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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • The article is not far off from the mob mentality in this thread. It makes one good point, that one oligarch should not be in control of a global communications network, but it fails to notice that this move would take the power from one wealthy individual and hand it over to another, who now holds all the power.

    And let’s be clear, if we nationalized, Trump would ruin SpaceX, run it right into the ground like every company he’s ever touched. Starship would never be finished, despite being within sight of the rocketry holy grail, reusable rockets. Washington would take control of starlink, which would probably be good, except it gives trump control over a communication system, which is a terrible idea. But it wouldn’t last long, because when we mismanage and underfund SpaceX and it crumbles, we’ll have no way to replace starlink sats and the whole network will disappear.

    Nationalisation is SpaceX is a dumb idea because people aren’t really thinking it all through. The outcome would be a lot worse for everyone, especially with a vindictive president that would like nothing more than to seize the assets of his opponents and liquidate them into his own coffers.




  • Let’s say I bought you a car, I paid for it in full and then gave it to you, and in return you sometimes drive me around.

    Let’s say I get tired of this arrangement, should I repossess the car just to drive it into the ocean? What would be the point of that? Sure, it’s rightfully mine, but what good does it do to destroy it?

    “IT BELONGS TO US” is not a very compelling argument for arbitrary distribution.




  • I mean you have to realize how important it will be to have fully reusable rockets and a significantly reduced price to get to space. The goal with starship is to reduce the cost of getting to orbit by at least an order of magnitude (but possibly much more than that). When that starts to happen it’ll allow for new and exciting things to happen in space.

    First, we can go back to the moon and to Mars, we can explore again. But more than that, it will make some new things possible. It will eventually become feasible for resource extraction and manufacturing to move to space. That would mean processes that produce harmful waste don’t have to happen on our planet. Mining asteroids would mean again, minimal ecological impact compared to mining a mountain on Earth. And of course creating industry in space is the first step towards a future where people actually live in space, the first step towards humanity getting a real foothold off of earth.

    But you literally can’t get to any of those possibilities without reusable rockets first, it’s just not feasible.


  • This is the thing, NASA is underfunded as it is, if we nationalized SpaceX, we wouldn’t actually continue to fund it appropriately and it would simply die. Actually, with trump at the helm, nationalizing it would mean Trump immediately liquidating it. SpaceX is definitely the most successful rocket company in the US. It would be an awful shame for the space industry and for humanity’s future in space.

    I hate musk as much as the next guy, but I think the success of spaceX is undeniable. Their success with reusable rockets is not just impressive, it’s ground breaking and important. Developing a fully reusable rocket is probably the most important challenge humans are working on in this era, and I only know of three companies attempting to do it. I don’t want to kill the company that’s furthest along.




  • Wait, what makes this a confirmation? Just cause Elon said it? I mean we all suspected it, that’s exactly what I’d expect from Trump. But Elon saying something doesn’t make it a fact, the dude loves to shit talk people and he’s never needed proof before…

    So I’m going to go out on a limb and say Elon doesn’t actually know any more than the rest of us. And it also doesn’t really matter either way, Trump was a rapist before and a rapist after.









  • Well, 3.5" SSDs are certainly possible, but 2.5" (or in fact m.2) might just be a better form factor for SSDs. The thing is, an SSD is just a bunch of chips on a PCB, so they really don’t need the extra height afforded to them by a 3.5" bay.

    You could probably fit 2 pcbs one on top of the other within a 3.5" drive, but that would probably need a third PCB to connect the two which would be more complicated to manufacture and be worse for cooling than using two individual 3.5" or m.2 cards.

    Also, for a bunch of reasons smaller is usually better. Generally, it tends to be cheaper to use a few large capacity chips on a small board than it is to use a lot of lower capacity chips on a larger board. Of course fewer parts also means fewer potential points of failure, so better for quality control. And again, smaller cards are better for case airflow and cooling.