Indeed, and he's from Dolton (a southern suburb) and lived in Hyde Park (south side of Chicago) for awhile. (Not that it's uncommon for south siders to favor the Cubs, but it certainly is amusing.)
My father-in-law grew up a few blocks from Prevost and they’re a Cubs household. The family switched a century ago, after the Sox gambling scandal. Serious business!
He also said he rarely spoke to his brother after childhood. So I doubt he is faithfully representing his essentially-long-lost brother's current opinions.
I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care, the care becomes more expensive in ways that governments never provisioned for (see Japan and many countries in Western Europe for good examples of this in practice).
In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon).
The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today.
At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.
I think you made an erroneous assumption. Here you say the declining birthdays are always aging populations that require more care and this is a net drag. First, care and health services do contribute to GDP and provide good income work for those providing care. Second, while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium. Third, aging population doesn’t mean decrepit population. Part of our aging story in the developed world is that quantity of life has sort of capped out but we are continuously improving the quality of life at all ages through medicine, nutrition, education, etc. Fourth, people are working considerably longer. People used to retire around 50 to 55, then 60-65, now it’s more towards 62-70. I don’t see that trend reversing frankly especially as quality of life care improves which I expect it to dramatically in the next 10 years. I suspect we are also within spitting distances of genetic, mRNA, and other cancer treatments that virtually eliminate the need for radiation and chemo while providing astounding outcomes as close to “cured” as you can get with cancer. Fifth, you bring up Japan as well one should - but if you look at Japan they’re doing fine by any standard and their per capita GDP is about the same as it was in 1990 in adjusted currency. It’s not like we’ve never seen youth / aging boom and busts in history and everything is fine.
As a final point I think older workers are generally more productive as long as they’re able to use the tools they’ve developed skill with. With the advent of computers and information technology older generations were unable to map their skills to the new way of work. Society existed in the state they were used to for 10,000 years and suddenly instead of being masters as the elder had been, they were bumbling fools - made more tragic in that they were otherwise highly skilled at what they did with a lifetime of experience. This colors our perception of the aged because we are still in the middle of that transition. But do you think you and I will be limited by ability to use information technology? Mental decline doesn’t generally start until much later in life, and people are doing careers into their 70’s with success.
>while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium.
This is absolutely wrong. The "aging population" will be larger than the "younger population" in any situation in which there is sub-replacement fertility + stable (or increasing, obviously) life expectancy. It's just that the ratio may stabilize but it will be <1.
I think you're thinking about 'old professionals' when whats under discussion is "jesus fuck you are old as dirt" people, and how the economics change when your distribution starts skewing towards that old and ineffective side.
Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters? This is easily one of the most exciting startups out there at the moment. It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work.
Is it the everyman's plane? Certainly not. But it essentially makes living in Tokyo/Hong Kong/Singapore/Sydney and working in SF much closer to living in New York and working in SF (which a lot of senior executives and investors do). Imagine if Australia East Coast was a 6hr flight and 5hr time difference to SF. New York is a 6hr flight and a 3hr time difference to SF. Seems a lot different all of a sudden doesn't it?
Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all. Having these senior people able to work locally can enable them to seed their hometowns with thriving local offices that train new generations of talent.
Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets (both very complex industries) over very well established incumbents. Don't underestimate how much organizational dynamics can weigh on a company. Do you think the best people at Boeing are going to risk the next decade of their career working on a plane that might only do 300 orders when they could go get easy promotion working on the next 787?
"Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all"
Jeez, this again.
What is it about we tech folk that allows a little aptitude to let our ego get so far out of whack?
I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.
There's a bunch of guys and gals in Hong Kong/Canada/Iceland/wherever who are just as capable of doing the same job without intercontinental commuting.
As others have said, the Internet exists, which mitigates the need for international travel like you've suggested anyway (which is absurd, not least for the environmental damage this implies).
Think you are missing the point. Earth doesent just give us resources we then use, we invent ways to use things as resources. Oil wasnt a resource, uranium wasnt a resource,the sun wasnt a resource, we had to find ways to turn them into resources.
