“Robinson”!?!

I’m sorry but you’re going to have to hand in your passport.

Why would they want you to have a working program? How does that help sell you more stuff?

They are branded, so effort would have to be put into making them appear to be authentic.

Not really. Branded QR codes are just regular, unbranded QR codes but messed up— You basically just stick the the branding right on top, and then let the built-in error correction take care of the rest. Should take all of 5 minutes to set up, or maybe 20-30 if you wanna be a stickler for detail.

And I think it’s improbable that staff wouldn’t notice.

If I were working at the restaurant— I think I’d notice after a couple weeks— They’d have impunity up to then— But even then, I’d just assume the management switched it out or patched it up because they wanted to change the link for metrics or messed up something backend or something like that.

The staff is paid to wait tables, not to audit cybersec from the perspective of the customers.

And again, the roi for the bad actor seems incredibly poor.

Probably highly variable.

If the restaurant has a lot of patrons that are wealthy and technologically illiterate, with banking apps on unupdated phones with known exploits, then you’d think “ROI” is basically everything in the bank accounts of the patrons.

Same if the online menu includes online payment options for whatever reason.

Regardless of age, I think you could probably argue that the small, glowing rectangle in your palm is an inferior reading and dining experience compared to an actual menu.

That’s not even to mention the unholy abomination of a tech stack that a system like this would be— Camera, QR decoder, web browser, WiFi/cellular, their web server— That signal might travel hundreds of miles to your ISP, their host, and then back— Probably a couple layers of outsourcing/contracting/helper apps they used to set it up— Though it’s apparently normal to take all that for granted these days, it’s still sorta ridiculous.

Tater tots are great, though.

Firstly I wasnt even thinking about co2 emisions and was thinking almost exclusively in total mass movement. Secondly when I was refering to the amount of fuel required for slow down for landing I was more so thinking yet again in total mass. Almost all of my points on the matter had to do with the idea of alocating energy toward putting stuff in space.

What do you think the GHG from the manufacturing comes from? Expendable rockets means you’re “al[l]ocating energy toward putting stuff in space” much less efficiently because you’re spending (apparently) much more fuel and energy to replace the rocket.

If you meant “total mass and fuel in the rocket”, then frankly that’s an arbitrary and cherry-picked metric in this context. If you’re talking about the social impact and technological history of first NASA then SpaceX developing reusable rockets, then “efficiency” should include everything that they’re paying for.

I doubt think the falcon is completely bad either, just that it has its niche. If memory serves me right its mostly doing things like putting satalites into orbit, thats a great use of a reuasble rocket.

…So its “niche” is… Literally the entire thing that space launch rockets are scientifically and economically useful for???

Literally every space mission, outside of like upper atmospheric research sounding rocket launches (which aren’t really relevant to space launch), is “putting satellites into orbit” (regardless of whether those artificial satellites house crew that they’re then going to ferry Mars, or whether they’re just there to relay your cat gifs).

All I was stating is that such rockets can be kinda inefficient for certain jobs. To put it in nautical terms you wouldnt use a fishing trawler as heavy cargo ship.

“For certain jobs”— Yeah, no, not really, at least unless you can name those “certain jobs”.

Sometimes a payload is too heavy for reusable mode but still okay for expendable mode. But that’s not really being “inefficient”, just too small, and would be more efficiently solved with a bigger reusable rocket. And there are certification and supply chain concerns which mean that expendable systems like SLS and Ariane 6 still sorta have a place for now, but that’s not really an efficiency issue either.

But overall, from tiny cubesats to massive moon landings, reusable rockets are consistently and increasingly demonstrating significant efficiency advantages in all areas of spaceflight, because as it turns out, despite all of Chief Twit’s mistakes and harms, throwing away the rocket after you use it once was in fact just a sorta dumb way to do things in the first place.

Perhaps this is showing my ignorance for arospace shit, IDK but as I understand it more fuel and less mass means you can get shit farther. Thats all I was really thinking.

Yeah… I feel like you’re getting defensive because I might have come across as trying to dunk on you… Which is… Fair enough, I guess, and sorry if I came across that way.

And I get not wanting to like anything that Musk’s tied his name to. But you presented yourself as an authorative/informed speaker on a technical subject, while making a claim that simply isn’t true.

Remember it takes about a lot of energy to land something coming down from orbit, that means more fuel, more fuel means more weight. And sometimes it better to put that fuel and weight into putting more shit into orbit.

