491–500 of 504 posts
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All on board today were trained and fully qualified for their roles.
In which their role was 'sit there, when sign says you can unbuckle, dso that, then get clicked back in when it's time. Christa was legit trained how to spacewalk.
Sure, McAuliffe trained to do so much more, but all of them fulfill the criterion you gave of what an astronaut is.
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The US was behind the USSR at the beginning of the last space race. Jeff Bezos is an extremely smart and talented guy, and is now focusing a lot more of his time on Blue Origin. I wouldn't count them out.
Bezos is a businessman, rockets require engineering. Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.
Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.
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Bezos is a businessman, rockets require engineering. Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.
Bezos can hire engineers to work for him. Amazon requires lots of engineers and that works fine. Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.
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> Walmart almost doubled Amazon's revenue last year, Eh... that's not really true, it's about 1.45x the revenue, not 2x. And that's not the whole picture. Revenue for 2020: Walmart: $559 billion Amazon: $386 billion Operating income for 2020: Walmart: $20.6 billion Amazon: $22.9 billion Net Income (business/total) for 2020: Walmart: $15.2/14.9 billion Amazon: $22.1/21.3 billion
Which one seems more likely to you: a. Amazon solves brick and mortar b. Walmart solves online sales. Given the way things are going with Amazon essentially throwing in the towel with counterfeit reviews and products, I would put my money on Walmart eating Amazon's lunch this decade. Don't forget political influence as well. Walmart has a large fraction of congress on bankroll.
I don't think you understand just how insignificant the counterfeit issue is. Amazon reports it as 0.01% of sales, but even they're off by a factor of 100 that's just 1%. And 1% of their .com revenue is still less than 0.5% of their overall revenue because most of Amazon's profits come from AWS.
> Amazon solves brick and mortar
What is there to solve? Amazon has a logistics infrastructure that Walmart can't touch. If they decided to open a big box store do you really thing the counterfeit issues in their affiliate program would harm them? It's not like they'd put affiliate merchandise on the floor. I feel like they could figure out how to unload trucks to retail shelves and do in person payment processing at least as well as Walmart.
> Walmart solves online sales.
Walmart has been competing with Amazon in online sales for a decade, how's that going? Walmart has nothing to compete with Amazon's Audible, Echo, Ring, Blink, or Prime offerings. Sure they have free shipping with Walmart+ and an affiliate program but is that enough? They've tried countless times to compete against Amazon and failed, most recently they sold Vudo off. At the same time Amazon has launched countless brands and new products with great success.
Amazon.com's tone deaf Billionaire founder and their treatment of their workers are a far greater risk to them than Walmart. But bad reputation and consumer dislike aren't going to kill Amazon anymore than they've done so with Walmart who has infamy for destroying both small town America and America's manufacturing infrastructure.
Honestly I'm not sure why you'd want either of these companies to succeed.
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Well to be fair, they don't compete with Walmart. Walmart almost doubled Amazon's revenue last year, and that was during the height of a pandemic, which naturally steered people towards more online orders, something you think would tip the scales in Amazon's favor.
have you _seen_ walmart.com? their online store rivals amazon easily.
Walmart's affiliate program allows them to cater to the long tail market that Amazon has long dominated but that alone isn't going to convince people to switch to Walmart.com. Why not go to Ebay or Newegg instead?
Walmart+ costs 2/3 of Amazon Prime but doesn't offer any of the digital services available like Audiobooks, ebooks, Videos, Music, Gaming, and photo storage/backup. For many those services are more valuable than free shipping or pharmacy discounts.
What does Walmart.com offer that's going to convince people to shop their over Amazon, Newegg, Ebay or other online retailers?
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>>With a private space race, technologies like these seem more likely to remain a trade secret. Much of what is developed is in the public domain. Patents and trade secrets only go so far. You can't patent or keep secret the concepts that these trials prove out. The satellite of industries that develops to support space flight is also not affected by whether the fights they're supporting are private vs government, an…
> Patents and trade secrets only go so far. You can't patent or keep secret the concepts that these trials prove out. I'd argue this is, if we're talking about practicality, is just crumbs though. For example, scratch-resistant lenses were developed at NASA. Proving that it could be done wasn't the important factor that brought it to everyone's homes. What brought it to everyone's homes was the fact that NASA license…
And proving it can be done is aside from proving how it can be done. Once the general principle is proven out, competitors find ways to apply it that avoid infringing on the patent. The process of discovering the how involves expensive trial and error, that a large private sector can greatly accelerate.
I agree that publicly funded technology initiatives have their own strengths, but private technology provide far more than crumbs. Much of an industry's development is in the form of mundane, that is too unremarkable to be patented or held in secret, and for that, it makes no difference what the source of the funding is.
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Which one seems more likely to you: a. Amazon solves brick and mortar b. Walmart solves online sales. Given the way things are going with Amazon essentially throwing in the towel with counterfeit reviews and products, I would put my money on Walmart eating Amazon's lunch this decade. Don't forget political influence as well. Walmart has a large fraction of congress on bankroll.
You started out by claiming "they don't compete with Walmart" because "Walmart almost doubled Amazon's revenue last year". But since that's not true you've moved the goal post and now you're claiming "Walmart eating Amazon's lunch this decade" is the most likely scenario because Amazon has a counterfeit product problem and Walmart has political connections. I don't think you understand just how insignificant the coun…
I said "about" 2x. Ok, about doing some heavy lifting, so it's closer to about 1.5 for 2020, during a pandemic. What's a typical year? Ah but you are so focused on technically correct, you missed the forest for the trees. My point still remains. The gulf between what Amazon sells and Walmart sells is so wide, it's hardly seen as "competing". Amazon themselves have admitted to this fact (and have used this fact to shield themselves from anti-competitive legislation. One of their favorite moves is to point at Walmart and say "they are the big guys, not us") So these are just established facts, not moving any sort of goal posts. I am not here to defend a thesis or dissertation, we are having a casual conversation on the internet.
I guess you must be one of those guys who demands zero margin of error in their conversations? If so, you must be fun at parties.
> Honestly I'm not sure why you'd want either of these companies to succeed.
Speaking of fallacies, never did I say I want them to succeed, so here's your straw man back. I am observing the reality of what is, and what is likely to happen.
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> These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses! Okay, so these launches aren't amusement rides for billionaires, they are marketing stunts to advertise amusement rides for other billionaires? Hard to see the difference tbh
These rides are being sold for a few hundred thousand dollars. Before New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, the only private tourists to space paid tens of millions. That is a huge decrease in price! Now any millionaire can afford it, and it is just within reach of an upper middle class person willing to save for a significant part of their life. Some people couldn't care less about this, but others have dreamed of flying in…
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Bezos can hire engineers to work for him. Amazon requires lots of engineers and that works fine. Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.
Then why hasn't he done so earlier?
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These rides are being sold for a few hundred thousand dollars. Before New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, the only private tourists to space paid tens of millions. That is a huge decrease in price! Now any millionaire can afford it, and it is just within reach of an upper middle class person willing to save for a significant part of their life. Some people couldn't care less about this, but others have dreamed of flying in…
s/billionaires/millionaires isn't a very compelling argument in my opinion. It's still a huge waste all so some rich people can float in zero-g for a few minutes so making it accessable to a few million people instead of a few thousand doesn't seem like a win to me.