More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…
I think stores have become much more welcoming.
The doors automatically open for you, the interior is nicely arranged, everything is brightly lit, and food is chilled, refrigerated and frozen.
It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space. Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.
> It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space I don't see any of the alternatives ever being competitive.
It's even worse than that. A space elevator, the only thing that could conceivably replace rockets, requires materials so strong that they don't exist in our universe.
Space is like the internet. You can communicate through it, but sending matter is nigh impossible.
Foolish short-sighted take. Imagine if the same opinion held during the age of sail. There's literally more resources than are currently controlled by our entire planet in the asteroid belt, and a lunar colony (at least a refueling station in space) would be a huge boon to anyone who wants to go explore further. If that's not good enough, how about outsourcing our shitty resource extraction and polluting manufacturin…
The problem with arguments by analogy is they inherently assume the analogy is valid. It's a circular argument. The "cognitive shift" thing is just BS some space fans made up to sell their cult. And no, Apollo did not launch "our discipline of computer science". Talk about spinoff inflation!
Apollo did feature a bunch of interesting first in electronics. We would have gotten there, and we did, but the Apollo program had stuff like the first fly-by-wire vehicle. That's a great invention!
It remained staggeringly expensive because the Space Shuttle was a disastrous design to follow up the lunar rockets. It held up the space program half a century in some ways. It reduced the manned program to Earth orbit, was supposed to be highly reusable to reduce launch costs, but didn't work out that way. And of course, it was supposed to be reliable and safer. If we had continued going to the moon, even infrequen…
It's also possible that materials science (and others) were too immature and could not be rushed without innovations in a million other areas. The tradeoffs needed across all fields may be worse for society, or just impossible until the global population could produce enough skilled workers.
Nope. The Shuttle was a catastrophic strategic blunder. Why do you think NASA is so adamant on chasing a second vehicle to go to the ISS when A) The ISS is nearly over; and B) Space X's vehicle is awesome?
Because of the Shuttle. Initially, and they actually did it for a couple of years, EVERY satellite launched into orbit by the US was supposed to use the Shuttle. Inevitably, when the Shuttle proved inadequate at all its jobs, they had to revert back to rockets. That's not a failure of materials science. That's a strategic mistake that could have been avoided.
More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…
It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected lea…
More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…
It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected lea…
If you think those stories charaterize USSR production/planning system, they do not. Specially the historical period when Yeltsin took power, at that time, they already had market like elements of production. If interested, there is a few books on planning, f.e. Cockshott. I think it is important since we as humans capable of conscious transformation of production relations. In some parts of production may be it is ok if it is done by independent agents, in some parts it could be better if agents could communicate not just by market, but directly, as with free softwere/GPL where you can directly work on it, not though market.
What is good about USSR, is that you could likely get any schematic of any device. I do not like proprietay things so this huge market of phones and etc, is not really for me. Some ICs used do not have datasheets. The many supermarkets, it is 10 or so in radius of 1-2 km here. I'm ok if it is 7 and one lab equiped with electronics, etc equipment. There is a clear by now bound of what individual agents communicating only over market, can do.
I sometimes think that modern American super market would blow the minds of a lot of people nowadays too
There's a reason some people celebrate when Wegmans opens near them.
We moved from nowhere Montana to North Carolina and when our teenage kids stepped into Wegmans, you would have thought they had never seen a grocery store. The vegetables section alone had their eyes bulging. One kid actually teared up. Best produce we had had in years. A couple years onward and the novelty is absolutely gone and the oldest thinks wegmans is too expensive with too little variety
Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity. WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.
Not to disagree with you but to add context, the monopoly on violence has not always been as straightforward as one might imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain The British East India company’s operations are another example.
I completely agree with you but my point stands as is.
I'd only change 'never have' to 'almost never have' and most probably won't again.
me> in my pocket contains a device that gives me access to all of the world's information almost instantly person from the past> wow! what do you do with it? me> look at pictures of cats and argue with people i don't even know /i think that's from an xkcd
Benjamin Franklin: "So you're telling me there are hot single women in my area that are looking to date?"