are possible with full rapid re-usability.
Really? In 5 years ROCKETS will be as safe as airplanes? And as cheap? And possible to fly over cities etc (talking about Shotwells promises here)? You really think this?
I hate framing it this way but your passionate hating has me doing it - do you build rockets? Or cars? What exactly do you do that gives you such certainty in bringing down these people who have already achieved so much? Their "dream big" mentality is sorely lacking in a society full of cynical, dead eyed and uncreative drones focused on nothing but financing their own survival or excesses. Applaud it, don't try to bring it down. There's literally no point. At a minimum they inspire others to get out there and get after it tackling problems.
The real problem with Musk is that he seems to be a narcissist and a good hypeman.
His achievements are that he invested in the right companies and then he ousted the original visionaries / founders... and finally claiming he is the founder... see Tesla.
Also a real leader usually gives credit where credit is due. Not once have I seen where Musk has credited his team.
And don't get me started with how he's calling a rescue diver a pedo, because his idea of his rescue submarine was rejected. Fragile ego is a dangerous thing.
He wants to be seen as a real life Tony Stark. It's more about him, not really about moving humanity forward, that's just a side effect.
From what I can tell Musk is literally a founder of SpaceX. I know he was a dick to the founders of Tesla, and he deserves shit for that, but it is a fact that Tesla has come very far since then under his leadership, and any claim that the founders would have done better is pure speculation. And of course the teams at these companies deserve credit, which he consistently admits. People who are obsessed with tearing down Tesla/SpaceX are often inconsistent in that any good thing these companies do cannot be attributed at all to Elon, because “he’s just a grifter hypeman, the team/other founders deserve the credit”, but any bad press they get is somehow entirely Elon’s fault. The truth is just that he’s partially responsible for all the good and the bad.
From accounts of people who have actually worked with him, he’s a legitimately smart guy with a laser focus on executing, albeit a micromanager. All the people I’ve seen saying he’s just some idiot MBA type who doesn’t actually believe what he’s selling are random media personalities and pundits. I can’t claim to know which is true, but one is certainly more credible than the other.
What I was trying to get across is that a founder's own value system and motivations of why a founder is doing a thing are an important factor for the longevity of a company.
To me it appears that Musk is only in it for himself and his legacy. Eventually this will become more apparent and the loyalty and followership he's enjoying will drop.
He's more of a hypeman than a true visionary.
See how he hyped up his other ventures... solar city, self-driving cars you can make money with, electric trucks, hyperloop, etc... still waiting for that self-driving car which should be available 'next year' and that was in 2018 or something.
He has a fragile ego and weird behavior on the social networks. At the same time, SpaceX is by far the most successful of all the space startups that have emerged in this century. Most of its competitors are not even unsuccessful, but outright dead. Blue Origin, financed by Bezos, hasn't yet managed to reach the orbit after 22 years of operation.
Yes, it is possible that random forces of luck selected SpaceX for a string of successes. But I think it is deeper than that. Musk has an ability to attract engineering talent and give it enough leeway so that interesting concepts may emerge. Shotwell has an ability to keep the company financially sound and on track.
SpaceX is in big part successful through what looks like corrupt self-dealing and fraud. They bailed out SolarCity with NASA funded bonds and then instead of taking the L when SolarCity was to go bankrupt, Tesla bailed them out with a fake demo of non-functionable solar shingles followed by an acquisition.
SpaceX has delivered fundamental breakthroughs in commercial space launch. Any analysis of the company that omits this is extremely disingenuous and makes me suspect ignoble motivations behind the critique.
Reusable rockets aren't coincidentally many orders of magnitude safer though. They would need to be just to come even with airplanes. It would also involve acceleration forces far beyond anything a normal passenger would accept. I'd be glad to be wrong, but I have yet to see an analysis that actually does the math and doesn't result in something along the lines of "this concept is insane and doomed to fail". Spaceship would probably make a good spaceship. But using it for quick flights between cities is less realistic than airlines reviving the Concorde.
Very true. Though the high costs historically associated with rocket launches have precluded the kind of scale needed to achieve extreme safety. This will change if SpaceX succeeds with Starship, though of course it will take a long time to iterate enough on safety to achieve the extremely high standard seen in aviation, or at least as high of a standard as is possible with rocket transportation, and then establish a long enough track record that consumers can trust it.