>> I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.
There are a few target markets that are special. Celebs are each unique, their earning power is tied to this uniqueness. Such an aircraft is great if you want to film in the UK but spend your weekends in NY. Much of Concorde's passenger base fit this profile.
Then there are the truly wealthy. There might actually be an environmental argument for them to use this aircraft. Compare it against the carbon footprint of someone flying on Emirates in that airborne apartment they sell on the A380. I'd bet that a semi-normal seat on this rocket will be less carbon intensive than one of those giant first class seats on a slower aircraft. Maybe a few people opting for a less-opulent but far faster option might actually reduce net carbon emissions.
As far as the carbon footprint goes, the energy required to move a thing with a given mass scales quadraticly with speed, same goes for overcoming air resistance.
However, there could be some novel gains in engineering an engine that isn't dogshit inefficient at low speeds like the Concorde ones were.
To have any chance of taking control of our collective carbon footprint we need to move away from technology like this not towards it.
And until we can manifest fundamentally different technology for air travel we should collectively and rapidly scale down our dependence on long distance commute.
Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.
>Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.
But it's the reality. Electrification of individual ground transportation, and the phasing out of gasoline cars, is absolutely inevitable over the next 20 years. But jet fuel isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. It's just a matter of physics. It's foreseeable to have small scale electrified commuter aircraft shuttling people within 400 miles. But any type of long haul flight will be done with turbine engines burning kerosene. Even with a 10x increase in energy density for LiPo batteries, we still wouldn't be there.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but not having a viable alternative to fossil fuel driven flight right now doesn't justify accelerating the damage it's doing by leaning further into it.
Aviation is small fish though. REALLY small fish. This type of aviation even more so. It accounts for only 1-2% of anthropomorphic CO2eq production. Benefits outweigh the bad. I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about supersonic travel.
I'm kinda surprised to see this kind of hostility. Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested even though the IPCC HIGHLY advocates its use. It is all about relative impact. Part of the problem with resolving climate change is that even the people who acknowledge it fight among themselves and don't push for both current technologies (which includes nuclear) and research for new technologies (fusion, batteries, and better solar/hydro/wind). We need to just listen to what the experts say, not what you read in some blog post or HN comment.
Aviation is currently a small fish because it's currently available to such small part of the population on a regular basis. For those that take part of it it's a major part of their footprint. Scaling it up to more people is very unsustainable. Therefore fossil fuel aviation is unsustainable in a world where more and more people get richer.
> Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested
It's not the "same thing". Nuclear has some sustainability benefits. Bringing back commercial hypersonic air travel seems to have no such benefits.
If we cut carbon out of everything else, the price of oil will drop, and aviation will be able to greatly expand.
Air travel is low now only because it's expensive. People world gladly take many, many more flights if they were cheaper.
Of course if we taxed carbon this problem would go away, and taxing international flights would probably be easier than a general carbon tax, if flights were all that was left.
Internet experts, politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals can argue until the end of time about which CO2-emitting products and services deserve to, or should, exist.
Just the same way the expertise of the most-brilliant central planners in the USSR and elsewhere allocated resources.
It doesn't work. There's a better way which is also consistent with democracy and individual choice. But people don't like the sound of it.
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted... this is 100% the best way to incentivize reduction in carbon emissions. And just keep upping the tax gradually as needed.
It's the next-best solution. The only reasonable argument in favor that I've seen is that it is easier and more authoritarian (maybe be careful believing this is a good thing?) to set a hard cap. But a carbon tax can always be adjusted.
It's inferior in econonic efficiency and comprehensive coverage to a carbon tax.
And if implemented incorrectly, it becomes corporate welfare, and this has already happened. It has potential to be just another corporatist-cronyist scheme at taxpayer's expense.
And to date government and bureaucracy have been pretty horrible about solving climate change.
Carbon tax is a simple, elegant, efficient, effective solution. Most people just dont like the sound of it though.
