But what happens if they build a reusable booster that can lift this sort of weight? If Spacex could lift 200mT to LEO for costs that are comparable to today's heavy launches, would new uses arise?
There is not so much demand for milli-tablespoon launches.
A geologist on the surface of Mars would be far more scientifically productive than 100 probes.
This is repeated often, but is there any evidence to support this? And if you could put 100 probes on Mars for the price of a single geologist, what then?
It seems like an easily testable hypothesis. We can test it right here on earth! Just build some probes which are limited to Mars-like performance, drop them in one of our more Mars-like environments, and monitor them remotely through a comm delay to make communications Mars-like. We can reasonably deploy several geologists around the site for comparison.
There's still a data chute on the side of my house that leads down to the data-fired server.
And there's a chute on the back side of my ass that leads to analogies about data being coal.
You do realise that in most cases this would require them to kill themselves. Most warmists talk a good fight, but if you asked them to give up their cars, air travel or air conditioning, they'd refuse.
That describes many of them, sure. But we don't actually have to give up any of those things, just improve them all. Well, maybe cars. Cars are just stupid. Also, you don't get to complain when people do the things they need to do to be a member of our dysfunctional society as long as they're at least asking for change, and perhaps voting for it as well. Our society is built around the car. I want that to change, but I'm still going to drive places I can't reasonably get to any other way.
Nothing says you have to dump that CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 has various uses in industry, or can give a slight growth boost to greenhouses.
In fact, you could use the CO2 from making cement to make cement.
No, what GM needs to do is license their technology from the Volt to other automakers. The biggest problem with the Volt is that it's made by GM, the same company that made defective ignition switches for years and intentionally hid this and murdered people so they wouldn't have to pay for a recall.
While that is a particularly blatant example, the truth is that all automakers kill people all the time by making cost decisions. All cars could be safer, without exception. They would have to make other compromises which would in turn compromise retail value, so they don't do that. You only have to decide how much killin' is acceptable, much like how all government which does anything for the people is socialist, and you only get to argue over how much socialism is acceptable.
And then, recycling... which provides access to high-value raw materials much less expensively than mining.
Yes, but only a small amount. What is needed now is batteries with recyclable electrolyte chemistry. That stuff is just thrown away (presumably incinerated?) We recycle the electrolyte from wet cell lead-acid batteries, but that's easy.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
Take the plastic bag challenge and find out real quick whether CO2 is a pollutant. You don't even have to kill yourself, although I do suggest keeping the bag on until you panic for maximum effect.
The author concludes that our best hope to fix this trend is a return of high gasoline prices.
IMO, that's ONE way it might change, but pretty much the WORST option.
Personally, I'd rather see more people opt for electric cars or public transit because improvements were made in those areas, making them more desirable!
The problem is that people don't buy fuel-efficient vehicles while fuel costs are low. They make purely economic decisions, because someone else will pay the cost of their externalities.
The best approach is to build the costs of the externalities into the fuel prices, and actually spend the money improving things. The best way to do that is to make the producers of a product responsible for cleaning up the results. EU laws along these lines have succeeded somewhat brilliantly at reducing landfill waste; manufacturers are now designing products to be easier to recycle as a means of reducing their costs. So, here's what you do rather than using regressive taxes to solve this problem: Make the oil companies responsible for fixing the carbon released when fuel is burned. This is trivially calculated, or at least estimated. The costs of fixing the CO2 will then wind up baked into the fuel prices, and the problem actually gets solved so long as we actually hold them to their obligation. Yeah, I know, that's the part that rubs. But fuel taxes going into the general fund don't actually address the real problem now. They try to change behavior for the future, but don't do anything to address the results of ongoing bad behavior. We need to do both.
I used to take the commuter train, but the combination of increased prices for it and reliability issues forced me to go back to driving. There are just too many times the train is really late due to freight train traffic that gets priority on the rails they use, or mechanical breakdowns.
It's sad, because these things can be done much better.
And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?
They are selfish, spoiled children who want their conveyance to continually shout "LOOKATMELOOKATMELOOKATME". The first thing the stereotypical Harley owner does is straight pipe his 1930s technology boat anchor and reduce the torque to the point that you can out-accelerate them in with a total ramp turd of a cage. Only spectacularly old riders don't do that, probably because it makes their tinnitus act up.
They should make up their minds. If the warming trend is natural and not at all bad for us, why not draw the graph realistically? What compels them to sugar-coat their own sad "me too" rebuttal?
Why does this remind me of GMO labeling? Deniers decry the "hockey stick" because they claim it is "alarmist". And the processed food industry is against GMO labeling for the same reason... it will scare people!
So im coming to the conclusion that us 'power users' that until now always wanted pro should now be looking for the enterprise edition.
You're not a 'power user' if you're looking for ways to buy yourself out of abuse. You're Microsoft's bitch. Better have daddy's money on time. And get ready to get slapped around anyway, because that's how daddy keeps his bitches in line.
Trump certainly has assets that could be liberally valued at over a billion dollars.
Does he? Does he really own them? Or does he just have some sort of contractual control that can disappear with a lawsuit, and the stroke of a pen?
What happens when government itself is poisoning your water?
That's a sign of insufficient citizen involvement, not a sign of too-large government. Larger governments than Flint's have managed not to pollute their water.
I'm guessing you took all of Watts' claims as gospel and never realised it's based on only a single ice core (and thus says nothing at all about global temperatures).
What causes you to imagine that a single ice core tells us nothing at all about global temperatures?
Memory fault -- brain fried
