Best slashdot quote in ages:

" France, consistent with its traditions, surrendered before the war began." --superwiz

Dolla dolla bill yo!

andy

No its exactly like that. Farenheit 451, basically. The parties are flipping a coin to decide who will be in power next, and their mindless supporters follow along. Ever see those scenes of the Middle East where they hold up giant pictures of "their guy"? Same deal here....

"I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he's one of the nicest-looking men who ever became president."

"Oh, but the man they ran against him!"

"He wasn't much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn't shave too close or comb his hair very well."

"What possessed the ‘Outs’ to run him? You just don't go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides, he mumbled. Half the time I couldn't hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn't understand!"

"Fat, too, and didn't dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost figure the results."

I wonder if the pilot didn't get the memo about that region and used an old flight path? It certainly looks like the FA track deviates to avoid that region on the previous flights....

His car is 12 years old, yours is 5. If you replace yours at twice the interval that he does, your net carbon footprint will be significantly larger. His car get a tank every month and a half, so 8 tanks a year. At 32 mpg, ~16 gal/tank (18.5 max, per http://www.edmunds.com/bmw/5-s...) he drives ~5000 miles/year. You drive 20,000 miles/year. So your fuel consumption is twice his per year, even if you get double the mieage. So not only is your car newer which implies you generate tons more carbon buying new cars, but you burn twice as much fuel as he does per year.

And if you upgrade to that newer model, you will put tons more carbon into the atmosphere, before you ever drive it.

Your best bet is a recycled (ie. used) Honda CRX HF, which gets the same fuel mileage as your Basic Marin Wheels but has already had its carbon burned.

This would tie in well with the study that people who worry about carbon climate change are the ones who do the least to prevent it....

andy

Also, the US has a huge first generation immigrant population. That skews our national numbers pretty badly in things like life expectancy, child mortality, etc.

Yeah, we're working on it. We have a system to correct this crap, hopefully we'll use it. In the meantime, make sure yours is just as transparent as you want ours to be. Maybe even show us the way. It would really help out, if you are indeed using the ideas our founders gave you....

Oh, and the NSA et. al. also spy on all the US citizens. Its not like they really tried hard to avoid it. They can have any non-US entity do it for them and share the results. We're all sorta in this together, us humans.

The Oligarchy in the US will get fixed eventually, we all hope for the better. It would be, you know, easier, if certain eurasian countries could stop invading their neighbors, and all. Have hope, humans are better than this.

You either have no idea how the engineering job market works or are being deliberately obtuse.

These companies set the price for engineering hires throughout the valley. If they collude to keep salaries down, all other companies vying for engineering talent will not have to pay the market rate. In effect, they are guaranteeing themselves access to engineers at depressed wages by market manipulation.

And in the real world, you retain talent by paying for it. It doesn't work for free. If the talent is so freaking important, then pay for it. It will stay if you are paying as much or more than is available on the outside. If you are a business, and you have critical folks, you should be paying them like they are critical, not limiting their job options.

You would care about this if you were the talent in question, getting underpaid and reported for applying to another job. Imagine how many careers have been derailed in the valley by these HR departments reporting job seekers to their employers.

You would also care about this if you were a shareholder or current employee at one of the cartel companies, given that all who have applied for a job from one of these cartel companies to the other and been rejected now are a pain free class action waiting to happen. All who have had their wages depressed are a class action waiting to happen.

And in the end, everyone loses except the CxOs with their golden parachutes and the Blood Sucking Lawyers.

That's why this is fscking stupid and wrong. You can resume speculating about their motives, as though that means a gd damn thing.

andy

It is completely about wages! Did you miss the part about keeping employee pay within narrow bands? The sharing of compensation data with competitors? They prevented their engineers getting hired at other major employers, then kept these same emploees from making a market wage, ie. the wage they would receive if free to go to another job! If these engineers are so critical, maybe, they should be paid like it? And in doing so, raise the pay for all engineers? These CEOs, who made the deals here, are worth Billions, with a B. They are the 0.1%. They are the reason there aren't "enough" engineers in the US; there aren't enough engineers who will work for the artificially low wages they are offering. This behavior is dispicable; imagine if the engineers got together and artificially capped the compensation of senior management! They sign up for that too? I think not.

andy

Yeah I dunno man, I have pretty much switched to reddit. Their comment sorting makes most of the losers disappear, or something. /. used to cater to people like you, who make excellent posts. Now you are yelled at by trolls. I don't understand it. You even posted the command for fscks sake!