If you edited your original post to add carbon tax, it would probably read a lot clearer. (I upvoted it, I agree)
How would you solve the trade component though? Because carbon production would just shift elsewhere unless:
* there was an international treaty where states each agreed to raise carbon taxes and cut other taxes or do a dividend, or
* import tariffs were levied in proportion to the carbon used in imports from countries that didn't have a similar tax
The latter would demand a large bureaucracy and have a lot of distortions.
I realized recently that a carbon tax isn't like an income tax. An income tax only occurs on profits, whereas a carbon tax is an input tax. This makes the jurisdiction shifting problem more acute.
A carbon tax is still my preferred solution, but was wondering if you had any ideas on how to get around this.
I dont really have a strong opinion or definitive answer.
What I know is that many other industries deal with somethint like this. Not just taxes, but costly regulation hurts domestic production. For example, countries which do not respect responsible fishing practices have a competitive advantage.
Part of the answer can be: just dont let those countries sell fish within the US. Others can be international treatise or laws.
If I were king, I'd need to spend more time to consider my options, but I guess a treatise is in order. I dont see how any climate change action within the US's 350M population will do anything meaningful to solve the problem if the other 6.5Billion are not cooperating.
Except for the fact that markets are a great way to manage rivalrous goods, dynamically balance economic need against cost without the need for a centralized authority to have high-touch meddling (which presents a corruption danger), oh and most importantly, ad I said, they work, empirically, as with the United States SOX and NOX markets
Initial post wasn’t meant to be hostile at all and I’m still unsure of whether or not supersonic travel is a net positive or negative.
My issue was with the parent comment essentially suggesting that you can justify boosting emissions from flight travel because we still rely on fossil fuels, so might as well double down. Nobody was suggesting that we immediately cease all flight travel. I’m open to the possibility that supersonic travel is a net positive, but the argument needs to be around what we’re getting in return for the emissions and why that’s worth it.
People saying supersonic travel is a step in the wrong direction are listening to experts who agree that our use of fossil fuels is a threat to humanity and the environment. And what about when experts disagree? There has to be some level of independent thought to parse and apply what experts are putting forward.
> Why would you be aware of people worrying about something that currently doesn't exist?
I'm not sure how to break this to you, but scientists are generally aware about up and coming technologies. And we do think about potential future impact.
So let me rephrase
>>I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about potential future implementations of supersonic travel.
You don’t expect to see an unvarnished historical perspective derided that way here, but I suppose you have a point. Can you tell me where I’ve changed my mind on this issue?
By that standard you shouldnt be using the internet. The “damage” is questionable to say the least. There is a whole group of poor people who need access to fossil fuels to survive, but are you going to stop them from getting it in the mame of climate change? Are you goin to stop buying computers and other products build and distributed using the internatioal supply change? If not why expect others to do what you dont?
I don't understand this logic. How does one action with unfortunate side effects excuse another?
Sure perhaps we shouldn't be using the internet. Or perhaps we should do a lot more to make sure that the energy used for powering the internet is sustainable.
But our deficiency in that area doesn't make this activity any better.
Who are you to decide what is ok and what is not? How do you know that building a supersonic jet doesent open up for other technologies or methods that wil improve effectiveness of fuel consumtion? I dont understand with what logic you get to decide that your consumption is ok but other peoples use isnt.
Nonsense. It's less than 1% of our carbon emissions iirc. In theory we could convert that over to biofuels and/or hydrocarbons produced using CO2 from the atmosphere, at which point it would be carbon neutral. It may be the only reasonable way to get the energy density we need for practical air travel in the near term.
“The global aviation industry produces around 2% of all human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Aviation is responsible for 12% of CO2 emissions from all transports sources, compared to 74% from road transport.”
But that’s with current aircraft supper sonic is less efficient and enables longer flights having a very outsized impact for minimal gain. You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets, going 2-3x as fast adds little productivity.
On top of that emerging markets are just as happy to start flying as start driving which is pushing up flying’s impact every year.
