161–170 of 240 posts
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The implication is rather that we’ve grown much more inept when it comes to getting things done.
Because there isn't an existential war going on forcing people to listen to the people who want to be economically efficient.
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The US medical system wastes enough each year ($950B) to start an LHC sized project (~$10B), fully funded, in each US state every year and have enough left over to fully fund three new Apollo scale set of missions ($150B). You can't recover all that, but still, it's hard to picture just how big some of these figures are until you compare to other large costs.
That number is shocking. I'd love to know details. Can you provide a source please?
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Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem. You can see this by comparing it to fission. Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage. Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants.…
Fission is too expensive because everyone tried to get economies of scale at big complex custom-built one-off plants. Those who see hope for fission look to get economies of scale with a modular approach, mass-producing simple, small, reactors, shipping them from the factory to the site on trucks, and attaching them to the grid. I am not qualified to assess whether that hope is well-founded, but there are real differ…
It's not that clear how much economy of scale is there with a modular design and if it's enough to displace the diseconomy of making smaller plants. But the one thing that gets cheaper with a small size is safety mechanisms, and those are a big thing.
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>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot…
Interestingly enough, the most expensive program was The B-29 bomber program, which cost 50% more than the Manhattan project. Then one B-29 had an emergency landing in Sovjet and the soviets reversed engineered it into the TU-4. Tu-94 which is still flying is a newer scaled up version of this. It's amazing how much of the innovation the U.S did in the 1940s ended up in others hands(the bomb, B-29). The world would pr…
Jets and Rockets were built by the Germans first.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160201-the-wwii-flying-...
Are at an inflection point for fusion power? With interest and funding for it finally gaining steam? I’ve noticed several announcements about independent efforts this past year [1–6] but not sure if (a) it’s always been this way or (b) my view is skewed by HN. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806334 "General Fusion" [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979608 "ITER" [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com…
>>> b) my view is skewed by HN. Making us anti-fake news?? :-) However I also have the same impression, and HN is one of my leading indicators so it could well be coalescing.
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yes, technically the next generation of Starships flying to Mars would be fission powered. Unfortunately the regulatory regime makes any fission related development close to impossible. Add to that practical unavailability of fission fuel - even NASA has issues getting those mere kilograms of plutonium, and even Musk wouldn't be able to get nor breeder reactor, nor enrichment plant (here on Earth i mean). As a result…
the physics of Fission work better (or work at all, really) at scale. Fitting the weight and size of a fusion reactor on a rocket ship strikes me as impossible for the forseeable future.
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Fuel in the US is already much more expensive than two decades ago. I remember buying a gallon for around 90 cents in 1999, and at the same time I read a newspaper article about some immigrant-run stations on the Jersey shore that had slashed their prices to several cents below that, as they were content to make a tiny profit margin and play a long game. Now a gallon costs more than twice as much as then, but as far…
$0.90 in 1999 is $1.41 today. Near me, gas is ~$2 (give or take). So, more expensive (~40-50%), but not double.
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That number is shocking. I'd love to know details. Can you provide a source please?
Just the US value from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... vs #2 (Switzerland) is $US800 000 000 000 for all US residents in extra spending.
It's common knowledge that the US spends much more per capita on Healthcare, however the commonly offered explanation for this is that the private healthcare system in the US is less efficient than the public systems in Europe. But the graph in the provided link shows that US costs are split evenly between private spending and public spending.
This is confusing because the private system in the US covers twice as many people as the public system. Per the US Census Bureau: "in 2018, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, covering 67.3 percent of the population and 34.4 percent of the population, respectively."[0] If the provided data are correct, this would indicate that US private spending is nearly twice as efficient as public spending.
What am I missing?
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
2040s? 20+ years from now!?! Too fuckin slow!! For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
I'm not a fan of this sentiment. Sometimes things are just really f'ing hard, and no amount of "pushing people" is going to change the reality of how long those things take. I mean, if you look at both Tesla and SpaceX, nothing they've done was thought to be "impossible" from the outset from a scientific perspective . Electric cars already existed when Tesla was started, and we've been shooting rockets into space for…
True, but the difference between too hard and only needing an organized push is often only obvious in hindsight.