Honestly, I would like the world to keep Vivian out of this. (I wanted to say ‘his daughter’. But Vivian is right. He’s just too obnoxious to be related to.) Elon has done enough damage to her by throwing her to his band of online trolls, because she chose her own life instead of following his wishes.
A couple of million? You’re talking about pocket change for them. You should look at the grants and subsidies he avails from the government to keep them afloat. That should also give you an idea about a major source of his funds - your taxes.
It says ‘one of the most shameful’. There are plenty of others - especially the ones perpetrated by the devil Henry Kissinger. This shameful episode is right on character for the USA.
All I asked here is a question, and suggested the most probable answer in most simple form. You could have given a different answer, but…
But what? Answer your misdirections? There is only one type of civilization - one based on justice and empathy. But you project it as a white man’s creation. This is just deceitful. A malicious justification.
You don’t explain your notion of civilization, but want me to deal with your notion of common sense, justice and civilized behavior. Why?
Because reasonable people with common sense all come to the same conclusion about justice and civilized behavior. Only people with delusions of past glory, racial supremacy and autocracy reach different conclusions. I don’t need to pander those tendencies of yours.
There used to be entire chapter worth of material to mug up for exams on which feature of Indian constitution is borrowed from which white country in textbooks.
Ambedkar only borrowed ideas. That doesn’t mean that it’s foreign. Your own quotation says so - “It involves no plagiarism”. I called it unique to India because it’s uniquely adapted to the conditions in India. It also has a depth that none others have. But you keep insisting that it’s a foreign invention. I would rather live in Ambedkar’s India than Manu’s India. What you’re aspiring for is a barbaric order that the citizens are not particularly found of.
Did you skip all of that in school?
Evidently, being in school is meaningless for people like you. We have learned enough to see the warning signs and consequences of an oppressive regime instead of clinging to technicalities to make up frivolous justifications for it.
There. You just lost entire argument by Godwin’s Law.
“Godwin’s law can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, a diversion, or even censorship, when miscasting an opponent’s argument as hyperbole even when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.” Nazi comparison is entirely justified here since we are talking about the importance of the constitution and the slide into authoritarianism. So perhaps you should learn that it’s hypocritical to use Godwin’s law indiscriminately like you do.
Prepare better for next time.
No amount of preparation is enough to talk to authoritarian apologizers like you. You can’t be reasoned with logic or reality. You live in your own delusions. You can live in the hell of your fantasies. Please spare the rest of us. We have no intention to go back to the dark ages with the likes of you.
What’s the second problem after topo naming that’s getting fixed?
FreeCAD has already merged the solution for the infamous ‘topological naming problem’. The 1.0 release may happen soon!
Early signs of Project 2025?
I’m an adult and am not responsible for anything you described. They were all there even before I was born. In fact, the same may apply to my parents or even grandparents. I’d rather blame a sociopolitical class than any single generation for all those ills.
But to answer your question, yes, I’d blame that entire class for the harm caused by young people using murder tools they introduced. They did it with the full knowledge of its consequences. They valued momentary material gains above the wellbeing of entire generations. They absolutely should be punished for all the mass shootings in schools, because they knew it could happen. Yet they chose the blood money. Similarly, if an entire city is under a drugs epidemic (like the current opioid crisis), wouldn’t you want to hunt down the producers and suppliers, instead of the users?
It’s extremely nuanced. ‘Light years ahead’ is correct since you are thinking about a race where one competitor is a long distance ahead of others. On the other hand, ‘light years away’ doesn’t make sense, since we think of achievements in terms of time needed, rather than distance.
You are right, except for one detail. Package managers almost always validate the packages using digital signatures, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. You don’t need to trust the network anymore. Shell scripts piped to a shell don’t have that protection. You still have to trust the developers and maintainers, though.
Wasn’t that the point behind hanging, drawing and quartering?
No. Just leave their corpses in the jail for multiple lifetimes.
The sort of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance that these subhuman c-suite employ to justify stealing everyone else’s data while demonizing sharing of their data, is just infuriating. If these scumbags were incarcerated for a day each for every time they showed this hypocrisy, they would all rot in the jails for their entire lifetime, perhaps more.
There was a time when ministers used to resign after taking responsibility for accidents, scams or overall failures. People have forgotten that time. They seem to think that India was like a sub Saharan nation before 2014 and now it’s like Europe. This government has made people comfortable with the stance that ministers are not answerable or even responsible for their piss poor performance.