…That sounds like bull, and quick back-of-the-envelope arithmetic shows there’s probably no way it’s true in the general sense.

Falcon 9 LEO payload, expended: 22.8t
Payload, recovered: 17.4t
Structural material: Various aero-grade aluminium alloys.
First stage dry mass: 25.6t
Propellant mass (LOX+RP-1): 395.7t
Second stage dry mass: 3.9t
Propellant mass: 92.67t

CO₂ emissions to produce aluminium: 2t·CO₂/t·Al to 20+t·CO₂/t·Al
(Depending on whether fossil fuels are used— Al is very energy-intensive. MINIMUM. Does not include mining, alumina, alloying, machining, etc.)

CO₂ emissions to burn LOX+RP-1: ~0.8t·CO₂/t·Fuel

The launch kinematics shouldn’t change too much otherwise, so assume the difference in payload approximately correlates to the fuel amount that must be saved— Oversimplifying and overly linear, I know. (I’m not breaking out Tsiolkovsky for this. You do it, if you want.):

(25.6t * (2t/t)) / ((22.8t - 17.4t) * (0.8t/t))

In even the most conservative scenario, the carbon footprint of the extra fuel to land a Falcon 9 will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12X less than even just the raw material costs to replace the aluminium in it.

If we assume a more typical US aluminium production process for a US company, resulting in 11t·CO₂/t·A instead of 2t·CO₂/t·A:

(25.6t * (11t/t)) / ((22.8t - 17.4t) * (0.8t/t))

…Then we’re looking at the carbon footprint of the fuel to reuse a rocket being 65X lower the carbon footprint of replacing it. This is still not even counting either the actual mining, preprocessing, and alloying of the aluminium ore nor the machining nor the rocket structure, so the real number will be even higher.

…In fact, it looks like nearly half of all the carbon emissions from a rocket launch are likely to come from just manufacturing the rocket, not even the fuel it burns. I’m honestly pretty surprised by this too; You’d think, and I’ve always personally assumed, that the big tank of carbon-based fuel and not the thin sheet of metal around it would release the most CO₂, but apparently not.

((25.6t + 3.9t) * (11t/t)) / ((395.7t + 92.67t) * (0.8t/t))

I guess it makes sense when you remember that GHG costs for other types of vehicles are usually amortized over the useful lifespan of the vehicle in question.

Reusable rockets are just kinda inefficient for a lot of shit.

Remember it takes about a lot of energy to land something coming down from orbit,

This entire premise is somewhere between false and dishonest or misinformed. It costs basically zero energy to land something coming down from orbit, compared to what you’ve already spent to send it up there in the first place, because all you have to do is lower your periapsis into the atmosphere and then fire a quick thrust burst for a couple seconds to land at the end once air drag has done all the hard work of bringing you down from hypersonic to subsonic terminal velocity. The Saturn V had to be millions of tonnes to get to the Moon, but the command module and capsule to get back was kinematically basically one step above an inert rock with a couple of whoopee cushions strapped to the back.

Call out the shitty labour practices, security risks, and deeply problematic political and economic injustices. But don’t try to lie about physics.

The DC-X/Delta Clipper was really cool, but the Space Shuttle was a design-by-committee safety and maintenance disaster. VentureStar didn’t go much better either, though that was mostly Lockheed.

NASA’s had the tech, the expertise, and the will for a while, but the political process was never going to give them permission to do anything more than slow-moving rehashes and incremental evolutions of old technology.

The fastest predator in the world right now is a dinosaur that can fly at over 200 mph— with razor-sharp claws, and so durable it can survive crashing into moving objects at that speed.

Their friends are scary smart. They’re fiercely loyal, and yet ruthless and cruel.

And we’ve spent the last while spraying their eggs with poison, releasing bio-engineered killer drones into their midst, and planting invisible obstacles right in the middle of their highways.

I love how villainous they look oh my god

Yes, I have sorta discovered this the hard way recently, a couple times. It is why I am so angry about the whole thing.

Usually rated “Gold” or “Platinum” on AppDB:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=12274

Platinum: “Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation”
Gold: “Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration”

Click on a version. Apparently it works perfectly, but you need to winetricks corefont, vcrun6, speechsdk, and sapi for the initial install.

