Actually in Spain Social Security is 30 to 40% of what you earn. From the remainder 60% it is up to 50% in IRPF taxes, so you could pay 70% of what you earn.
The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.
Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.
Oh don't get me started on the taxes. Just the solidarity tax they added from the younger generation to the pensioners makes my blood boil. How about cutting the top pensions and returning some of the money to the bottom of pile instead. The tax regime is also destroying small independent businesses.
But we have at least the option of additional private coverage and it is not crazy expensive like in the US.
The great thing about C is that is was not designed by a committee at all. It was designed by a person with strong opinions. This means it is really great for what it does well(what the author was interested in).
To illustrate the difference look at C++, it was designed by a person with strong opinions, but then left it to be controlled by a committee.
If you look at the structure of C++ in Backus Naur form it is absolutely nuts. The compile times have gone through the roof and people leave to create new languages like jai, Zig or whatever.
Common Lisp was designed by committee. It is as chaotic as C++.
Rust is also gigantic. I am very careful not to use in critical systems because it is so big unless we could restrict it with the compiler or something.
> To illustrate the difference look at C++, it was designed by a person with strong opinions, but then left it to be controlled by a committee.
This comparison confuses me because C is... also controlled by a committee? The evolution of the C standard is under the control of ISO WG14 [0], much like how the C++ standard is under the control of ISO WG21 [1]. This was true for even the first versions of each language that was standardized.
For what it’s worth rust was also designed by a person with strong opinions. It’s devolved to an organization but that’s inevitable in terms of long term sustainability.
You can always use no-std if you so choose where the language is about the size of C (but still has better utility) although if you’re complaining about the size of the language, c++ is drastically worse in my opinion. Rust starting to work its way into the Linux kernel should be a signal that the language is better suited for paring down than c++
I don't want to fight against decades of State propaganda and indoctrination, but do you realise that by "men" they were not referring to black slaves or Mexicans in Texas or California or native Americans(the best Indian in the dead Indian).
I like them, for whatever reason icons are a good thing for me.
I believe different people literally see the world different and there should be an option to remove icons if they prefer this way. It used to be this option at least in some programs.
But of course this person doesn't like it, and it wants everyone to follow his taste.
It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.
The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.
E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.
You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.
The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.
Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.
The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.
Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”.
This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.
It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.
Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.
I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.
Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.
I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.
Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.
Even diffusion into air is too slow for some use cases. The whole complaint of datacentres "consuming" water is due to heating it and dumping it back or evaporating it for cooling. This is done because mass air cooling is much less efficient and requires lots of energy to run the fans to force the air through the heat exchangers, which is also extremely loud. And that is, in turn, much more effective than passive radiation, even if you have a ~3K background.
The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.
So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.
The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
The comment you were replying to mentioned this. Yes you cant remove heat via convection, but you can use radiators to emit heat as radiation into space.
Depending on how hot/dense/clocked you run your compute, the Radiators take _less_ surface area than the solar panels, so you can have them back to back and the radiators will take less space.
Obviously there are some unanswered questions but there is clearly a path forward.
The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.
I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.
To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.
> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).
Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.
Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).
When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.
So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.
You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
This is a great way to spy on all your company data and give it freely to three letter agencies.
Marxist politicians in companies like France or Spain will demand access to it just like with private messengers for fighting tax fraud, child abuse or whatever pretext they can manufacture to get access to this succulent information they can privately manipulate for making themselves rich, destroying the opposition...
Power concentration is very dangerous. Absolute power corrupts.
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion.
Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist:
And? We still have yet to see whether full re-usability of the second stage is the best approach. The Neutron approach is really interesting, they can make the second stage incredibly light and cheap. Blue Origin claims the economics of a super-cheap disposable second stage, even for as one as large as theirs, is pretty much equal to a more expensive and heavier reusable second stage. (they're developing both in parallel to see where the chips land).
So, the company gets things done but the CEO is unpopular with certain crowds. Seems better than Boeing, which is bad at getting things done. At least their CEO is inoffensive, and that’s what is important?
There is gonna be a time when shit hits the fan in United States. Youll know when that is. And you should know that Musk played a large part in making that happen.
They haven't gotten anything done in regards to HLS. They can build their HLS and even launch it into orbit next year but then what?
HLS requires on-orbit refueling. Anything from 10 to 20 refueling launches will be required. Did you think it required one refueling launch? The SH+SS stack will never be reusable or reliable enough to accomplish the refueling operation in time and on budget.
This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads and probably 20 complete stacks to even be feasible, because reuse will not help one iota.
Their upper stage reuse will never pan out. Sure they will catch a few, then they will remove the engines and stick the rest in a shredder for scraps to be melted down and recycled.
Elon's HLS is completely detached from reality. I won't even call it a SpaceX system because it's unlikely anyone but Elon came up with it.
While I agree with anyone saying that Musk himself is "detached from reality", and also that the Superheavy/Starship timelines are unrealistically optimistic, given how bad basically everyone else in this sector is I have no specific reason to expect that Superheavy/Starship* will be what delays anything.
Not that this actually helps with any thesis of "Yee Haw, look at Us! We're America! We're number one!"
* And now I'm worrying the initials might have been deliberate on his part; hadn't even considered that before seeing your comment…
> HLS requires on-orbit refueling. Anything from 10 to 20 refueling launches will be required. Did you think it required one refueling launch? The SH+SS stack will never be reusable or reliable enough to accomplish the refueling operation in time and on budget.