> You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets
Speak for yourself — I can't sleep on planes. Nor is airplane internet anything close to high speed by any standard. It's expensive as hell and doesn't exist over oceans. At the same ticket price, for long-haul international, I'd greatly prefer an economy-sized seat in a 2.5x shorter flight to a biz-class seat in a traditional flight.
The cost of these things are well into first class territory* which I find much easier to sleep in vs business class. Turbulence can still occasionally be a thing, but it’s less frequent on long haul flights because they have more options.
As to internet over the ocean, Gogo has quality high speed internet via satellite. If you have not flown on one of these flights or a competent competitor you will notice a real difference.
*At least until a large number of aircraft are in service. Airlines make the most money per square foot with business class, but first class is still a critical revenue stream. Free up first class space via these and run fewer large aircraft with a higher percentage of business class is going to be most efficient. This also means you end up with either fewer economy seats or more expensive ones as currently first class and business class subsidizes economy.
Much as you wish it were the case electric battery power does not have enough power density for mass aircraft transit yet. They're much too heavy. We're getting there but we're still a good decade away. You're certainly not going to get supersonic airliners with electric aircraft. (Elon Musk keeps talking about it but even he states that the energy density isn't there yet.) People need to realize the difference between fiction and reality.
How much do nuclear submarine power plants weigh? :-) Looks like on the order of 600 tons; also looks like 787s carry over 100 ton just in fuel fully loaded. So it is plausible that a scaled down nuclear sub reactor should supply plenty of energy at reasonable weight budget. Obviously you'd want it to be somewhat robust and maybe eject + parachute it for catastrophic scenarios, rather than irradiating whatever the plane runs into.
The problem is shielding all of the people. When you land the plane all of that ionizing radiation bounces back at the people inside giving bathing them in fatal or near fatal levels. The shielding is just too heavy and the physics of shielding make it very unlikely we can develop anything lighter.
Also should the plane have an accident you now have radioactive material spread over miles. Which is also not an easily solved problem.
The energy requirements of moving in the water and the air are completely different so its not a good comparison point. And subs use nuclear power I am pretty sure nobody wants to have planes flying with nuclear reactors over their heads.
I don't see why this is any less viable than the other alternatives. It's the only option that we've already tried. Before invention of air travel.
I mean of course I see that people don't change. But that's the very thing we absolutely need to fix. We have to stay within our means. Not doing the thing that brings cost seems like a simple enough solution.
Until we have better technology we have to scale down or reliance on unsustainable tech. The alternative is adverse degradation of our most sophisticated technology available - the biosphere.
Yeah, see, saying “let’s all stop doing this thing” where the thing has diffuse long term bad effects for everyone but short term benefits for the person that does it generally doesn’t work. People have been trying that for a long time. It has to be written into law, or the benefits (economic or otherwise) need to be tilted toward doing the right thing.
I think a large carbon tax is the only shot of getting everyone on track with reducing impact.
Yes. No disagreement here. We absolutely need to put it into law. Although, making such legislation happen doesn't seem to work either. But we need to make it so.
I think slower flight might be best for long distance travel. Something like an airship. I don't know much about the technology, but my naive view is that the technology is undervalued. An airship has VTOL, is quieter, is more spacious, produces less carbon emissions, etc.
Weather issues are one problem for airships. Actual ships are an option for transatlantic routes but there is basically one limited alternative for that. People basically want cheap and fast. Once you get beyond driving that mostly means subsonic planes.
International airline travel can already be pretty much as roomy as a mass of people are willing to pay for on a route. And shifting to a slower mode of transportation that's equally or even more roomy tends to carry a big premium as well. Taking the train or a ship on a multi-thousand mile trip costs more than certainly economy flying does. You can generally travel in comfort. You just need to pay for it.
My wife and I took our then-infant daughter on a 2800km train ride about five years ago (Toronto to Saskatoon by VIA Rail). We paid extra to have sleeping berths with meals included vs regular seats, but overall it was pretty expensive and slow:
- You spend a lot (would estimate 30%+) of time waiting on sidings for freight trains to pass in the other direction because there's only a single track owned by the freight company, so their trains get priority.
