Well, your buying power would be crippled.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

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.

The question isn't 'are they number 1' or 'are they number 2' but 'did they sell enough hardware and software, or otherwise benefit from having the brand, to make it worth their while?'

After all, you mention the Wii, but a lot of people who bought a Wii never bought a game past Wii Sports. Many people bought PS3s to be Blu-Ray players, just like many people bought a PS2 to be a DVD player.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.