Does this make starlink any more feasible? I thought that the math just doesn't work out.
Not to mention the massive amount of space garbage (40k satellites replaced every 5 years?)
See for example a "busted" video https://youtu.be/zaUCDZ9d09Y?t=912
It only just showed up for CA (in 2021) and mostly only along the border (eg Victoria). Granted a lot of population is lower.. but current ETAs (from the starlink "Order" page) for the 5 biggest cities are all tbd:
- Montreal late 2022 (4.2M people)
- Vancouver late 2022 (2.6M people)
- Toronto 2022-2023 (6.2M people)
- Calgary 2022-2023 (1.6M people)
- Edmonton late 2023 (1.4M people)
There is no way that getting a satellite connection inside a city is cheaper or more practical than a physical line though. It will be necessarily slower, have worse latency and be more expensive.
I didn't say it was? I just used cities (major population centers) to determine what coverage was like (bad) and how much of the country had access (almost none).
"No inheritance - no more digging through the massive world-tree of objects to find the code that actually does things."
You still have interface methods? I had problems navigating a new codebase and find the places "actually doing things". Some object was passed in somewhere which mysteriously implemented a one method interface defined on the spot in the other go file. I.e. the implementation had no relation to the interface which was obvious without a lot of searching and finding the right implementation.
Also passing in functions (callbacks?) all over the place is a little messy at least for a newbie. It was hard to find where the functions where called and at what point and how the program flowed.
(this is hard to explain but maybe somebody gets the point...)
edit: somebody else touched on what I also meant: " duck typing make refactoring and understanding new codebases error prone"
Also the modules and dependencies management surely is a joke? Pulling stuff from github willy-nilly? Quite bad in any case when compared to maven where you have a local repository with all the dependencies (so they don't change or disappear from the internet so that you can actually build your software 5 years later, exactly in the same way)
There are certainly ways to write confusing code in Go too, no inheritance is just one cause of confusion subtracted.
IMO interfaces are best used sparingly and in a minimalist way like io.Reader (but I prefer them to Java interfaces and have not found them confusing nor felt compelled to find all concrete types conforming), callbacks are best avoided if possible, and yes dependency management has only recently improved.
I really do think Go has a discovery problem. Function signatures don’t tell you hardly anything, does this need something deferred, what types does it implement, etc.
Jeep is actually enforcing this! In the game hill climb racer 2 there were two vehicles, "Jeep" and "Super Jeep". They had to change the names of the vehicles in the game... (To "Hill Climber").
Why do we still talk about "safety" when discussing nuclear even though this has been handled over 30 years ago. Or in other words I haven't seen any arguments presented in this paper "debunked".
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/
In short a few points:
- nuclear power is the safest form of energy production by far
- storing the waste is an easy problem (store on site and reuse later with better technologies), or just make glass cubes of it and dump in the ocean (yes really)!
- the high price of building nuclear power plants is in many ways the result of "nucular paranoia"
- non-military reactors (ie. all "western reactors") can't have the same failure modes as chernobyl had
Do they really make enough money to pay for their food, housing in the city they work, health care, pension, kids and kids education?
If not these sorts of jobs (or with this pay) should be banned. Else it's just subsidies from taxpayers who need to pay for these things through government "subsidies".
Where I live (a nordic country) eg. taxi drivers used to be able to live a very comfortable life with their pay. And the taxi service was excellent. Not even that expensive if you think about having a private chauffeur driving you around.
Now they changed the rules (to enable "gig economy") and most of the taxi drivers don't pay proper taxes or know any address without gps, and they don't get paid nearly enough to get by without government handouts/social security, or have any pension accruing so they will need even more government/tax money when they are old.
Jeez, I don't get hacker news downvoting (and yes whining about it is against the rules I guess). Was there some fundamental flaw in my argument, was it too "mean" or did someone just disagree and downvote because of that.
And on the lower end a friend has a Renault Zoe. An excellent car on all accounts. I saw a base level black model 3 the other day parked and I tought what a cheap looking car, it was truly underwhelming (where I live there aren't many Teslas). Then I saw that it was a Tesla which costs about 50000$ here...
I don't care about model S ludicrous mode acceleration, nobody actually needs that kind of acceleration from traffic lights. Well maybe if you have low self esteem and try to compensate for something?