- There's no back up plan, and only a few trips a week. Our train happened to run on time, but I had a family member try to take it a few years later and ended up having to cancel for refund and fly instead because the train was running 24h late and she needed to be home for something.
- It's priced and advertised as an "experience" comparable to going on a cruise. They serve you nice food, but obviously the cost of all that service is baked into the ticket— no one is pretending that you'd choose this option just to get to your destination.
- We got our fares for around 60% off, but it was still $450 per adult, I think, which was a lot more than our return flights were (we could afford neither the time nor money required to take the train in both directions). Getting these fares required weeks of monitoring for VIA's "discount Tuesday" promotions and then building our travel plans around the specific dates offered.
- No wifi or even cell reception for most of the route. The northern Ontario section of the route is extremely remote and not at all scenic— just mile after mile of unremarkable forest.
Maybe there's room for an option that's slightly more comfortable and slightly slower, if that's what an airship would offer? But as far as the train goes, it's lots more comfortable and many times slower, but there's just no way to make the cost comparable to flying when you need to pay for all those hours of staff and equipment.
Air ships were already obsolete before the Hindenberg disaster. Being by over twice as much the most expensive mode to travel in, having to take a trickle shower, share a dry toilet with 20 other people, and sleep in a bunkbed (all to save weight) is an extremely lousy deal.
Edit: Why are people downvoting this? I just googled it and confirmed what I posted here.
No. The payload fraction is just too poor. For instance, the Hindenburg, which was the largest, most advanced Zeppelin ever built, had a payload capacity of only 21,000lbs. That's using hydrogen, which, is, obviously not real safe. If it had used helium instead, it would have had a payload capacity of -34,000lbs.
For comparison, a single 40' standard container has a maximum load of 57,000lbs, and a large cargo ship can carry thousands of those.
What was the mass of the Hindenburg without the lift gas? Doubtless modern composites could significantly reduce that mass, which could go directly into increased payload.
Alternatively, an airship of the same mass of the Hindenburg could be made significantly larger, and since payload scales with the lifting gas volume, payload would also increase.
Oh, and throw the Hindenburg's aluminum piano over the side.
I note with interest that you say the Hindenburg would have had a greater payload with Helium rather than Hydrogen. Why do you say that?
I saw the dash, but didn't understand it. If the payload with hydrogen is 21,000lbs and it is -34,000 pounds with helium, then it seems like it wouldn't even get off the ground. But clearly, it did get off the ground with passengers using helium, it was designed to fly with helium.
Okay, I stand corrected about it flying on helium, thank you for correcting me, +1. However, the Hindenburg was designed to fly using helium as the lift gas.
Why is that an absolute? Can't biofuel sources be refined into jet fuel?
I understand that subsidies currently create perverse incentives in that industry, but I struggle to see why bioengineered carbon-neutral jet fuel is fundamentally not viable. That thinking seems very closed-minded.
Biofuels have been a disaster inasmuch as we've destroyed enormous amounts of rainforest to grow them, releasing quite a bit of carbon in the process (and destroying wildlife habitat, of course)
That'd not an argument that carbon-neutral supersonic jets are impossible and should be abandoned.
Biofuels doesn't necessarily mean subsidized corn fields... for example, algae and bacteria grown under specialized LEDs powered by renewable energy are another path forward.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. We can research supersonic jets in addition to better electric storage and propulsion systems.
That's great if we have the algae and bacteria. Right now we don't seem to. Maybe we should invest the money there.
In theory, you can power a big car on responsibly sourced fuel. In reality, selling millions of big cars is a huge problem, because of course people will understandably put in the cheap, ubiquitous fuel for which they're not covering externalities.
This saying is not suitable here because unsustainable technology isn't good. It's simply not worth the cost and we are borrowing from the future.
If the venture would be unprofitable up until the point when it would be sustainable would we still push money into it?
