I was in the same situation once. Laid off by Northern Telecom in the late '80s, I started work as a contractor at their head office three weeks later for double what I'd been paid as an employee. :)

Of course, the old Orion design has been significantly surpassed by a number of newer designs. Medusa, for example, is much better than Orion - the bombs explode in front of the craft behind a gigantic "parachute", which captures far more of the energy and the long cords on the parachute allow for a much longer, smoother acceleration pulse. The bombs are also able to be detonated much further from the craft, and the craft may be made a lot smaller.

Nuclear thermal - the first version that was being developed called Nerva - allows for "clean" (to varying degrees) fission propulsion from the surface. Or if what you want is high ISP in space, then a fission fragment rocket goes much higher than an Orion or Medusa design (and scales down a lot better)

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

None of the content I watch on YouTube is paid for by advertising.

YouTube is just a file sharing site for a lot of users.

There are hundreds of university lectures on line, they haven't been paid for by advertising.

It may be a fallacy in your mind. But it does beg the question why such a huge number of poor people are in prison camp USA.

Increases in wealth in America have largely gone to the 1% since the 1970's rather than the poor or middle class. Basically the USA has reinvented feudalism.

You mean you run your economy on illegal cheap foreign labour and because criminal money is just as good as real money to you Americans you think its would be a good idea to stop providing welfare to the human beings you threw down the toilet in your own country because you displaced them with foreign slaves..

And you wonder why Putin is able to get worldwide support for his immensely successful propaganda?

He seems no worse than the US.

Decade or two to ramp up production for new vehicle sales. Plus a decade or so for consumer acceptance lag. Then two decades or more to phase out existing gas cars. We're talking half a century here.

Yes, at one point there were 5 cars per million people period. Around the year 1890. Today there's 0.15 cars per capita globally. It took over a century to scale up that much, so I don't think that's the sort of point you want to be making. Plus, not only do we have to scale up for existing car replacement, but also to handle the rapid growth of the third world, which will push that 0.15 cars per capita way up over the coming decades. It's simply something that will take decades to get the production capacity in place, and then decades at that level to phase out the existing vehicles on the road.

Biofuels are hardly a gap filler. Have you ever checked how much land they eat up even to meet today's tiny pathetic percentage of the market share? To meet the needs of the average American driver's 12k miles per year in an average 24mpg car (500 gallons) would require 3 million square miles of farmland dedicated to it, more than double the US total farmland for *all* crops - for human consumption, for animal feed, for clothing, for industry, everything combined. And that's just for passenger cars, let alone freight trucks, trains, airplanes, ships, etc.

It's not a gap filler. It's an environmental disaster on a greater scale than the oil it's trying to replace.

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.

And for the literally 99.9995 percent of the world population who doesn't have a Tesla?

As much as I'm a fan of electric cars, it's simply an absurdity to pretend that everyone's going to have one any day now. The average car on the road in the US is 10 years old, implying an average US lifespan of 20 years - and many live on even longer, shipped to the third world. So even if every new car sold tomorrow was an EV, it'd still take decades to switch over. But of course, every new car sold tomorrow won't be an EV. Even if every consumer in the world was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs, it'd take a decade or two to be able to ramp up production that high. But of course every consumer in the world isn't sold on the concept of EVs, it'll take a decade or two of people getting to experience the technology and being satisfied with it for that to happen.

I wish this wasn't the case, but the majority of the cars in the world aren't going to be electric for many decades to come. So if your plan is to stop all oil production during that time... yeah, best of luck with the end of human civilization.

It's a bit baffling how "some economists" weren't fully cognisant of what would happen when the minimum wage was raised. I mean it's not as though it's the first time it has happened, the effects should be well known by now. Kind of reminds me of the old joke:

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job.

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathemetician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"

You think the boat is just going to sit in one place? They drag the sensors behind them while they travel across tens of millions of square kilometers. At the sort of pulse rate discussed and at typical ship rates of travel for a craft like this, the pulses would be about 100 meters apart, and the ship would be dozens of miles away an hour later.

There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.

You're kind of putting the cart before the horse here. Marketing costs enormous amounts of money but it is effective, that's why publishers keep paying for it. People buy because of the marketing as much as the content.

So if you were a publisher would you prefer to put all that money behind a) a formulaic, uninspired but proven work or b) a new, exciting, but unproven creation? There's a good reason they keep making remakes of remakes.

If new and original content were to benefit from the kind of marketing muscle that gets put behind the formulaic stuff, it would probably have much more of an impact.

I just checked out Patreon, maybe I'm doing it wrong but when I clicked "writing" I got a mish mash of podcasts, comics, programming projects and art, with little writing to be found. Unless I'm missing a trick here they really need to get their categorisation sorted.

France also has a much milder climate and 3.5 times the population density. They're also heavily dominated by nuclear power, which some people like but others truly hate, and which tends to be one of the more expensive generation sources per kilowatt hour and with a very long turnaround time from conception to commencement of generation.

And once again, we're talking about oil here, oil and electricity are not interchangeable. You need to be comparing oil consumption per capita. France's is a bit over half the US's, but with a population density 3.5 times higher, that's kind of to be expected.