It kind of makes sense because gasoline taxes help fund road projects. Of course, if you live in a state like Pennsylvania, there's not much evidence of real improvements to the pothole infested roads.
It can be done was my point. Our taxes go elsewhere though.
>You can rebuild the road twice a year, still gonna crack.
Rebuild or patch potholes? It's been over 2 decades since I've been to Philly and Pittsburg, not sure how things are now. I lived in the tri-state area for 15 years until '05. Never saw anything approaching rebuilding, just mickey mouse patching (Brooklyn, NJ, Manhattan).
I disagree - at least for the near future. If companies stop outsourcing to poorer countries, they'll be hit now. If so many Americans lose their jobs that nobody has money to buy anything, that will affect poorer countries too. It's not the technology of AI that's necessarily causing the problems. It's the greed of all the shareholders and business owners laying off everybody in favor of automation. This has been building up for years - even before AI. The quest to replace human jobs with gig economy workers and automation is also a relevant factor.
I am not sure where that "Americans lose their jobs" claim is coming from, Job statistics are freely available, US has historical low unemployment now (for many reasons, but nevertheless) and all that doom and gloom about AI eats the world jobs has little support from data.
It comes from watching Linked In and talking to people in real life. Again, I don't think it's AI eating the jobs. I think it's greed that's eating jobs.
Conventional wisdom always used to be that China would never compete with the US because they were rote learners and we were more creative. I'd say that is no longer the case. China has been doing a LOT of interesting things. I joke with my son that given the state of the US lately, I'd almost rather move to China.
Whereas in China, and in a lot of other countries around the world, when they talk about moving to the US they are completely serious about it. They are actually highly concerned with what specific options they have for getting some kind of visa to the United States, they are genuinely upset with the recent US policy changes that have made it harder for foreigners to get such visas.
Of course it's not "safe"! We put a ton of explosives into a huge can, put a small can with humans on top of it, set it on fire and try to control what happens and get the humans into space, and then we try to drop the same can from the space, while it's traveling at miles per second, and land it on the ground. It's not "safe" and won't likely be "safe" in our lifetimes, there's always big risk, that's why astronauts get so much respect - they take a lot of risks. These risks become smaller with time, but still they are quite serious. And of course anything that reduces risks - while not disabling the whole program - is good, but I don't think "safe" is the word that is justified when talking about those things.
What he means and you're interpreting a bit too literally is that this [heatshield] is one subsystem where the risks are not well understood or quantified as, say, the propulsion system, for which we have a lot more experience and flight heritage.
Yes, of course there are risky systems in there, and calling attention to one of them is fine. What I object to is framing it as a "safe/not safe" issue - as if without the tests the author proposed it were "not safe" and with them, by implication, it would become "safe". That's not like replacing old tires on your car with new tires - there are a lot of things that can go wrong, and many of them are "unsafe", and it's always a complex equation which can not be (at least at current level of technology) solved with doing more tests or anything else to make it "safe". The "safe" framing is the one I object to.
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.
When I was growing up, I remember some drama because East German and Soviet male athletes were trying to compete as women. If male to female trans athletes were allowed to compete, I imagine it would just be a matter of time before a female athlete would HAVE to be trans in order to stand a competitive chance.
