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Asteroids on earth have been changed by the environment on earth. Part of it during entry, part of it during impact, part just lying there for long times.

The Ryugu sample provides an opportunity to check our understanding of the changes that happened to asteroids on earth.


You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes.

I'm confident the vehicle design will work once they get a handle on the production. They got really good simulation tools for the vehicle flight part of the problem.


> You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes.

No, they clearly are not.

They are designing a vehicle. One of the design requirements might be a better production process, but as it is very obvious to everyone their goal is not to produce a vehicle that blows up unexpectedly.

And the vehicle blew up unexpectedly, when it was scheduled for a flight test.

The goal of SpaceX is not to implement the broken window fallacy.


Of course the customer accepts the lower quality.

Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD of savings.


Also, air travel has actually got safer over time, not less safe - despite the massive increase in air travel, total deaths have actually gone down over time. The whole reason that the 737 MAX problems were such big news is that passenger airplanes are so safe these days that even one air crash is remarkable, let alone two which appear to have the same cause.


It's more like a $800 difference in ticket price. People forget just how expensive it was to fly back before deregulation. A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300 today.


Think about computers. Apple Machintosh costed $2000, now ... Why airplane industry cannot behave like computer industry?


According to Wikipedia, the original Mac 128k had a launch price of $2495 in 1984, equating to approximately $6100 in 2019 USD). I'd say they're behaving very similarly?


> A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300 today.

I'm not sure that is a universal positive.


If you're talking about airline passengers, they have no choice in which plane they fly in.


not only no choice...

No information - They rarely have any information (you have to go through several menus to find out your plane on most sites). They don't know when / where the plane was last serviced [0].

No framework - Your average consumer of air travel is not equipped to accurately evaluate that information should they even have it. (c.f., 'if it's not Boeing I a'int going [1]). They cannot make rational and informed decisions without information and a rational decision making framework

No control - They have no control over whether that plane is changed for operational reasons even if they have the information and a framework to evaluate it. You may not even know until you are onboard with the door shut unless you are really well informed about airplanes that the plane model has changed (e.g., I avoid A321s because

No recourse - Even if they consciously choose a plane based on information and an informed framework and then it gets changed what can you do? Are you even going to know until you get on the plane at which point what do you do? Do you think you get a refund?

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780372


It's not hard to see which planes fly which routes.


It's also not guaranteed which plane will fly which route. Every airline has "substitution" rules in their conditions of carriage, and frequently use them.


Depends on airline. Southwest, for example, has Boeing-only fleet. JetBlue has only Airbuses and Embraers.

The odds of buying a JetBlue ticket and ending up on a Boeing are fairly low compared to flying Southwest.


Boeing just bought Embraer, but I assume that it will take some time until they the quality of products start to fall


Plus, flights get cancelled, and passengers get re-routed last minute.


I can't recall any plane crashes that also involved a plane switch. So getting bumped to a different plane type and crashing is incalculably rare.


A lot of routes have only one airline though.


For the evaluation of costs of prevention measures it is exactly the right way to measure it, isnt it?

Prevention measure cost dollars are identical to catastrophe damage cost dollars.


Whatever seems useful. Or do the inverse of the power satellite idea: send the excess energy to space as microwaves.


Modern medicine has some aspects that are miraculously good and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that those are representative for all of medicine. It's a kind of halo effect bias.

In my opinion the most amazing thing still is antibiotics (and vaccination). Treatmeant of war/vehicle/sports injuries taking the second place (including anesthetics). Both can take people from a path of sure death within hours or days to often complete recovery within weeks or months.

If that is the performance expectation of the general public for all of medicine, then it certainly is overrated.


As someone who has had some less-acute sports injuries, I'd also break the injuries down into "shit's really fucked up" and "you could conceivably walk it off" categories. The former, modern US medicine excels at. The latter, I'm not sure the doctors are even trained to treat something less acute and not requiring expensive surgery. In fact, I strongly suspect they often prescribe a surgery anyway, just to make a buck. I had to decline a surgery once.


> Modern medicine has some aspects that are miraculously good... like antibiothics and injuries treatment

Not to mention having all valuable poisons in the planet in a nice packed, chemically pure, split in comfortable monodose capsules, accurately measured and checked for 10 years before enter in your body, packed guaranteeing non posterior adulteration as long as the plastic seal is not broken, extensively documented in several languages and available at less than ten minutes away from your home. This is probably the biggest bonus from the real medicine.


That might very well be the case.

Still we as a society usually decide not ban things that hurt only irresponsible people. There is an exception to this for children, but they are banned from driving already.

If the autopilot crashes start resulting in a number of deaths outside of the drivers car that might shift the public opinion.


Lawn Darts only killed one person before they were banned, I think Autopilot is at 3 or 4 and counting, and Uber's driverless system has killed at least one pedestrian.


Never heard about Lawn Darts.

> In the previous eight years, 6,100 people had been sent to the emergency room due to lawn darts in the U.S. Out of that total, 81% were 15 or younger, and half of them were 10 or younger. On the week the commission voted to ban the product, an 11-year-old girl in Tennessee was hit by a lawn dart and sent into a coma.

From wikipedia. It's a bad example.


It once was the canonical X in "we banned X why haven't we banned Y" (where Y is something like "assault rifles" or "peanuts") but perhaps only for people of a certain age. A more recent example: the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded after two accidents out of a few hundred thousand flights.


We do not need to wait to know that high-speed collisions pose a threat to other people in addition to those in the vehicle that causes it.


For those of you that want to see the data behind this story: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...

I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years.

There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies. None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.


Yeah, the Energiewende is an absolute farce. The government exited nuclear while utterly gutting the German PV industry. It's mind-boggling.


Some relevant numbers (TWh) from that graphic:

                2002    2018
    Total        503     545
    Coal + Oil   253     205
    Gas           40      44
    Nuclear      156      72


So, they've successfully got rid of about 50% of nuclear and 20% of coal by adding a very small amount of gas generation. Presumably the rest is coming from renewables. Sounds like a pretty good progress report.


Presumably the rest is coming from renewables.

No reason not to complete the picture, I guess:

                    2002    2018

    Total            503     545

    Coal+Oil         253     205
    Nuclear          156      72

    Gas               40      44
    Biomass            4      45

    Wind+Solar+Hydro  39     177

    Other             10       3


Why spend years learning those results when you can ignore them at no cost?

And have a happy client that finally gets the results he wanted when the other analysts said it was impossible.


Reaction time is usually measured as time from stimulus to a button press.

For many things in Dota you also need to move the mouse cursor to a specific point on the screen which obviously takes longer than just pressing a button.


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