The space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable. They tried with Shuttle but the material science wasn't there yet (heck it might not be even now, it doesn't seem that they've really nailed down the heat shield on Starship yet).
I don't think Shuttle's issue was that the material science wasn't there. The issue was the way the design was constrained, and the general aerospace culture at the time (that only began to change with "New Space").
Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting position.
They could've iterated on heat shield designs, particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and time" stage.
One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is that Starship is pretty much the first program actually doing the flight testing needed to understand the engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that SpaceX are figuring things out.
In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time, even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly, tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached, to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully intact.
I'd say material science since the only non-ablative material we can use is too brittle compared to a normal fuselage. I really hope they succeed but it's a pretty fundamental problem to have unanswered this deep into the program development (and gating Artemis no less). Also hard to judge their progress without the data their heat shield team is getting, see https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1978183753114505496 for example. It's great that they can tolerate loss of vehicle & have better margins due to the steel fuselage but for Artemis and Mars they need to solve it or they'll be burning up hardware fast, literally.
The issue with the shuttle wasn't the material science. It was designed around a mission profile of servicing spy satellites, which at the time had film which needed to be developed. The defense department gave NASA requirements which could only be satisfied by moving the orbiter to the side of the rocket, dramatically increasing potential damage to the thermal tiles and making crew escape basically impossible. This was all justified by the incredibly large number of flights that the shuttle would fly to service these satellites, and the money the defense department would pay for these missions. The shuttle was screwed late in production when digital camera technology allowed for spy satellites that didn't need regular servicing, eliminating most of the demand for the shuttle and rendering the infrastructure designed for it unsustainable.
Well for starters, this was the 70s - the space shuttle's development started in 1968 and its maiden flight was in 1981. The last spy satellite program to use film ran from 1971 to 1986. Further, the issue wasn't a lack of knowledge of TV signals - the first wireless video transmission had been made in 1923. The issue was producing digital video cameras of sufficient quality for the task in an appropriate size, and then transmitting such large files to the ground. Nobody in 1968 foresaw the massive improvements in digital electronics miniaturization that would unfold over the coming decades.
Rather than "very late to use tv" they were "very early to use CCDs". Even so that only happened in the 1980s. Before that film had to be used, same as we all had to use film for our holiday snaps until 2000.
Au contraire, the space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic space projects was _too_ sustainable. The idea that NASA has had a lack of funding is a myth. The problem has long been them spending it ineffectively.
SpaceX uses flight proven boosters. The rockets aren't quite as gigantic nor as single-shot as the Saturn V. Also, they launch satellites into LEO for commercial reasons. It's quite a different beast from lobbing LEMs at the moon where the money is essentially lit on fire.
Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.
There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way.
I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
> It's very difficult to find some way of defining rather precisely something we can do that we can say a computer will never be able to do. There are some things that people make up that say that, "While it's doing it, will it feel good?" or, "While it's doing it, will it understand what it's doing?" or some other abstraction. I rather feel that these are things like, "While it's doing it, will it be able to scratch the lice out of it's hair?" No, it hasn't got any hair nor lice to scratch from it, okay?
> You've got to be careful when you say what the human does, if you add to the actual result of his effort some other things that you like, the appreciation of the aesthetic... then it gets harder and harder for the computer to do it because the human beings have a tendency to try to make sure that they can do something that no machine can do. Somehow it doesn't bother them anymore, it must have bothered them in earlier times, that machines are stronger physically than they are...
You need to define "consciousness" first for the question to have any meaning, but all our definitions of consciousness seem to ultimately boil down to, "this thing that I'm experiencing".
What about the famous solution provided by Descartes, “Cogito ergo sum”? Let's assume the fact that “we think”, so we can put it in a function to be computable, how is that going to prove that “I exist” for a machine? How is the machine going to perceive itself as a conscious being?
He didn't topple the system but it wasn't for lack of trying. Pence had to refuse Trump's repeated requests to fix the election (a precedent that would have guaranteed single-party rule). You are relying now, as you were then, on other people in the system conducting themselves with integrity. If it were up to Trump, Biden would never have assumed office.
tl;dr It is very highly correlated to U-3. The paper doesn't include 2024 in the data series but the figure the article cites, 23.7%, is very near all-time best. That's pretty deceptive framing IMO.
I feel like you both may be missing the point. The article isn't just about the present. It takes a very long view:
> The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks
> The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.
In other words, the official statistics have been misleading for a very long time, misleading in the sense of not showing the true hardships of the economy on the voters.
"Year X is better/worse than Year Y" is not really the point.
The proposed measure is highly correlated with U-3, so as time-series they should basically tell the same story. If the assertion is "U-3 doesn't predict this phenomenon but this other measure does" it's likely to be wrong since the signals are roughly equal to a constant factor. For the entire data range depicted in the paper this property holds. Is it possible that back in $GOOD_OLD_DAYS this isn't true? Well I'd like to see the data but I don't have time to chase it down and none has been offered to support that claim.
> It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks
Then they should have made up a new number that proves that point rather than making up a new number that seems to imply the opposite.
> In other words, the official statistics have been misleading for a very long time, misleading in the sense of not showing the true hardships of the economy on the voters.
There is a relevant official statistic: the poverty statistic.
Their proposed unemployment rate tracks the official rate fairly well; the difference is that their rate is a lot higher than the official rate at almost every point in time over the past 30 years.
The author also notes that the rates can vary significantly by circumstances, such as geographical location, race, and educational attainment. Increasingly, in recent times, the Democrat/Republican voter divide is becoming a college degreed/non-degreed divide.
It's the author's argument. I'm just trying to interpret it correctly.
> X + Y is generally higher than just X, yes.
The author's point is that their rate, the higher rate, is a better reflection of how the voters are doing economically and explains why their perception of the economy can be very different than the perception of many leaders in Washington, who are puzzled about why the voters are upset.
>The author's point is that their rate, the higher rate, is a better reflection of how the voters are doing economically and explains why their perception of the economy can be very different than the perception of many leaders in Washington, who are puzzled about why the voters are upset.
Right, but that doesn't explain why voters are suddenly mad now. American consumer sentiment has deviated from "fundamentals" since the pandemic[1].
Who says they're suddenly mad now? The voters have thrown out two incumbent Presidents in a row and switched political parties three Presidential elections in a row.
Unfortunately for them, there's a political duopoly.
In practice it would be very difficult to predict RDRAND outputs. Even so I believe the truly paranoid can use RDSEED to skip the PRNG step. Not qualified at all to talk about how they de-bias the measurements.
> Like, life in USA became more or less good only several generations ago, after the country became giant economical winner of WW2.
This judgement of course depends upon the standards of the observer and where in the US you look. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, many elites in the Empire of Japan had spent time in America and came to view America as spoiled, decadent, and too soft to fight a long war.
It's definitely an edge case, but courts are not absolutely mechanical and given the context I think it can be argued either way (IANAL). Especially when the outgoing president just told his DoJ not to enforce the ban and leave it to the next guy. At any rate the delay only gives a stay of execution.
