Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Same reason parents send their kids to public schools: because the price is right. Since we're importing legions of indentured servants, wages aren't rising, and parents have to make tough decisions in order to pay for basic necessities.
A thriving education system is an indicator of a prosperous society, not a cause.
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
I don't think it's fair to say that he advocates against gay marriage; it would be accurate to say he's willing to donate to politicians who advocate against gay marriage, however. Blake Masters and J. D. Vance being the obvious cases. Kris Kobach and Ted Cruz also come to mind.
Well, that's embarrassing. I read the Wikipedia article wrong, he donated $10,000 to an organization that fought against a law that would ban same-sex marriage. The double negation got me...
Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
The obvious patch for this is to have monetary penalties for failing inspection written into the contract, so that submitting shoddy work has a price measured in dollars. Money is the unit of caring, at least at a corporate scale, so there needs to be money involved if you want them to care systematically.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
One of the very interesting parts of the report is that the OIG recommended 4 areas that needed to be fixed/worked on. NASA agreed to 3 of them, and was working on making those areas better. The one recommendation that NASA did not agree with was to monetarily penalize Boeing for continuous quality issues. I found that interesting.
Inspections can help to an extent, but you can't inspect quality into a product. The customer can't anticipate every possible serious failure. Good results in safety-critical systems require an organizational culture that focuses on quality throughout the product lifecycle.
Yeah but as we see with Boeing now, when its shitshow, its more like crap is landing left and right and not a situation of overall excellence with one singular failing point.
Meaning many failures would be spotted. Maybe not 100% automatically corrected but much better situation than current regulatory capture one and stuff we see in news every second week.
Those de-orbit in just a few years because of how exceptionally low they fly. SpaceX’s business plan is to just be so efficient at launching things to orbit that it doesn’t matter if they lose a huge number of satellites each year to planned atmospheric drag. It’s a pretty bold way of combating space junk, but it seems to be working out for them, and the FAA has looked over the math and given their blessing.
Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
I’m less worried about that with SpaceX than I am about most companies, because Elon has shown a willingness to just fire a large percentage of a company’s employees with the massive Twitter layoffs.
On the other hand, Elon just fired Tesla’s entire Supercharger team for what appear to be stupid reasons (and is now trying to rebuild from that error.) The unique expertise at SpaceX will be much harder to rebuild if Musk makes a similar mistake in that company. If anything, a massive outpouring of talent is the most likely vector by which the competition quickly catches up and overtakes SpaceX.
> If anything, a massive outpouring of talent is the most likely vector by which the competition quickly catches up and overtakes SpaceX.
I'm skeptical.
Like Amazon, SpaceX is a fountain of ex-employees who have tired of the required workload. I don't see a few extra on top of the current constant exodus changing much.
The talent and even many of the ideas came from NASA and old space, while SpaceX has both inspired and created a generation of it, there was always strong engineering talent in rocket science.
The primary issue for other companies is culture and institutional ability to foster innovation and take risk.
The old space organizations like ULA or Boeing et al and government funded are extremely risk averse and are also optimized for other priorities like having presence in as many states as possible or using old designs/ components to keep jobs funded and so on which limits them.
The new space companies do not have the resources to be as aggressive or fast although they are trying, they do not have free cash flow of SpaceX or extremely wealth and committed sponsor. Blue Origin+Amazon(Kuiper is theirs not BO) have resources but are not fast or aggressive and most likely chance to compete if they can get their culture sorted.
Private rocket companies were not successful businesses before SpaceX for a reason, its success has inspired capital inflows but problems are the same.
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Astra, Rocket Labs, Relativity and Firefly are the only ones with some track record of orbital launching vehicles, Astra went private at 99% down round for just 11M in March-24 and are probably going to be either acquired or shutdown.
Firefly has no immediate reuse plans. Terran R and Neutron are the realistic contenders for reusable vehicles if successful(big IF) then will have Falcon 9 equivalent competitor commercially available by end of the decade (13 years after Falcon 9 landed regularly in 2017). Starship will be active well before 2030 and be a generation ahead again. SpaceX when Starship launches commercially say in 2025 are at least 20 years ahead of everyone else and currently 10 years ahead with Falcon 9.
The last time space industry had this kind of disparity were the few years after Sputnik and other soviet first launches, to catch up the federal government spent multiple % of GDP and made it the national priority and employed 400,000 people to do it. SpaceX is not Soviet Russia it is a domestic company NASA and Space Force benefits from and Trump/Biden are not Kennedy so that is not going to repeat.