Vande Bharat isn’t a luxury. It’s a much required evolution of the railways. EMU passenger trainsets are common all over the world. There’s no point in sticking with locomotive driven separateable coaches other than for freight.
The main mistake here is how the railways is neglecting passenger requirements and safety. IR already has an indigenous solution for train accidents - Kavach, a cost effective implementation of the Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) requirement. Yet we find that in every single accident in recent history, the trains were not fitted with Kavach.
Another issue is about cheap general coaches and sleepers. The government cut their numbers, despite high demand. That’s just pure dick move. This one could in fact be due to the government trying to make it more profitable before selling it off to their crony friends.
The thing here is that VB and general coaches are not mutually exclusive. You could have VB trainsets with general coaches. Even Sudhanshu Mani said that the reduction of general coaches is a bad idea.
I don’t think that you can exercise such fine motor skills while you are shooting up a school or other mass gatherings - which was the whole point of the ban in the first place.
I don’t understand the kind of sociopathy required (by the judges in question) to seek an excuse to pedantically redefine a device whose whole original purpose is killing people en-masse.
Choosing a country that depends primarily on oil for income, to head a climate change conference indicates everything that’s wrong with the current world order.
Fight against climate change headed by oil companies, anti-war groups headed by weapons manufacturers, human rights council headed by regressive kingdoms that still uphold slavery, women’s rights groups headed by countries where women are not allowed to vote or even go outside on their own - the entire setup is designed to pull a massive wedgie over honest hardworking regular people.
Take the lesson people - you are like amusing, but expendable guinea pigs to these rich and evil beasts.
I know I’m going to be bludgeoned for this. But I’m mystified by this ‘iterative’ approach to development. I wonder if they got this from the IT industry. Charles Bolden once remarked that the congress would have shut down the Apollo program if they lost vehicles at the rate spacex does now. These failures also often feel like the result of lack of foresight and critical thinking, rather than the consequence of complex chains of events that are hard to predict.
Consider the first flight. They decided to launch it without a flame deflector or a deluge system. They thought that it would be OK based on a hot test of the superheavy at half thrust. I don’t think any other rocket company would have made the same decision. Even if the concrete slabs didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces, the reflected shock wave would have been damaging enough to the engine compartment. They predictably lifted off with several failed and failing engines.
Another problem was the stage separation maneuver. They had planned on a full 360 degree cart wheel to separate the upper stage with centrifugal force. Not only was it going to cause enormous lateral and bending loads on the two stages, I’m still confused about how they would separate at all when the airflow is pushing the top stage (whichever happens to be on the top) against the bottom one. Perhaps the sideways loads might snap the joint. But the two stages are still in danger of collision due to airflow. This concern was proven to be valid when that flight cartwheeled several times without separating and then buckled. I don’t know if that’s the reason why they abandoned the maneuver, but something was definitely wrong with it. And it was bad enough to switch to hot staging.
I don’t have many comments about the second flight. Both stages failed in flight. The first stage failed due to problems with filters. I’m willing to give them a pass here.
As for the third flight, the superheavy exploded 400m above the seas. It was clear that it didn’t decelerate enough due to engine failures. More engine problems. But a pass here too, since engines are generally hard and the raptor is particularly nasty at that.
The real problem in that flight was the starship. It was tumbling pretty badly even in space. The video didn’t give any clue about how they could arrest the tumbling. I was looking for the operation of attitude/RCS thrusters and I couldn’t find any solid evidence of any of it. It was more like the starship had no attitude control at all, rather than one failing. Perhaps I’m completely wrong and it had attitude thrusters. But it was clearly deficient at least. The commentators of flight 4 said that they added more thrusters for attitude control. That would mean that either they didn’t consider tumbling as a problem or they completely underestimated it for flight 3. Why? Attitude control isn’t the hardest problem in rocketry. Very good simulation and analysis techniques exist for it. Anyway, a sideways reentry is bad enough. Even worse is an unarrested attitude rate at reentry. The atmosphere predictably incinerated the ship’s engines and exposed steel skin.
