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Comment Re:I'd pay 2k or so (Score 1) 191

That stuff left in the 80s and he'd have to build it up from scratch

It's doable, if he gets a couple of Chinese engineers to help. Designing and building factories is an art in itself, one we've largely lost in the West. But in China, they know how to set up an automated factory, producing goods to the right tolerances, and applying automated QA. They do that pretty much every day.

Comment Re:The American Dream (Score 2) 19

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

Comment Re: Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 1) 249

The dollar being the reserve currency of choice is one thing, what really matters is that oil is traded around the world in dollars. That effectively expands the dollar economy by trillions, and is what allows more dollars to be printed without affecting inflation. Once countries stop selling or paying for oil in dollars, that's when the currency will crash and burn for real.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 163

Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

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