Realistically next 40-50 years will be dominated by SpaceX in both satellites and rocket vehicles, even if they stop innovating soon.
There seem to be a lot of things that cannot be explained if we take what you're saying as an assumption. For instance from 2011-2020 (when SpaceX started launching to the ISS) NASA had no way to get crew to the ISS, and relied exclusively on Russia. That can't be dismissed as just risk aversion. Similarly Blue Origin is filled with old space talent, was founded before SpaceX, is funded by Bezos Bucks, and yet can't even manage to achieve an orbital flight. Also SpaceX's early talent included people like Tom Mueller [1] who would go on to work as CTO. Notably he was picked up on SpaceX because of the rocket engines that he was literally building in his garage!
I have no claim to knowing what SpaceX's secret sauce is, because the problem I think you run into immediately is that any sort of logical explanation then bumps into issues like the ones I'm mentioning here.
To be fair, Tom Mueller was also head of liquid engine propulsion at TRW as noted in the wikipedia link, he wasn't exactly an amateur.
I had the same initial response to the gp, but I think they got it right: "The primary issue for other companies is culture and institutional ability to foster innovation and take risk."
I think SpaceX went after people who knew what they were doing, but were frustrated by the bureaucracy. I get the sense that Blue Origin hired people with experience who were pretty happy with the way traditional aerospace worked, and kept doing exactly the same thing at Blue Origin.
> I think SpaceX went after people who knew what they were doing, but were frustrated by the bureaucracy.
Legend had it Musk hired Mueller after meeting him and seeing a liquid biprop engine he was building in his garage. That sounds exactly like the type of person you describe. “I can’t do the cool shit I want to do at work because of forms/approvals so I’ll just do it myself at home”.
(I know it’s unpopular these days but) this is where I think Elon has to be given some credit.
He set an implausible but interesting ’mission’ from early on. He set the culture of the company from the start such that the concept (borrowed from the tech world) of failing and iterating fast actually happened (rather than just being talked about in corporate presentations). He brought naive but effective ‘first principles’ thinking to many of the questions or problems which probably helped avoid the conservatism of ‘old space’. He brought enough money to start, but it was little enough that they had to be scrappy and lean for survival, which probably fed into the culture and built a great team further. And (by luck or judgment) he hired the right people, like Tom Mueller, who was already a rocket engineer, but was frustrated by his previous industry experience.
(And of course, back then he didn’t have the baggage he has now, which made these things easier to achieve.)
> NASA had no way to get crew to the ISS, and relied exclusively on Russia.
The reason NASA was doing that was because of risk aversion and lack of innovation!
The shuttle was shut down because NASA couldn’t afford another disaster like Columbia and there had been absolutely no meaningful progress to replace it .
Without spacex, that would still be the case , Dreamliner is still not done a demo flight and Boeing would have held NASA by the balls and renegotiated from fixed price to cost plus contract as they have been doing for decades.
SpaceX forced the hand by delivering on commercial crew (CCS)
The shuttle had bunch of older parts designed for other programs and was 30 years old in 2010.
SLS flies on engines that are decades old from shuttle era with no plan for new engines and still costs in multiple billions per launch !
If not for spaceX we would be cheering BO for successfully delivering the Vulcan engines and being proud of that as pinnacle of private space .
BO official Moro is step by step ferociously. They were always culturally tuned to be risk averse and careful
Astra is not private yet. The SEC is still reviewing the take-private offer that Astra's board accepted from the group of investors. The take-private move is essentially an acquisition.
Except in this article, where they assert that the funds were correctly reported to the government with no explanation of what that claim even means. And they’re not saying that the defendant claimed to have reported; Reason themselves are making the claim.
Like most publications, they have editorial constraints, and usually choose to discuss the breaking news rather than rehash older facts. Reason has been covering this highly complex and lengthy case for nearly a decade, they have published dozens of articles about it, unfortunately for you they did not address your specific question in detail in this particular article. I think if you dig a bit deeper you'll find answers.
edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:
That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.
It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).
Objective C is a system for that; Objective C++ is at least three systems for dispatching calls in ways that don't involve linear search. Not sure why they'd try to make another one.
I'm not the OP, but I'm pretty sure there's a simple, uncontroversial answer here. They were an excellent idea at the time, allowing much more pipelining with the microarchitecture design techniques in use back then. In the time since, the complexity of the instruction set has stopped being such a big deal.
