bumby

Is the fouling functionality more complicated than one would assume? From a naive perspective, it seems like it would just be a simple photo-eye sensor

You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.

As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you think it’s a major issue while still maintaining the free service for smaller users. I personally don’t like the privatization of profits while also maintaining the narrative that companies don’t benefit from public works.

I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.

Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.

As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.

Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project."

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3556/1

Maybe somewhat ironically, I think this is an overly cynical take.

People can acknowledge a difference of values and recognize what they consider a destruction of the commons without their stance being distilled to simply being a hater.

Would you also considering people who bemoan the degradation of Lake Erie by industrialists of the last century as “crab mentality”?

Similarly, people at the time took what may be closer to the opposite stance: “Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

”claiming it was impossible”

Again, what do you mean by “it”? Economic viability? I already stated I agree with that. Technologically viable? I disagree, since the proof of concept was shown decades earlier. We don’t need to to keep going around and around this point.

That’s kinda the point.

40 years ago it was questionable whether it was technically possible. It was “JWST-stuff”. The forerunners of ULA showed it was feasible.

20 years ago it was questionable whether it was economically viable. SpaceX changed that.

Your previous statement was too vague to make the distinction and implied Spacex did both, while ignoring the contributions of the previous group.

Not in scientific edge domains. Eg: quantum computing is shown to be scientifically feasible right now, but nowhere close to having economic viability in a business sense. Same with fusion etc etc

Economic viability is not the same goal. One is a business goal, one is a scientific/technological one. The goal from the DC-X 35+ years ago was the latter. Certainly, we'd expect the economics to improve since then.

The technological viability was shown with the proof of concept. If you meant strictly economic viability was unknown, I agree with you. This isn't meant to disparage SpaceX. They're doing great. I would say there is a risk that isn't often talked about which is the quality risk. Early on, SpaceX disregarded well-known quality control checks, presumably because they didn't think they were worth the time/cost. When that burned them, they integrated those checks. Do that enough times, the economic viability erodes.

I think that misremembers or misrepresents history.

The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rapid turn-around/reuse. It never made it to the full orbital regime because it was scrapped early, but it was considered successful in proving the proof-of-concept. It was also managed by the predecessors of ULA (McDonnel Douglas, which later merged with Boeing).

I think I disagree. I think the administrative overhead makes for additional problems and is certainly imperfect at mitigating the risk.

Risk mitigation (where the risk defined here is emissions outside some acceptable threshold) usually follow this hierarchy from most preferrable to least:

- remove the hazard (make it impossible for emissions to exceed the limit, even by altering the operation)

- install an engineering mitigation (filters, def, altered fuel mapping etc.)

- administrative mitigation (training, inspections)

- protective equipment (?? make everyone in society wear a mask?)

In this framework, a technological solution is preferrable to an administrative one.

I know people used to look for retired police cruisers back in the day because they thought they were “detuned” but I’m pretty sure that was a resale marketing myth.

If you want people not to have out of spec tractors that is a regulation and oversight issue, not an issue of locking down tech.

It can be either, but be careful of the knock on effects. If you want to manage it via administrative controls now you may need a bureaucratic mechanism to regularly inspect vehicles. Generally, engineering controls are preferred over administrative controls.

See: The Prisoners Dilemma.

In some collective action problems, if everyone acts in their own individual self interest it results in worse outcomes for everyone. In those cases, it requires some central coordination.

I did talk to a corn/soybean farmer on this recently and they weren’t nearly as concerned as I would have thought. They said they pay JD to maintain their equipment anyway. The equipment is apparently so expensive and sophisticated that people are wrenching on it much themselves (similar to the trend in road vehicles).

What kind of government vehicles are you referring to that are typically modified to legally avoid emission standards? Short of military or emergency vehicles, I’m not aware of This as a practice.

Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary.

Maybe I'm missing your point, but the vendors non-compliance is documented fact in a court of law. Multiple individuals were indicted and the company itself pleaded guilty to multiple felonies (including fraud). Further, as with most collective action problems of this type, relying on individual choice to correct the problem all but ensures it won't be corrected. This is one area where the extreme libertarian mindset (which seems to be overrepresented on HN) tends to miss its mark.

I think your general point is reasonable, but far too centered on emissions. There are other reasons to limit modifications beyond just emissions. As an example, most turbocharged vehicles are de-tuned to a much lower psi of boost. The can run at much higher HP but also reduce emissions (depending on what type of emissions you're concerned with. Sometimes decreasing one type corresponds to an increase in another). They often force consumers to a lower psi rating for reliability reasons. So should a user be forced into higher reliability by a manufacturer? That seems like a much less clear answer than being forced into lower emissions.

Competence and conscientiousness are the ideal traits but I think I’d tend to prefer “true believers” over “inauthentic charlatans”.

Irrationality isn’t one of those big five personality traits though, unless you say it overlaps with neuroticism

What terminology would you prefer to describe that real dynamic then? I don’t know that you can hand wave it away when it’s a substantial portion of the real births. I’m not even claiming it’s a problem, just not something that should be superficially dismissed in a good faith discussion.

Perhaps disagreeableness is a necessary trait for these kinds of results. Unfortunately, that can is also an innate personality trait rather than something easily turned on/off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

The best I can tell, 7-9% of US births are to non-US citizen parents. Maybe you could clarify what exactly you mean by “citizen tourism?”

It is certainly difficult to have a productive conversation when someone refuses to engage in discussing their own point.

I’m the one who is trying to bring it back to the original point. I also brought up healthcare and aerospace. There are many examples of government limits on business that go against your thesis of “this has always happened externally and is only now being applied internally”.

I literally said nuclear was an example. You apparently didn’t draw the line to the broader principle.

The strawman I was referring to was the binary option of "threatening to the survival of all living species...or not". Perhaps "false dichotomy" would have been a better description.

The GGP point was that this level of control has been normal when dealing with other nations. The nuclear point was that it has also previously been applied internally, so the original framing of "other nations vs us" is not particularly good.

If your counterpoint is "yeah but that's ok when it's based on existential risk" that doesn't support your first point, it just reorients the framework from "external vs internal" to "risk based". If you change the goalposts to the latter, you are actively undermining your original point. That's a fine point to make, just not coherent with your original one.

I can understand the sentiment, but that’s not how the govt has operated in the past. There are numerous examples of tech transfers to benefit a single company. It’s reasonably common in aerospace and health applications.