Don't go too far, some of us still appreciate informed posts.

andy

SpaceX didn't go hiring a bunch of ULA engineers to build the Falcon series of rockets; there's a quote floating around that it was like 5% came from existing rocket related enterprises. It turns out that rocket science and engineering is just science and engineering; anyone can do it.

And yeah, if you're an engineer and working for a company that employs 4 guys who keep a chair warm, 2 guys who create make work for everyone else, 1 guy who is a drooling moron, and you, and you're consequently spending 10 engineers worth of time to do 1 engineers worth of work, and you don't notice or care that its the case, you're fscking mediocre.
Good engineers pay attention, collect data, do metrics; if you don't do that, you're mediocre.
You work for ULA/ESA-Ariane/SLS, and you don't see the writing on the wall? You're mediocre.
In fact, you're the definition of mediocre.

Christ, its not even close; the majors have been in this business for almost 70 YEARS. I mean, how in the fsck do you have to charge 10X what your competitor charges when they just started doing, heavy industry, like this century, ferchissakes? I mean, ULA/ESA should be able to FART faster better cheaper rockets than SpaceX. The fact that they can't, and aren't even trying, tells you all you need to know not just about the companies/alliances themselves, but ALSO the people who work there.

And I didn't say anything about CalTech/JPL; we are talking about SpaceX competitors here. JPL might do theory, design, and testing, but I don't think they've built an EELV class launch vehicle lately. In any case there is no evidence they are mediocre since nobody else has built a planetary rover, deployed it, and done equivalent science with it for better than 1/10th the cost.

andy

Do you work in the defense aerospace industry? Because the part I worked for boasted that it was white collar welfare. In the specific instance, what do you call an industry that is getting paid 10X what it should cost (as defined by what cost someone else to do it) to deliver something? I mean, if you paid fast food cashiers 72.50$/hr (10X minimum wage) simply becuase they work in a niche industry using revolving door lobbyists to gather no competition govt contracts, what would you call that? What if you paid market rate to 10X as many engineers as you should (using the definition of should, above) for the same reason? What if your "competition" and "you" were allowed to "merge" into an "alliance" (ULA) and then you jacked up the price on a mature, delivered product, what would you call that?

At least he didn't call it racketeering, or extortion, or bribery...which one could also argue....

He called it welfare.

As to the mediocre part, who in the fsck would ever work in a place like that? That's right, engineers who couldn't/can't get another job. As in, mediocre ones.

andy

So, do you work for Orbital, Boring, or Lockmart? ESA? Major sub? Trying to do SLS? Even work(ed) in Aerospace?

This is a mature Delta II launch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsVzpE7ltb8

A Titan 34D (carying a 1B$ KH-x spy satellite, no less):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBl03wVHOY

Early failures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8

All of these were funded ENTIRELY by the US Federal Government on a Cost Plus Fixed Fee basis, meaning even when they failed we paid costs AND profit to the contractors. SpaceX hasn't failed like this buddy, not by the order of magnitude less that they cost.

You're either deliberately obtuse or a moron. I'm not a fanboi, I'm just glad to see a prime not fleece the Feds out of my tax dollars; I'm a huge fan of that.

I tried to find "Wagon Train to the Stars" for the obligatorily accurate portrayal of NASA also, but my google-fu was not so good.

Anyone, who thinks the status quo pre-SpaceX was better than the current situation is the one with their head in the sand.

andy

Poor track record? How so? They haven't popped one on the pad, as all the majors did getting to this point. They built an EELV class launcher for less than ULA charges to keep the manufacturing base available for DeltaIV/Atlas V.

These posts are so three years ago. SpaceX is bi-coastal and in business. All legacy launch companies are done. SLS? Done. It will go to the real commercial world for 3B$ instead of 30+. Lockmart and Boring cannot compete in any non rigged contest (CPFF what?). No more white collar welfare in the launch business.

Oh, and birds don't have to be 1/4B$ if launch costs drop by an order of magnitude. You don't have to be that careful. You can afford to lose a few. And, you can afford to use technologies developed this century as a bonus. "Flight Proven" == 1960's tech.

And we might get humans living off this rock this century, as a bonus. Or we can keep paying the tards to keep tarding.

andy

I agree. I am far more likely to be harmed by my own government at this point than any other. I fear my own government more than any other. We need to address the factions in our government and make it for the people again.

andy

My take on the solution, feel free to critique it. Its my current plan.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4056347&cid=44485435