In fact, suffering increases a whole lot because medical and agricultural tech is still tech, not to mention how much life-saving and quality improvement is brought in by communications technology. Some people really think you can just click the “medical” tab in Civilization and guarantee only the benefits of the one technology you like.

The main point is, you need a crazy person to have crazy ideas. Even if 95% of his ideas are shot down, the last 5% are still crazy shit nobody else would thought was possible and never bother to seriously pay some engineers to try it if he wasn’t in a leadership position.

Without him, there will be much less crazy, but both the good and bad kind. I fear the day SpaceX just becomes another Boeing.

Seriously, just landing rockets was laughed off as a stupid waste of time by all the industry incumbents just 6 years ago. That was a crazy stupid Elon Musk idea even dumber than the cybertruck at the time, and look where we are now.

I wish rocket lab the best and hope that one day they can have a competing heavy lift/human certified spacecraft.

However, it’s nigh impossible to ignore how much SpaceX alone has reshaped the space industry and is basically forcing everybody else to step up.

Not remake the entire shuttle, but to simply design a disposable rocket and build a hundred of those, instead of a space plane.

The space shuttle was technically reusable, but not in a way that was beneficial to anyone. The time and cost of refurbishing the shuttle after every launch was so much they may as well have built a brand new disposable rocket for each mission.

SpaceX may have built the first reusable rocket that actually saves money

That looks more like a hot vending machine

I think the general rule of thumb is to shift the units of time up.

If he says 2 weeks, try 2 months. If he says 2 months, wait 2 years.

Robotaxis in 2 decades I think is actually achievable.

1. First draw a few ovals
2. Draw the rest of the owl duck

20" box fan + 20" furnace filter. Both are pretty standard sizes. Add duct tape as required.

American flags everywhere. Like EVERYWHERE. I get a bit of national pride but holy crap, every other house in the street is flying a flag, clothing has flag patterns, bumper sticker American flag, it’s everywhere. And no, it wasn’t even close to July 4.

It’s like Americans are afraid they might forget what country they’re in if they aren’t in sight of a flag at all times.

There are also plenty of dumb, nearly inconsequential recalls on regular cars too. Including things like “place this warning sticker in your manual”. That’s a recall.

Yes, the bomb travelled forward in time at one minute per minute

CEOs? Ruin their career? By what, jumping ship and taking a $100M bonus?

Lol, like the previous Boeing CEO. Kill a few hundred people, planes or plane components falling out of the sky, absolutely tank all manufacturing quality control, fail a NASA contract and strand a few astronauts…

Peace out and take a $62M bonus.

I wish I could get paid that much for failure or “accepting responsibility” lol

It also reuses old 2G/3G bands to allow much much higher throughput and therefore more customers per band

Yeah, it pumps GDP numbers up. By having more people to do work.

Not by increasing GDP per capita.

It can suppress wages.

Immigrants often are expected to work for less money. After all, they usually immigrate from an economically worse country, so they don’t expect to land top tier wages.

You keep filling in minimum wage jobs with an endless supply of immigrants, then there is never a worker shortage and never any incentive to raise the bar. No company needs to compete with higher wages to attract talent. In fact, it can make things worse and cause a race to the bottom… Reducing wages on existing positions until workers quit and just filling it with less skilled workers.

They already stuck a screen on the back

If China wants to pay for my next car for me, I’m fine with that.

That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after

Nissan invents white paint