How could companies justify plowing money into oil wells, semiconductor plants, toy factories, apple orchards, etc. if they don't have assurances in place that the cash will be recouped? Yet people invest in those things everyday. What makes launch services any different?

Because all of those things were able to start small, relatively speaking, where only a handful of people were necessary to get the initial ball rolling. Even semiconductors; We looked at a house for its detached garage and the previous owner apparently had a small semiconductor fab set up in there at one point.

By contrast there's no real option for someone without already established financial means to launch things into space.

No one should be left out because there should be no contract. Instead, NASA should be fostering a spot market for launches. They should have a separate bid for each launch: "We want X satellite in Y orbit, and insured for Z dollars." Then give the launch to the lowest bidder. That way each company can work continuously to cut costs and improve services, knowing that if they leapfrog the competition, they can win the next launch, instead of being locked out for years.

This won't happen either; it's very expensive to develop the tech to do the launches, let alone to build production. No one will take the risk to develop unless they have so much guaranteed production as to amortize the cost of development over those units.

This isn't like the beginning of civil aviation or even how companies that want to design planes get into civil aviation now, building small planes until their success with small planes gets them the revenue stream to let them build bigger ones, etc, this would be like coming into the market and jumping straight to long-range widebodies. To my knowledge, the only companies that have even come close to that have all been government-sponsored.

The only way that you're going to get someone to pay for the development costs themselves is to give them enough production to justify those development costs, and the only way to do that is to guarantee them so many launches. It applies to both SpaceX and to Boeing.

I've never found a low-flow shower head that I liked, always had to spend an inordinate amount of time bathing if the flow was too low in order to get the shampoo and soap off, negating the savings. Being tall I've always had one of those "S" pipes with my own shower head to replace the downspout pipe, when I was a renter I'd install that and save the landlord's shower head to put back on when moving back out again.

Many low-flow water fixtures use a little plastic washer bushing thing inside that can be removed in a couple of minutes.

Burning Man has always had a geek component to it. There's the, "build the man" part, there are the art projects that are one part art, one part creative tech, there are the logistics parts of how to pull-off holding this event in this location.

A buddy of mine that's a huge geek has gone more than once; I've been tempted by my suburn-in-fifteen-minutes skin probably wouldn't serve me well.

Citations please?

I ask because the only person that I'm acquainted with that was raped in a festival-type setting had it happen somewhere down in Mexico on Spring Break during the late nineties when the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon was taking off, and she admitted that she was so drunk that she couldn't put up much of a fight.

“Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.”

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

...I had to buy a bigger house for all of them you insensitive clod!


I still have my Hotwheels cars, Legos, Construx, Heroclix, RC cars, and some Star Trek toys from childhood, as well as hobbies that I picked up since adolescence, like model rockets, computers, musical instruments, auto restoration, machinery restoration, and woodworking. Ended up buying a place with a detached workshop.

Then why do they have a cable TV subscription with a bigscreen TV, a smartphone with a data plan, and stop at fast-food and spend $10/day between breakfast and lunch?

For fluorescent you'd actually step-up the voltage, not down. The amperage is much lower though, so you've got that going for you, which is nice.

If you want to go LED most efficiently then you need to go DC, but DC doesn't work well over distances, which is why AC was adopted as the grid in the first place.

Toilet flushing at my house happens generally between four to eight times a day. The amount of water that we spend on the landscaping dramatically exceeds that. The amount of money I'd spend on new commodes would probably exceed a decades' water savings, and the current commodes use very inexpensive, easy to source parts for what little repair they need, which to date has been a new chain and a new flapper valve. These toilets were manufactured in the late seventies and will probably continue to work for another 30+ years.

And that's not even accounting for the one in the basement, that deposits into a sewage lift pump, which needs a certain amount of liquid before it pumps the blackwater from the basement out to the municipal sewer. I'd have to flush a toilet two or three times to engage the lift pump, which wouldn't save anything.

You know, a lot of people say that, but I haven't ever seen actual evidence of that being the case. I'm not saying that it's false, but I want to see some actual data showing the same cars coming back to independent dealers time and again.

I am aware of that, ST:II is probably my favorite Star Trek movie. I also maintain that many things that make literature good translate very poorly on-screen, and sometimes vice-versa. I don't think that most Stephen King works turned into movies or TV shows are terribly good; taking what required imagination and was a lot of description or inner-conflict thoughts of characters and modifying that to make it screen-capable doesn't work too well.

On the other hand, we're not going to call the character struggles experienced by the crew of the Enterprise when fighting against Khan to be something world-shaking; it was a battle of wills, man-against-man. The Genesis Device was a Macguffin designed to further the plot, similar to how the alien-baddie in The Fifth Element was there to drive plot. It served to be thwarted, not to be used or controlled or to make influence. Even in Star Wars, the Death Star is a Macguffin. It's a thing that has to be stopped, and the point of the movie is to watch the characters as they fight to stop it or to use it.

a) Their constitution is based on ours. b) It's not really standard surveying work when it is targeting a specific area to collect money from tax evaders with drones and it is most certainly invasive if they are comparing it against people's tax documents.

It falls into rules governing being in plain sight. In the United States, cities and counties use Google Maps and other aerial surveillance to look for nonpermitted structures and other construction that hasn't properly been paid for. If I were to put up an awning or accessory structure over a certain size I could be hit with penalties from both a lack of permit and a lack of reporting the improvement for property-tax purposes. That's perfectly legal for them to do.

Not exercising credit is what makes your score go down. A credit card with a sufficient limit, a mortgage, or a home-equity line of credit can all help to maintain a credit score. It doesn't have to be a car payment.

That said, we'll probably finance future cars once the mortgage is paid off, even if we have the cash, because the cost to borrow and maintain liquidity is so small when one has good credit that there's really no reason not to.

Admittedly that's coming from a different perspective, having climbed out of the debt-cycle through personal austerity while still earning a decent income.

A friend of mine was stupid enough to take over payments on his parents' Audi A8. My rent for my two bedroom, two bath apartment close to a major university in a good part of town with ready access to entertainment cost less that that car cost him.