Live data from Hacker News

Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

cnbc.com

151–160 of 216 posts

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$900 million = 5 days of federal food stamps spending $3-4 billion = 3 weeks of federal food stamps spending I know which I think is the better government expenditure

Still a government handout to private corporation.

It's a country investing in infrastructure.

A hand out is bailing out failing auto makers, forgiving debt arbitrarily, etc, etc.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an oligarchy to me https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-s...

Redundancy for NASA funded projects makes sense, and it's how we regained the ability to launch human crewed rockets from US soil: Boeing wanted to be the sole contract, and has bungled their launch projects, and it was due to NASA also contracting SpaceX that we've had any successful launches. When SpaceX was recently awarded a sole contract, plenty of people — including here on HN — howled that NASA was letting Spa…

'neutrality' is a mirage, but WaPo isn't known for it, either, and in this context it's an especially egregious choice

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#153
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting $1.8M for expansion of Starlink to deliver broadband to rural America is not a net win? As someone in the midwest US, Starlink is the first realistic opportunity for many people I know to access broadband internet. My mother-in-law has had to teach from home all year using her cellphone as a hotspot because that's the best internet she could get no matter how much she payed.

I'm not suggesting. People are engaged in heated normative[1] discussion with little or no facts. I am not. Even saying Tesla is a great example of a government project does not mean it's good or bad. Just a great example. I just wanted to add some facts to the discussion. Not enough, but some. I think it would be great to find out the total indirect and direct subsidies these companies receive, but I could not find…

I appreciate the information. I did not have an opinion on the matter until you provided context that the subsidies were specifically for StarLink.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#154
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'google: "SpaceX subsidies" SpaceX gets almost $900 million in federal subsidies to deliver broadband to rural America https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/tech/spacex-starlink-subsidie... SpaceX just won $885 million in federal subsidies to expand Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite-internet project https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacex-just-won-do... In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor. SpaceX and…

Are you suggesting $1.8M for expansion of Starlink to deliver broadband to rural America is not a net win? As someone in the midwest US, Starlink is the first realistic opportunity for many people I know to access broadband internet. My mother-in-law has had to teach from home all year using her cellphone as a hotspot because that's the best internet she could get no matter how much she payed.

We already paid companies to roll out copper to your area in the 90s, and they just didn't do it.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#155
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is clearly historically incorrect. > What reason is that? How long do you have? https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs in particular from 13:30 onwards, though the whole thing and the follow up video are both worth watching.

If you actually study history (not YouTube, history books) you’ll find starving people and human rights violations to be a common cause for revolution.

Books like this?: https://www.amazon.de/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...

“and” is pulling a lot of weight in your sentence, given I’ve not made a claim about general human rights on this thread.

Also? “Common cause” is very different from “has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding”, which I consider important in this context.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#156
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be more specific? "A lot of damage to humanity" is a quite strong claim with deep ethical implications. I would prefer a concrete example of such an act.

It would take me a week to go through every detail but wikipedia has some summaries: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Controversies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Lawsuits_and_contr...

"It would take me a week to go through every detail"

I did not request every incident, but just one concrete example that would validate the quite strong characterization.

In the United States being sued is not a proof of guilt, it's just a proof of being sued.

This is unlike in some other countries, where the guilt of the person is presupposed and the purpose of the court ruling is just to make it official.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an interesting trend I’ve seen where a lot of folks who were previously super health conscious, put on weight when they are in a relationship they enjoy. Anyone have a study or article of this phenomenon?

The chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. We are machines that work to attract mates, reproduce, and rear young. Once one has achieved the goal of attracting a mate, there's little need to devote energy to courtship displays - though perhaps more need to reserve energy in case of hardship. I might be being a little reductive though :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

> We are machines that work to attract mates, reproduce, and rear young.

How would this be distinguished from people simply having the desire to orgasm which unintentionally causes reproduction? At least for males, I can see a case for the machine’s goal to spread the seed as far and wide as possible, so there need not be any biological imperative to stop at one mate.

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#158
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14 trials is nothing - especially when even a 5% risk would be considered too high. For reference, the 95 % confidence interval on a distribution with a 1 in 5 accident risk would include this result: https://epitools.ausvet.com.au/ciproportion

A 0.1% risk is probably considered too high for tourist flights that have no other useful purpose. They can't do enough flights to verify that experimentally, they'll calculate the risk via simulation and then validate the simulations with the test flights.

Indeed a 0.1% risk is far too high for tourist flights. The FAA doesn't accept the less than 0.0006% incident rate[1] of general aviation as safe enough for paying passengers.

[1] 0.54 fatal incidents per 100,000 flight hours and decreasing year on year: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#159
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos owns the 2nd largest newspaper in the country, and now a major movie studio. I would say he qualifies.

How has he used that newspaper to exert political control over the US?

How easily is that question answered?

Re: Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger spaceflight of Blue Origin in July

#160
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'google: "SpaceX subsidies" SpaceX gets almost $900 million in federal subsidies to deliver broadband to rural America https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/tech/spacex-starlink-subsidie... SpaceX just won $885 million in federal subsidies to expand Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite-internet project https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacex-just-won-do... In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor. SpaceX and…

> In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor. It's important to note that SpaceX is different from most space-related government contractor in that they mostly sell a packaged service, whereas other contractors before it had development contracts. Boeing / ULA etc were paid to develop launchers, SpaceX sells launches. (I know that SpaceX benefited from subsidies towards achieving that, but their competitors…

NASA has given seed money and development funding for Dragon, Falcon 9, engines and demonstration launches ($248M at least) https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_Minutes...

I think this is the same way as Boeing and others get their money for development.

Post reply on HN