I say we should treat any venture that is unsustainable the same way we treat those that are unprofitable. But we don't. We allow unsustainable ventures to carry on without ever becoming sustainable. Which means that it is constantly borrowing (stealing) means from everyone else.
In my mind the most viable way to make air travel sustainable is to use synthetic fuels produced with commercialised fusion power and atmospheric greenhouse gases as input.
It sounds very sci fi and I'm not sure it would even work on a napkin calculation produced by a thermodynamics professor.
Sure; it's not an unreasonable approach for making such travel carbon neutral; the idea being you're sequestering parity amounts of carbon via the atmospheric gases -> fuel process, and nuclear power covers the inefficiency of such a process.
Downsides include:
1. It's only neutral. It doesn't remove gases we've already released.
2. The process is almost certainly extremely expensive. Until something like emissions taxes are levied, it will not be a competitive fuel.
It's slightly better than neutral. Captured atmospheric carbon would be stored out of the atmosphere in fuel tanks until use. And we could decide to capture and sequester more than we plan to burn again, since in this scenario we have the capturing tech sorted out.
Sure, under the assumption it's cheap to sequester more than all of the oil we extract out of the ground and consume today, then some could be stored to make it neutral or even positive. There are two big steps in there that might or might not ever happen.
When it became clear that there was absolutely no way this could work for more than a token number of flights without absolutely devastating consequences to the planet we live on.
Not to mention that many of us have a "better" idea what to do with 100 million dollars and would gladly trade some our founder's equity for the opportunity!
> and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all
> "It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work."
What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?
Humanity doesn't need a new Concorde. The only real upside I could possibly see is faster transport for organ transplants, and how often is that actually going to happen?
> What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?
For any serious discussions, video conferencing is a garbage replacement for in-person meetings. If anything, the latter is becoming more impactful as lower-level functions get clearly displaced to the former. As others have mentioned, jet fuel doesn’t have to be carbon additive.
Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics. Boom is entering an area where the large incumbents have failed because the physics doesn’t work with the economics. And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.
> Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper.
That was one part of their strategy, but the ultimate goal was always to make it cheaper through reuse and not through cheaper production.
> It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.
Tell that to all the people who claimed that the way SpaceX does the landing of their rockets would never work out because of the "fuel economics", "the way the engine is designed", etc..
Before SpaceX actually achieved it, there were a lot of people out there who doubted that their approach is feasible.
Did SpaceX actually proved that their economics work? We do know that they sell them much cheaper than competition, but do we know when/if VC money stopped paying for the difference?
> Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.
That's quite a revisionist characterization of SpaceX's 15-year toil, which many had described as impossible. Elon Musk said it best in March 2017 [0][1] when they achieved the revolutionary feat of successfully landing a reused rocket:
“It’s the difference between having airplanes that you threw away after every flight, verses reusing them multiple times."
“It’s been 15 years to get to this point, I’m sort of at a loss for words. This is a great day, not just for SpaceX but for the space industry as a whole, in proving that something could be done that many people said was impossible.”
I certainly wouldn't call something that had never been done before by anyone a well-understood technology.
> And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.
You may be correct on the physics, but you are ignoring other dimensions that could make this endeavor feasible. The first Concorde flew 50 years ago. Our understanding of CFD, materials science, manufacturing techniques etc has progressed significantly from what they were 50 years ago.
{deleted} - largely due to me misreading "mid 2020s" as "mid 2020" for delivery of new planes and being highly skeptical of the ability to go from 0 to airliner in 5-6 years.
SpaceX spent less than 100mm year until 2012, and delivered something that cost others billions to create. As mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of inertia in older/larger corporations.
Um... what? The Falcon 1 and 9 were built from scratch, at least as much as anything is. They developed their own rocket engines and most of the components as usual aerospace components were too expensive to hit the price they were targeting.
Boom is certainly an extremely risky startup (as was SpaceX)... but isn't that what venture capital is for?
Are you just completely bonkers? If we start considering Atlantic flights normal and pleasant for commuting than we can completely give up on ever saving the planet. Regular aviation is already extremely pressing on our CO2 output, supersonic flight is way way worse!!
