Honestly, few people on this site are as hilarious as you are. Your main competitors are rsilvergun and drinkypoo.

Obviously. You couldn't be bothered to research the hint I left behind. Or perhaps you missed the hint entirely. Oh well.

I didn't say they don't.

No they don't. It certainly helps to reduce it, but only an UnknowingFool would think a flipped bit or two is necessarily either catastrophic or flight ending/endangering. Even somebody with a basic computer science understanding would understand why that may not be the case.

I didn't say that. What I am saying is there's a faster way to iterate, and even though it has been conclusively proven to work, the ESA still sticks to the old ways.

Actually the private sector has a lot less tolerance for this. Unlike the government, they can't just issue bonds for it and go infinitely into debt.

A few things to unpack here:
- Hubble (not ESA) certainly could, and was, so preceding that with "ESA/NASA projects like" followed by exactly one satellite is just something an UnknowingFool would say.
- James Webb (also not ESA) is rather unique because of its location, not because it's inherently unserviceable. What's more is there's no reason this couldn't change at some point. We may even be able to refuel it to extend its service life. For now, the only real limit is one of feasibility.
- NASA lets ESA have some time for JWST because it allowed them to provide the launch services, even though the ESA introduced three very long delays because of repeated launch engineering faults on their part. By the time it was ready, NASA had alternative launch services available, but it was too late to switch because it was already engineered specifically within the constraints of Ariane.

Even if that were true, it's still an incredibly low defect rate considering the overall size of the constellation. But it's pointless to entertain this because it's not true. To date there have been no more than 350 failed starlink satellites. Given the time Starlink has been around, that is far removed from even one per day. And we don't even know the cause of most of them, which could very well be from debris strikes or natural phenomenon (e.g. solar weather that once took out nearly an entire batch of new satellites, or micrometeor strikes.)

I'd tell you to do some basic research, but that username kind of precludes the possibility of you at least retaining any of that knowledge after you did.

I think you're one of few people on slashdot who's username accurately describes them IRL.

I see you're unfamiliar with the initial failures that Hubble dealt with, because it wasn't operational at the time that it first reached its intended orbital parameters, and required manual servicing just to get it operational. Or the micrometeor strike that slightly degraded JWST. Though JWST is huge compared to starlink birds. And as you said, there's only one of each.

I've noticed how you tend to do that.

Because the only thing that ever goes to space are telescopes. And they get there entirely by themselves. I also believe you don't understand the entire purpose of Ariane, or why it won't actually fulfill that purpose. But do go on.

They did. They tried to play the race/identity card multiple times. And it backfired.

Uh...what? Where are these numbers coming from?

We already do, by the billions. Whether you're aware of it is notwithstanding.

Controlled how? Money doesn't and indeed cannot control it. This has been proven time and time again. We've seen many, many elections where the side that had the largest campaign warchest lost handily. In the case of 2016, it was 11:1 in Hillary's favor. See also Scott Morse, who was literally directly opposed to exactly what his constituency was asking for, outspent the competition handily, had incredible amounts of PAC spending in his favor, and lost handily. Below, I'm going to say "you" and "you guys" because I don't have any political affiliation:

You guys flat out refuse to accept why your guy lost, or at least, that it might, just might be based on the loser's campaign being completely tone-deaf to an issue that's been eating away at its core base, (which I'm not part of, by the way, given I've been doing quite well for myself) if not flat out ignoring and/or telling it its core base to just shut up and deal with it, complete with the most ridiculous advertisements that makes them want to hate the campaign even more than they already did. You can't accept that you just might be wrong on a lot of shit, so instead you want to place the blame somewhere else. Not only does that do you no favors, you guys are hell-bent on breaking the constitution when it's not only totally unnecessary, but it will bite you even harder in the long run than this ever could have.

While you're doing your populist "rah rah rabble rabble" shit against billionaires like morons, some people have done the right thing, and have been trying to figure this one out by actually talking to the base rather than ignoring it (or telling it to shut up, they don't matter, etc) and gathering data. They eventually discovered something, which big shock, has nothing to do with Elon, and nothing to do with billionaires. Instead it has everything to do with what the Harris campaign got totally wrong, which was already following the existing rhetoric of the democratic party at the time:

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx...

