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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Speed, boats need to be outside the area where they might get hit, which is actually quite large.

    Boats, even fast ones, are quite slow. And the larger boats that the fast ones would be deployed from are even slower. So even though that risk area gets smaller as the capsule descends, the big boats are waaaayy slower and still stuck far away. Generally, too far for ‘fast’ boats to get there quickly enough.

    Helicopters are much faster, also relative to the size to be able to have medical staff on hand. So they can get there fast enough.

    There is significant possibility of injury, and often times there are communication blackouts when they would already need to be leaving to make it in time. So, you send the fast thing.




  • Agree completely!

    And yeah, VCs doing VC things has really made it a tough industry to be in lately 😭 I miss the early days of new space when we were just a bunch of nerds trying to make the space industry more effective at making the world a better place.

    Edit: don’t get me wrong, a lot of VCs are great, and have done wonders for the industry. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a few of them. However, the explosion of a new industry has attracted a bunch who just see a market for a market’s sake.


  • Firstly, people have such a massive misconception about the cost of space exploration. It is such a miniscule part of our overall expenditure it is a drop in the ocean. (It’s important now to distinguish between overall Space budgets and the exploration budgets since we spend a lot of money in space that’s not for scientific development nowadays).

    The Artemis program for example was 93 billion over 13 years, ~7 billion per year (2012-2025).

    The Iraq war cost ~5 trillion over 8 years. Or 625 billion per year.

    The entire Artemis program could have been funded by winding down the Iraq war a couple of months earlier.

    The annual cost of the NHS is 275 billion per year.

    The extra knowledge, research and development in everything from materials, human biology, life support systems, to just engineering management improvements yield absolutely massive benefits to life on earth, greatly outweighing the alternative.

    Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits. Hell, even just making people excited about science and technology instead of so distrustful of it is so so important and intangible.

    Even if you extend the budgets to the entire space industry, it’s still a drop in the ocean, and most of the space industry budgets go directly to economic or defence benefits. Supply chain resilience, climate change policing, communications services, wildfire detection, industrial efficiency gains (e.g. data driven farming). As well as existential threats from space like solar storms and asteroids (although that’s an admittedly tiny portion of funding).

    This is coming from a space engineer and senior manager who has mostly fallen out of love with the industry because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus. But it’s still one of the best bang for buck industries that exists.






  • I think that where we are today, it’s more important than ever to really recognise that there is absolutely no “evilest” person. And moreso, almost all of them genuinely believed they were being a force for good.

    The main reason for there being no “evilest is because there are not just tens, or hundreds, but thousands of people who have committed horrific atrocities which even as individual acts would be in contention for the evilest.

    Just within the Holocaust, you have so many individuals perpetrating such evil. The croatian fascist groups always stick out in my memory for the raw personal brutality.

    However, there are so many comparable situations throughout history that we know very little about. Sacking of cities, mass rapes, Jeffrey fucking epstein, what’s been happening in Sudan, what happened in Ethiopia a few years ago, the Holocaust, the Mongols, the ottomans, the British empire, south American dictators, the Japanese empire, the russian empire, the soviet union, al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, the IRA, the Vikings, and on, and on, and on.

    Yes, arguments can be made about how much more evil things are when they are organised etc. However, in my mind, organisation is just a tool that we have improved. We need to be hyper vigilant that anyone, at any time can end up being so radicalised that they are willing to perpetrate evil. Including ourselves. We are not really different from these evil humans.