If this afterthought feels like a conspiracy theory, remember the time when Musk made a change to starship after Tim Dodd (earlyastronaut) asked him a question on the same? Or the time when someone on Twitter asked Musk why they didn’t start two raptor engines and then shutoff the underperforming one during Starship’s flip maneuver at landing? They do this now. Afterthoughts are evidently not a rare thing at SpaceX.
And finally flight 4. I’m not taking any credit away from them. They seem to have just made it till the landing. Superheavy worked all the way for the first time. But my concern is about the place where the starship’s fin burned through - exactly at the hinge. I would have expected them to focus more on that region as a weak spot and to have given it a better thermal protection. That would be the last region I would expect a burn through. Instead, it would have been in some spot where they didn’t expect any problem and missed something very subtle.
All these give me the impression that they are trying things and seeing what sticks. That’s not how traditional rocketry works. There’s a s**t load of analyses, simulations and small scale tests that precede the production stage. The result is that when such rockets fail, they fail in a spectacularly complex, unpredictable and mind bending sequence of cascading failures (unlike what I see on starship). They also tend to succeed with minimum test flights and work reliably over decades. Apollo is a great example. The first test flight achieved everything that starship achieved in 4 flights.
The only other industry that I’ve seen behaving like this is the IT industry. “Deploy whatever you have and we’ll debug in production”. Coincidentally, Tesla does the same with their cars - the only car company to do so. So perhaps there is a Musk factor here. The SpaceX engineering team is incredibly talented, skilled and capable. The only reason I can think of for them to behave like this is an enormous pressure on them to deliver results at high rates. That’s the only reason I can think of for them to proceed without satisfying themselves.
Now you may want to argue that SpaceX’s approach is better than what everyone else does. After all, they make bigger things, faster. They advanced the industry like no one else did or could. Perhaps you’re right. Only time will tell, since this approach is so novel that we haven’t had enough opportunity to assess the results. But my instincts worry me about one thing - technical debt. Mechanical engineering is not like software engineering. In software, a problem once solved is gone forever. In mechanical engineering, any problem you work around is a disaster waiting to happen in the future. The right approach here is to design things properly and meticulously so that the final product has minimum work around. I fear that the software style of design is leaving unknown flaws or technical debts that may compound together into a cascading failure on some flight in the future.
To those who are planning to reply:
What I wrote is not a criticism of the SpaceX employees or Starship programme. I’m genuinely fascinated by the interplay of technical design, development styles, management styles and human factors. I’m extremely curious about how the situation is evolving.
Please don’t attack me or question my abilities if you feel that I’m being unfair about this (that’s definitely not my intention). I may be just a kid in this arena, but it’s never wrong to ask, is it? I’m extremely interested in hearing your insightful opinion on this topic, based on your experience or your logic. If you think I’m wrong on any of these, please share your perspective and reasons here - I (and possibly others) may learn something new.
I’m hijacking this post to vent. After the Pyrrhic victory in the LS elections, many upper caste BJP supporters have started abuses and personal attacks against Dalits of UP for ‘betraying’ BJP and Hinduism by voting for SP.
For several centuries now and certainly more intensely in the last decade, the Dalits suffered atrociously at the hands of these UCs. Dalit women were gang raped, tortured and murdered by these UCs. Those who dared to complain had their entire families mass murdered by these UCs. Authorities hounded them, destroyed their homes and denied them even basic human rights.
Despite all these, the UCs kept denying the caste atrocities or even the presence of caste privileges. But after losing an election, casteism is suddenly a problem for them! The Dalits are now casteists, anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim! Arrogant hypocrites! You can’t have it both ways. In a way, Holocaust deniers are better than you. They deny only the past. You deny an ongoing mass scale atrocity perpetuated by your kind.
I was born as an upper caste Hindu. But I can no longer suppress my conscience or humanity in the name of the religion and caste I was born in. There is no other religion that uses its beliefs to persecute a section of its own believers like Hinduism does. Screw you! You coopt Dalits as Hindus only when you need to perpetuate violence against regular citizens from other religions. All other times, you treat them worse than animals. Heck! Even cows and monkeys get better treatment from you!
I’m usually an advocate for preserving culture and heritage. But screw it! I want this horrible inhuman culture to rot in hell! And all those who propagated its atrocities for personal gains to suffer the consequences. If there is a God, he/she will make you answer for this!
I don’t know why everyone’s surprised. What were you expecting from Elon? Ethics and morality?