Note this bit:

Emphasis mine. In other words: Science. That's also to say nothing of this: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/fiv...

If you don't understand why something like these come off as condescending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Then you really have no idea why your guy lost. These may as well have been Trump ads. Data wins over ideology any day. You can deny it all you want, but that doesn't win elections.

It was a question, followed by a statement borrowing context from another thread, which I erroneously thought this thread followed from, namely the one where a bunch of people were having a populist "rah rah rabble rabble" about how nobody should be allowed to have a net worth of $100M. So yeah, I'll admit that mistake.

What makes less sense is the way progressives want to tax people based on purely speculative value as if it were dollar bills.

Except it's not money, you just think it is because you don't know (or more likely don't understand/comprehend) what the difference is.

I've been offered exactly this for my shares, and yes, the terms aren't as good as progressives usually think. The motivation behind it primarily is to give you liquidity for everyday expenses without having to sell your shares, which also means you get to keep any gains on them, which tends to benefit you a lot more in the long run, but is not even remotely guaranteed.

You only get somewhere around a fifth or a quarter of the current price of the stock, and if the stock falls in value so much, you'll get socked with a margin call. If you can't pay it, the bank then sells your shares, which violates your equity agreement with the company, which will probably make you ineligible for more shares from your existing grants, and assuming you're eligible for more share grants, your future grants will be lower, meaning you also lose future income.

It's a calculated risk, not a tax dodge or a handout. If you treat it as those, you'll probably be disappointed. In a few posts above, rsilvergun was complaining about how this isn't available to him and people like him -- and that's really for his own good. Same reason the SEC won't allow him to buy into private equity, even if it was offered to him. The law is designed to protect him. In theory, he could do it eventually, but he'd have to somehow prove that he's not a total moron when it comes to finance. But given he's a moron when it comes to virtually everything...good luck with that.

His lockout is 366 days. For 100% of his shares. Full stop.

The employees and early investors get to begin selling shares in as little as a month from now, with the rest gradually becoming available over time, and all of it by 180 days.

This is how it's done everywhere, including for regular employee shares.

Jumpstarting the electric vehicle industry worldwide where countless others failed before him, is abusing the system?
Building the most successful space entity in the world, making the next frontier more accessible to the masses, is abusing the system?

How you figure?

We call that line of thought, and the ecosystem surrounding it, "old space". It's unnecessary, incredibly expensive, time-consuming, and end result isn't even very good. Unless...are these components being placed directly into space? If so...why on earth...erm...in space...would you do such a thing? COTS components can work fine. And no, I don't mean putting big lead blocks into space or anything silly like that. The internet has much to say about the way Falcon does it.

The ESA spends years, often over a decade, overengineering and certifying components. By the time they're ready for production, the private sector is already a generation or two ahead. A Starlink satellite can undergo a complete product lifecycle, from design proposal to end of life, in the time it takes the ESA to certify a single component, let alone a complete product. I really don't believe the ESA has the capacity to move past this either because it's bound by politics. What I mean by that is, you're never going to get out of the trap of having to design and build everything across 20 (or whatever it is) different member states, and all the logistical baggage that drags along with it. NASA has a similar constraint.

The private sector only has one real constraint: Whatever is good enough to meet all mission parameters with near 100% degree of certainty.

This is exactly why NASA, ESA, JAXA, and many other government space entities end up contracting with the American private sector rather than rely entirely on their own designs.

Starship is likely pretty close to that, but I'm curious to see your math.

Are trying to tell me the ESA just now figuring this out?

That's because you have drinkypoo for brains, so you make decisions based on what you feel in your intestines and especially their contents, and not based on real-world data. And even if you have it, you ignore it. As in most things with a large population, Pareto applies: Roughly 80% of users only use 20% of features. Good enough would be starting with that 20%, and expanding based on user request/demand during UAT, to reach the other 10% needed by 95% of users, and after that, incrementally expanding based on user demand during the normal SDLC, which may include adding features that users want but aren't part of the existing specification that you're still chasing.

