jordanb

Manufactured consumer products and food have gotten much more available. Housing, education, and healthcare have gotten less available.

Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.

Did we watch the same video? My takeaway from Manley is that it is something that can pencil out as a physics problem with a very carefully selected orbit

But as an engineering problem it's quite another thing. For example he talks about how far you have to pump the ammonia, and then you either need a very large amount of ammonia, or you have to pump a smaller amount of ammonia very fast through kilometers of plumbing.

Of course there are highly theoretical ideas like making an atmosphere of coolant around the satellite or something but he left that stuff on the sci fi category.

Professional Wall Street analysis is incredibly bullish:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/wall-street-is-bul...

Years ago Chicago started putting concrete pads on the road at bus stops because the busses stopping in the exact same spot repeatedly was carving ruts into the asphalt.

The issue was actually the door plug scandal. It showed that Boeing's QC was compromised in their factory and they were not able to properly certify that the aircraft were being built as designed.

As an aside this a long talked-about problem with the South Carolina factory, that the place does not follow aerospace standards and practices. The door plug failure was the highest profile QC miss out of that factory.

If Nastaq hadn't agreed SpaceX would have listed on the NYSE instead.

"SpaceX stock is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq. To secure such a high-profile listing, While listing requirements remain unchanged, Nasdaq recently amended its index-inclusion rules to accommodate companies like SpaceX when they go public."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2026/04/25/spacex-...

Notice a listing on the board and an inclusion in an index are two different things. Nastaq changed the index to secure the listing of SpaceX on their board.

Having the stock traded on their board is good for them. They also maintain an index. Elon made inclusion in the index a prerequisite for trading the stock on the board.

Well this is not how Nastaq's index worked until Elon twisted their arm. I would assume Nastaq had good reasons for the old rules.

"Get rid of jobs" was a pitch to investors. They needed a new trillion dollar idea. For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere. They looked at the economy and decided the only place it could come from is white collar payroll.

Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."

This is it.

The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.

Plus the monopolies..

Moreover what would a bailout even look like? The banks got loan guarantees from the government essentially.

But like what happens if the government guarantees open ai's loans if the company is structurally unprofitable? Does the government create an operating subsidy?

Steel is used for compressive applications all the time, not only slender column.

Main contaminate in iron ore is oxygen. The refining process is mostly removing stuff yes.

"Steel" is defined as carbon content between .02% and 2%. If the metal has less than that it's wrought iron. If it had more than that it's cast iron.

So steel is a range of carbon contents that gives particularly useful properties.

Historically the lower end of that was higher but with that addition of other alloys we have "low carbon steels" that behave like steel with very little carbon.

And the satellite internet business has been a dog since forever.

Even starlink only makes sense if you ignore the absolutely immense capital investment in it. And they're probably hiding losses in the launch division considering it's losing money despite 80% of its business being launching starlink satellites (they blame starship but that was supposed to be funded by NASA).

Crews on those ships are spending nearly all their time maintaining them.

Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots

where does the rest of the valuation come from?

AI data centers in space, of course!

This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.

Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.

Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.

So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.

Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.

Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.

Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.

Another possibility is that people are afraid to speak up when the threat is termination

"Stroustrup points out that some senior developers are starting to retire because they're tired of constantly validating unpredictable AI code. "

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/bjarne-stroustrup-...

Well most experienced developers I know hate it and agree it's taken all pleasure out of the work. We've spent our careers designing and building high quality software systems. But now we're told our job is to use the plagiarism box to sling slop all the time. Those who can are transitioning out of the field.

This is an industry where American developers have successfully competed on quality with the rest of the world for years. We never were very cheap but we always were the best and worth our premium. Now that's being destroyed by a short-sighted industry.

I'd like to just do something else and work on open source. Except I know if I contribute to open source my work will just be stolen by the plagiarism bot.

I remember working with people like this before AI and it was annoying but they struggled with productivity because they didn't understand what they were working on enough to produce good code efficiently, so the problem usually took care of itself.

Now these people can thrive because LLM coding encourages the incurious and punishes the deep thinker.

They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart.

The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)

Zuck became one of the richest and most powerful people in the world by saying "what if Myspace but we make it elite and exclusive and no custom html"

Been like this since the GFC: the rich have a government funded undo button they can press whoever they need to.

And he can't be fired by shareholders.

An IPO trading under its offer price after less than a month and before most lockups expire is never a good thing. This is especially true for an IPO that only floated 4% of it's stock.

This seems like a good way to encourage ticks to develop a permethrin resistance because the cotton will stay in the rodents nest and gradually be reduced in concentration.

Ive been treating my car, hiking clothing and gear with permethrin and haven't had a tick since doing that. Reapply every time you go to the woods or every two weeks if you're in the woods continuously and keep the concentration up.

If my house was in the woods I would also treat the den/mud room.

If you have a rodent problem then control the rodents: manage habitat, trap/kill them, encourage predators like hawks etc.

One good example: Facebook was ignoring Brazilian law. An employee in brazil was arrested and charged with contempt. He spent a while in jail. Zuck started posting about the guy being a martyr for free expression while the lawyers trying to negotiate the release begged him to keep quiet.

Eventually the guy gets released and is invited to California to meet Zuck. Except by that time Zuck had forgotten all about it and ignored the guy.

our common expectation

I think you're going too far with this. Most people understand scientific theories to be an approximation. F=ma is approximately true, in the sense that it's only accurate within the newtonian regime and each of those terms includes so many asterisks that you will only ever measure it approximately.

The latter is the jokes about the physicists "assuming a perfectly spherical cow."

In fact that's kinda the whole point of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" essay. It is unreasonable that mathematical approximations are so good at describing our world.

This is called "Fuckery:" I tell you a lie. You know it's a lie. I know you know it's a lie. But you have to pretend that you believe it because of the power I have over you.

The Fuckery is a demonstration of that power.