CO2 emissions from international flights will be capped at 2020 levels by international agreement so supersonic flight will have no net effect on emissions.
> "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
I was one of the idiots who didn't understand the Dropbox monetization strategy. Until recently, I thought the strategy was "whales" like in a casino would pay for everyone. I think I couldn't get past the idea that they were giving something that keeps costing them money away for free forever. What I didn't realize is how "sticky" something like Dropbox can be. I don't think I can get most people who use Dropbox and pay $80 a year to switch to Google drive and pay $50 a year. They have a workflow there.
I guess I'm trying to justify my reaction to Dropbox. Frankly, I still don't understand why Dropbox turned down acquisition offer from Apple. I still don't get it.
I don't remember laughing at Dropbox though. It was more bewilderment than anything.
It's a little weird that he includes Columbus there. Columbus was many things and genius wasn't one of them. Persistent, egomaniacal, outrageously cruel to the point that the Spanish crown threw him in prison, extremely bad at basic arithmetic -- but not genius.
Wow, what a bunch of nonsense. We are facing an environmental crisis due to fossil fuels consumption and here you are flippantly offering intercontinental commuting for work. For some reason, you think people who work in America can't find space in its giant, mostly empty landmass and instead need to commute on supersonic jets from Asia. Wtf?
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I imagine the key is in how you build defensibility around the core ride-sharing business.
Ride-sharing suffers from the problem of clustered networks - you can be a global player like Uber and still lose the entire city of SF to a competitor like Lyft, or feel a minnow like Juno tear into your margins in NYC.
Having bike sharing in your pocket helps you build a wider moat around these clustered networks. If I typically take a bikeshare to the subway every morning, and rarely Uber on the weekend, Uber might win 10 low-margin trips from me during the week (bikeshare to and from the subway every day), and through the use of a loyalty program incentivize me to make my 2 high-margin weekend ridesharing trips Uber trips.
So yes, it is an adjacency, and it is lower margin than ridesharing and capital intensive, but this is a difficult market and at this point in the game it might make sense.
You're comparing apples with oranges. A drug dealer is a peon, someone at the very bottom of an enormous multinational pyramid who sells a commodity product in a market where every disgruntled customer has the ability to put them behind bars, rather than just leave a bad review online.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
If, on the other hand, you had to do business with the head of one of these multinational drug syndicates, you would start to understand this power dynamic more completely, as the power balance would flip. All of a sudden, the person you are dealing with no longer fears law enforcement. They are no longer a peon - they have bought off people in the government, acquired arms, trained a small army of their own, and now have to power to kill you or your associates without fear of reprisal. Would you still describe doing business with these people as a 'trusted' transaction? Of course not. You would start showing up to all your business dealings with your own goons, weapons, and armored vehicles. There would be zero trust that each transaction wouldn't end in a firefight.
Compare this to walking into your local bank branch, where with the correct documentation a typical local branch manager can give you a loan for over $1M without having ever done business with you before. That is the definition of a trusted transaction.
You've just become so desensitized to the marvel of it all that you might not be aware of what the alternative looks like.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
How does a buyer do that on the darknet? Hell, how does the buyer do that on dealer that's part of a well set up network? Do you think cops don't know who many of the dealers are already? They can't or won't touch them, and as a buyer you have zero power to make that happen.
I don't know how's the market where you are, but I can assure you that nobody I know who buys or bought drugs ever even considered going to the cops - even when they got robbed and smacked around by a dealer.
If you were considering selling your company to Jamie Dimon - well, you can probably trust that he's not going to kill you, but you will show up with an army of lawyers and investment bankers to make sure you get a fair deal.
From the article: "Department of Education ticked up to 18.8 percent as of June 30, up from 18.6 percent the same time last year, new federal data show."
There's your answer - 0.2pp is totally insubstantial, which makes the title borderline clickbait. The economy doesn't uniformly grow or distribute wealth, so a change so small could just be from the distribution of college leavers in a particular year being overindexed towards sectors that aren't growing.
