Now we are _better_ than millions of years of humans were before! Oh, wait ...

Indeed. This is essentually the same when rats and other pests start to slowly crawl into a building.

Who says I am talking about their consumer products?

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

fuck off, Biden voter

Ukraine war is a scam. A US installed neo-nazi government was murdering ethnic Russians and Roma. Sure Russia is evil so is the Zelenkski government that continues to hold power without election

Inded. These days they cannot get anything right. Example: Just today Teams screwed me over. I minimally increased the speaker volume and some mechanism panicked apparently at the system-signal for speaker adjustment and then I could not hear the other side anymore. Leving and rejoining (either and both sides) did not help. Audio-settings did not help. Now, there apparently used to be a setting to switch this crap off or reset it, but not anymore. Nothing helped and I had to call the other person on the phone. That is not professional level software. That is a cretin-level tpy. If this was an isolated insicent, sure. But I found this has been a problem for people for several years now. And it fits well with the random and unpredictable and obscure behaviour of all things Microsoft. They have done so much crap now that there is no way they can fix this, ever. And some day the real cost of using their trash will become obvious. And then they will die.

Nobody said MS was "hurting". The claim is that they are a dead man walking and that claim is accurate. They will surely walk for anothe 10 or maybe even 15 years, but their products have gotten so abysmally bad that they have no long-term future.

Intel only ever had their superior manufaturing process, which they had from making memory. As soon as that was gone, it became obvious how bad technologucally theor designs actually were and how far behind the competition. Conceptionally pretty much the same as Boeing, or, since that is the topic, Microsoft. These companies never really could compete, except in a dominant position. Time for them to die. They join plenty of others on the trash-heap of tech hostory. And in most cases, death was well deserved.

so you only hear wallkicking sounds, people like that

Oh come on.

We've been saying "Thanks, Biden!" for years as a joke, and you blue haired legbeards always got riled up with your "source????" and "citation needed???" cries.

(FWIW I don't support Trump and have never voted Republican).

I have no idea whether you are a MAGA, but the quality of your mental processes seems at least often pretty similar. Remember thet Trump is a symptom of a larger problem and not everybody part of that problem likes Trump. Some even see that electing a rapist, convicted felon and serial banktuptee as president may be a bad idea.

True. Does not help the person going to prison much though.

It is really sad to see people not learning from history and making the same dumb mistakes again and again and again. Remember this in a few years. Maybe you will learn something then.

Indeed. And it will be. Probably by losing 10% of its revenue.

But Google has been a habitual liar for a while now.