I just saw a little documentary that had some sales pitch for SpinLaunch, and it clearly said they were testing ideas for satellites at 10,000Gs which they can achieve with a centrifuge that is not even the one they will use to actually launch things. Though I'm not clear on what a g-t is, but it sounds like this is greater.

I think the delay between trains will have to be close to 1 minute, not 15-20. The delay for a self-driving taxi will probably be on the order of seconds, which is why they will wipe out private car ownership.

It is quite possible we are going to have 100% self-driving taxi transportation in the future, but it is interesting the imagine a scheme that might be preferred by a significant number of travelers. The removal of the need to have your car with you for all parts of your trip may open up some possibilities we are not considering. I'm doubtful shared rides at the same speed are going to be preferred over private taxis, but sufficient speed and not needing to use a taxi at one end, may be enough. I think that means larger (but not huge) railed vehicles. If they can succeed without being the maximum possible speed then there may still be a market for larger trains (and planes and spaceships and hyperloops) for larger distances.

Mao used house arrest. Though you were probably lucky if that is what happened.

My feeling is that the "share" part is a problem. There is a big disadvantage in speed and convenience of sharing a taxi over using it exclusively to get between your location and a destination. If a system is able to overcome that disadvantage, it seems like it can just as easily overcome it for larger numbers of "sharers".

Self-driving taxis could concentrate a large crowd to a "shared" location (let's call it a "train station"), without being "shared" themselves, I really don't think people will use a "shared" vehicle without this. It will have to be significantly faster and no more expensive than taking the self-driving taxi all the way. This may be possible even with much shorter distances than the "intercity" that is usually proposed, but unless acceleration is really extreme they are going to be too far apart for the train to be considered an "alternative to driving" though maybe some die-hards will try to use bicycles or scooters.

No it does not sound like they are allowing immigration (of "non skilled" workers) even though a lot of people think it would help: https://www.ispionline.it/en/p....

I think I was getting confused with stories about internal migration, where they are trying to fill the jobs by getting the rural population to move to cities. I guess that is the same thing if you assume the rural and urban areas are different countries.

You mean like the Haitians that Trump complained about have?

You got paid overtime?

Population growth there was way faster under a far *more* oppressive regime, so your explanation is wrong.

They *are* doing that.

The removal of the need to take your car with you will make it physically possible to use a bus for a portion of a trip, so there is some chance it will actually help buses. IMHO that will only happen though if the bus is both faster and cheaper than using the self-driving taxi, and that seems unlikely without isolated lanes for the buses, and probably rails to handle the necessary speed and size and to negotiate narrow tunnels.

Both Paris and London (and I suspect some others) are building extensive ring-layout subway systems for precisely the reason you state. Buses (unless they have isolated bus lanes) won't work because they will be stuck in traffic on the ring roads.

New Glenn may finally launch this month.

Who knows, maybe Bezos and Blue Origin will land the replacement launch contracts for all the non-SpaceX stuff.

(SpaceX already has a lander contract: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in... )

My professor for C made us evaluate code on paper for our midterm and final, and for homework assignments I wrote code with a green terminal and compiled, linked it, and ran it from the command line. This was all pre-search engines. I remember another attitude from the time period, which was "if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand", but I digress...

With that said, many years later I worked under an engineering lead that took the "real programmers only use text editors" attitude to an extreme.

The unfortunate thing was the codebase we worked in was PHP, which at the time would totally allow you to introduce seemingly new variables in the middle of nowhere and not initialize them. Years later, we were still fixing typos in variable names when tracking down subtle bugs that were introduced when the company was just 2 engineers... both of whom refused to work in an IDE.

The JPL projects were highly likely to be launched by SpaceX boosters. You seem to be confused about whose budget is being cut.

I agree the pork project of the other booster, carefully distributed to many states to get support from as many congress as possible, should be cancelled. But JPL has nothing to do with that.

Weren't there a whole host of problems with that contract?

https://www.sacbee.com/news/in...

"The span opened last September after years of concerns about the quality of its welds, foundations, anchor bolts and steel tendons that support its skyway viaduct. Testing, evaluation and repair of some of those items continue as traffic flows over the structure that connects Oakland to Yerba Buena Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Chinese weld defects

Jim Merrill, formerly a top manager with MacTec Engineering and Consulting Inc., oversaw Bay Bridge quality control work in China from 2006 through 2008 and was a key source for the report. In 2008 he warned Caltrans officials that parts produced by Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. contained âoehundreds of cracks,â prohibited by the contract and by welding codes.

The work took place on Changxing Island near Shanghai, where most of the steel for the suspension span tower and roadway was assembled. "

https://www.sacbee.com/news/in...

"As concerns about workmanship mounted, the ZPMC began to resist even standard quality assurance. According to a nonconformance report at the time, Caltrans employees came to the jobsite to test a box girder for possible cracks on heavily corroded welds. A ZPMC supervisor obstructed efforts to take photos, wiped away key markings from the test area and shouted âoeno UT,â a reference to ultrasonic testing. The inspectors withdrew. Caltrans later agreed to conduct its quality checks on a schedule agreed to by ZPMC."