Further to that point, it typically takes years for people to adjust their majors towards sectors of the economy that are particularly productive, so we shouldn't expect to see such a quick change in the numbers.
I wouldn't say it's totally insubstantial. The economy is growing at some of the fastest rates we've seen since the beginning of the 21st Century. At the same time, delinquency rates are continuing to rise. If young people are still falling behind when times are "good" what happens to them during the next recession?
Have you considered that universities might be able to operate more cost efficiently? Purdue University has manged to freeze tuition for the past 5 years for example.
To add to your point. Schools have massive expenditures on things that have nothing to do with learning _and_ do not bring in money. Its one thing to spend money on something like basketball if you are UCONN and you routinely bring in enough revenue to cover the costs or even post a profit.[1] Its another thing to keep spending millions on your football team that does not bring in that much money[1] These are just one example in a school system. There's similar waste everywhere, like redoing the landscaping every few months so prospective students always see a fantastic looking campus, or the massive increase in administrative staff. The schools don't try to be more efficient because they don't have to be. They don't have legally set budgets and everyone can get students loans since they cannot be discharged so they can just dial up tuition.
Our whole financial system is built around accurately accessing the risk that an investment will be paid back and charging an interest rate commensurate to that, but its thrown out the window once you can try and convince the least experienced adults in the country to sign on the dotted line.
Until banks stop getting paid whether or not they made a good bet on someone's college expenses, or the schools are given a limit on what they can spend, its not going to change. My fear is that this won't happen in any way but a massive amount of defaults that cause the whole system to collapse unexpectedly and cause add on pain to the rest of the economy
I know the university I'm at has been holding the line in my college as long as it could, and its finances are screaming. And it's done a great deal of trimming along the way.
Purdue also has a $2.443 billion endowment. The university I'm discussing is a public university with maybe a sixth of that after a major capital campaign.
But what actually happened? It's state allotment got slashed in half, capital improvements are no longer covered, and the per-capita payment per student has stalled while we've admitted more students.
There are at a minimum two dials they can turn, the other being lowering costs. Less palatial dorms, cheaper food, cheaper coaches, lower faculty salaries to name a few. They could do these things, it's just that higher prices is easier to get past their faculty committees.
1. You'd be surprised at how vocal faculty committees can be about opposing raising tuition. Either because they care about their students and their futures, or more mercenarily, because it means supporting graduate students eats up more of their grant funding when tuition goes up.
2. We've already lowered faculty salaries - why do you think so much is done now by adjuncts that are pretty universally regarded as underpaid?
3. Student amenities have been shown not actually to be all that significant a contributor to rising costs, especially compared to the slashed state and federal budgets to support universities.
Many universities have already done a great deal to lower costs - putting aside needed infrastructure investments, not replacing both staff and faculty when they retire, the aforementioned reliance on adjuncts, and in some cases cutting or merging whole departments.
> Small business lending by the four largest banks fell sharply relative to others in 2008 and remained depressed through 2014. We explore the dynamic adjustment process following this credit supply shock. In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.
I just changed phones and found this really simple. You can just store a phone number with Google and receive an SMS key if you forgot to print off a key before changing phones.
Everything seems to be working pretty well for me and I noticed improvements since last using the app 1+ years ago, but obviously can't guarantee it's still being updated.
That might work with Google itself but TOTP based 2FA codes aren't specific to Google. They can be used out of band by anyone and the SMS approach wouldn't apply to anybody else.
Nice work team. I've been on Keybase for a while but I've only recently installed and started using Teams on iPhone and Mac and both the apps are very polished and easy to use. Definitely a lot easier than posting up my key and waiting for someone to email me encrypted text ;)!
I think the strategy of decentralising the data is a good one for enterprise apps like this, where there's typically little value from the perspective of the business user, employee user, or service provider from holding the data. Lots of data is great for driving personalisation and other features in a million+ person network but not really in cases like this one.
Hopefully this is a pattern that will keep working its way into enterprise apps.