Sure, you might upset 1% of users when you stop at 40% of features, but the cost to reach them just isn't worth it when 99% of the users are either mostly or perfectly satisfied. Likely not even in the long term, but with 100% certainty not in the short term. Rome wasn't built in a day, and Microsoft didn't build the current version of Office all at once. There's a good chance that half of the featureset is just leftovers from shit nobody has used in decades, but Microsoft keeps around for compatibility.

Again, this is going based on what you feel within the contents of your intestines. In the real world, the government does it your way all the time, spends a shitload of money, takes much longer to get a completed result than is necessary, and by the time it's finished, everybody else has already moved on. Thus allowing "perfect" to be the enemy of "good enough", killing both in the process.

In fact, the EU is a perfect case study on this with its Ariane 7 project, which is intended (even if they don't say it, the project specifications directly call for it) to be a not quite as good (in terms of mass to orbit capacity) clone of SpaceX's Falcon 9. Their plan, which they're well into executing, is to have it 100% finished by the time they do their first launch. As a result, by the time Falcon 9 was at its 9th year of development, which is where Ariane 7 is now, it had already been flying commercial payloads and earning revenue off of them, while being at a fraction of Ariane 7's expenses. If Ariane 7 was to match Falcon 9 purely in terms of feature set, it would be completed and ready to launch in a few months, albeit at a much higher budget, much higher per-launch cost, and a much slower launch cadence. Instead, they're not going to do that until 2030 at the minimum. By that time, Falcon 9 will already be considered obsolete, and will already have been retired, where SpaceX moves on to its much more powerful, even lower cost, and richer feature set launch system, namely Starship. And the R&D costs and development time of BOTH SYSTEMS COMBINED will still be less than the ESA is putting into Ariane 7, while likely bringing in more revenue over their development lifecycle than Ariane 7 will ever see.

But congratulations to ESA for having built a launch system that nobody wants to use, way late and way overpriced. And remember, the goal of the project was to have launch autonomy. So how are they supposed to accomplish that when none of their intended consumers even want to use it, because a much better product with a much lower cost is available elsewhere? A normal person would look at this and call it a failure, already saw that it was going to fail long before the project was finished, where somebody who operates based on what's in their intestines like you, and is motivated entirely on ideology and feces while disregarding pragmatism and practicality in general, will call it a raging success.

Likewise, by the time they reach feature parity with MS Office, the world will likely have already moved on, when instead they could have had their own differentiated project with an opportunity to address things people don't like about MS Office but Microsoft just kind of ignored while chasing the more flashy things.

But do the people who have drinkypoo for brains run this project, and let the contents of their intestines guide their decision-making? Who knows.

No thanks, I'm not into that. You might try rsilvergun, I heard he's feco-curious.

If you're cash poor, that's generally not a bad idea. On the other hand, it's also not as risk-free or free in general that you think it is. You ought to look at doing it for your own investments, if you have any, so you can see what the loan terms actually look like -- it's not at all what progressives make it out to be. I know because I've been offered this. But I grew up poor, and I've lived all of my life used to being frugal, or at best appearing to be a conspicuous consumer without actually doing so (people think my Tesla is worth a lot more than I actually paid for it, for example). Unlike most people in my shoes, I don't go spend happy the moment I get a windfall and instead reinvest it, so I don't really need this.

First and foremost, poor people do this all the time, probably moreso than any other group.

Regardless I don't even keep track of his personal life, let alone in this much detail, so I'll concede that you very likely know more details about how many of his butt hairs are greasy at any given second than I do. But so far, based on a minute of googling, all I'm seeing are legal battles, all of which were ultimately settled and paid. I don't see any evidence of the "deadbeat" scenario, or any injunctions being ignored or otherwise disobeyed, or any indication of money owed that hasn't been paid. Particularly considering all of them appear to have settled in the tens of millions, making any kind of "deadbeat" scenario highly unlikely.