Somebody’s damned no matter what. The victim deserves justice. The survivors deserve peace. The perpetrator deserves a chance to do better. And the rest of us deserve safety.

And these things cannot be reconciled. But I’m not willing to just give upon on any of them. So yes, if you could guarantee that it would give us a decent shot at having all of these things, I would be willing and honoured to live as that person’s neighbour or roommate. ..I’ve repeatedly made decisions before in my life that I think prove this, without even realising it. My life is worth less too if theirs is ruined, and I don’t actually innately care about my own safety if I think I can help someone else.

But nobody can currently guarantee that. So, I honestly don’t care anymore. Lock them up for good and throw away the key, or kill the survivors too and then kill me too for good measure; I don’t care. Just don’t make me choose who to damn, because what I want to see is for the victim to be alive, not avenged, and for the criminal to be helped, not brutally crushed— but we can’t have that anyway.

And Ffs, don’t let a known dangerous criminal have the chance to kill again and pretend it’s just mercy or kindness or whatever without a dangerous level of foolishness behind it while condescending at anyone who would want to see a more cautious approach. And don’t pretend that ruining one more life for some perverse ideal of “punishment” or revenge is going to fix anything either.

This is a shitty situation, and we’ve already lost to end up in it. People have already been hurt, and no matter what you choose, more people are probably going to end up being hurt before it’s over. Pretending mercy will magically fix everything is almost just as stupid and evil as pretending “punishment” serves any moral purpose other than cruelty.

…I’d want some kind of mercy for the man or woman who murders me. But it’s not my place to demand it for someone else’s killer, who may well go around being a threat to more and more people.

A chance to change, sure. But it would be a mistake to pretend it’s not also a chance to kill again. And it turns out people actually can’t change, meaningfully, without remorse for their past deeds— And you can’t ever actually know whether they feel that. Mercy feels very good until you realize ten years later how much pain you could have avoided otherwise.

Also, you’re presenting a false dichotomy between “Set them loose on the world” versus “Isolation and torture for the rest of their life”.

Don’t think people can ever change, eh?

In this case, you’re betting future people’s lives on a known murderer changing.

Disclaimer: I’m neither for nor against that.

Show, don’t tell. And get your shots before you go.

“The sane world” is, to be fair, a pretty exclusive club.

Maps with pretty colours and lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_number_of_parties#Effective_number_of_parties_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Cross-reference with the maps and lists for proportional representation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#List_of_countries_using_proportional_representation

Many of the European states, which tend to use proportional representation, are doing quite well.

According to an aside on Wikipedia, technically most countries never used FPTP in the first place, rather than having “moved on” from it. “Its use extended to British colonies […] mostly in the English-speaking world”. Of those, however, some have indeed “abandoned it in favour of other electoral systems”.

Proportional representation has been tried and tested since at least “its first national use in Denmark in 1855”.¹

A major black mark on its history might arguably be the fact that it contributed to the instability of the Weimar Republic by creating too many parties competing for power— Though, that was only a problem because of the generally disastrous state of inter-war Germany (reparations, debts, loss of industrial zones, restrictions on their military, Treaty of Versailles, fall of the Empire, etc.).

In general, proportional representation has worked out pretty well for the countries that use it, though. It doesn’t magically fix everything, but the US’s two parties currently clearly aren’t working.

¹ (Side note: Danish civil history is really cool! Used to be Vikings, lost their imperial ambitions and mellowed out, democratized willingly, saved nearly all their Jewish people and even sorted preserved their democracy through WWII, then went fully Nordic model, and now have neat randomly sampled citizen’s assemblies that are probably how democracy really should be done.)

² (The US had been hovering barely above the threshold between “Full Democracy” and “Flawed Democracy” for years, based on the EIU’s ranking criteria. It finally crossed the threshold in 2016, and has been falling alarmingly quickly ever since.)

Ah, but you’re missing an important distinction. He committed treasonous acts with plausible deniability! And he’ll always be able to come up with new lies and new ways to abuse you faster than you’ll be able to disprove his lies or protect yourself, so you may as well restore the monarchy already and put him on top.

EDIT: On a serious note, the comment you replied to is absolutely correct in the point they were making. If Trump is barred from the Oval Office, and the evidence and the way the evidence are presented are anything less than rock solid, then future presidents will absolutely weaponize it as precedent to lock out their political opponents (as happens in every other broken democracy).

No!

…I really wish I had a magnetic microscope.