>This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads
The refueling ships are to be launched weeks/months in advance, one at a time. If you look at the rate of Falcon launches this is nothing out of the ordinary.
I mean.. Werner von Braun wasn't just "sort of a Nazi if you squint real hard", but an ACTUAL Nazi. At some point you need to focus on getting the job done, and not on purity tests and struggle sessions. THAT is why the US once got to the moon, while China starved 40 million of its own people, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Everyone keeps saying Musk is just handwaving and not an engineer. Why can't we make the same argument about von Braun? The proof is always handwaving, so I don't see how it's different.
I don't need to go watch it. Every single time this comes up, its really easy to see that he has no idea what he is talking about, or at best, he just echoing what he has been told.
Every single time this exact thing happens, its the same story. Musk fans/conservatives get proven wrong, get quiet for a bit, and then act like nothing happened and repeat the same bullshit again.
The reason why that happens is because you don't actually listen to what he has to say. If you truly believed what he said was accurate, you would be able to repeat it, and explain why its accurate in your own words, without referencing anything he said. Instead, you are just simply an ideological fan of his, so no matter how many times he gets proven wrong, its not going to change your mind about him.
Overall in general, he and all the other conservatives have done enough damage to their credibility with straight up lies that are so easily verifiable to such an extent that, its totally fine to just discredit anything the say right off the bat. The onus is on them to provide extraordinary evidence if they wanna convince people otherwise.
> Instead, you are just simply an ideological fan of his, so no matter how many times he gets proven wrong, its not going to change your mind about him.
That's just you repeating confirmation bias again. I am not an ideological fan of Musk. You just assumed so because I said that Musk was correct or competent in some areas.
If I said Hitler was a vegetarian (true btw) and that this is a moral act (also true), does this make me a Nazi? Of course not.
Musk is consistently wrong about so many conspiracy theories it would be laughable if not for the influence he yields.
HOWEVER, we must also be able to accept that sometimes he's actually competent at something. Those are two different things and can both be true.
> Overall in general, he and all the other conservatives have done enough damage to their credibility with straight up lies that are so easily verifiable to such an extent that, its totally fine to just discredit anything the say right off the bat.
See, the issue here is that this logic can also be easily applied to US liberals. You just can't listen to the biggest idiots of a given group and judge the entire group by it, and certainly not ALL behavior of ALL the members of said group.
Because liberals threatened white people that had dreadlock with violence, does this mean I should stop listening to all liberals when they say the sky is blue? See how this logic is crazy?
To make it clear: I am liberal. Not US liberal (I'm Swedish), but I believe in gay rights and the right of abortion for example. I also believe SpaceX is partially great because Musk has done an amazing job. I furthermore believe Musk has done horrible damage by spreading misinformation.
No, the US got to the moon because it cared about engineering and science more than ideology (although MacCarthyr made a good attempt at screwing that up).
Stainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
> but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
> But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I've worked directly with both SpaceX and Tesla; this is patently false. Tesla's worse than SpaceX but both are terrible at removing stupid and obsolete requirements.
> I'm no engineer, so I don't know.
I am an engineer. Starship's "durability" is neither particularly technically impressive, nor evidence that stainless steel was a good, nonetheless optimal, material choice.
Partially it was that stainless steel was cheaper. A bigger issue was that making large carbon fiber structures takes much larger than with steel and so it would really have eaten into their iteration time. But also while the strength to weight savings from carbon fiber are a big deal at regular temperatures the heating from Starship reentry erased that.
And they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out.
The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.
> [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices.
Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.
I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
Well in the drawing analogy, they picked stainless steel while they were still trying to draw a sparrow.
Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.
Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.
Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.
Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.
Your comment mixes a few kernels of truth with incorrect premises, false information and wild speculation.
>> Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling.
Not really, no. When SpaceX switched to stainless steel in 2019, Musk simultaneously described using ceramic hex tiles on the windward side. They showed hex-tile testing publicly in March 2019. Tiles were not an afterthought added later because transpiration "failed". Musk did initially discuss transpiration/regenerative cooling concepts for hot spots (stuff like a double wall, or fluid-cooled steel skin) but this was framed as in addition to tiles, not as a full replacement.
>> Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense.
It is not. In 2019, carbon fiber was $135/kg with 35% scrap (so effective cost was $200/kg) vs. $3/kg for stainless steel. That's a two orders of magnitude difference in raw materials.
300-series stainless (301/304L) is widely used precisely because it is formable (301 work-hardens to high strength) and readily weldable (304L). That doesn't make it effortless but it's still much easier to work with than aerospace aluminum-lithium, which requires specialized friction-stir welding and tight process control.
>> The increased weight required them to reduce safety features
This is just conjecture. There's no evidence that Starship has reduced safety features to compensate for stainless steel + heat shield weight.
> ot really, no. When SpaceX switched to stainless steel in 2019, Musk simultaneously described using ceramic hex tiles on the windward side. They showed hex-tile testing publicly in March 2019. Tiles were not an afterthought added later because transpiration "failed". Musk did initially discuss transpiration/regenerative cooling concepts for hot spots (stuff like a double wall, or fluid-cooled steel skin) but this was framed as in addition to tiles, not as a full replacement.
Starship was switched to stainless steel in 2018. It was originally supposed to have an all-metallic heat shield. Ceramic heat shields for critical areas were added months later in march 2019, only in July of 2019 did the windward ceramic heat shield get added, which was after the starhopper prototype had flown and several more prototypes were already being built, and transpiration was still in active development at the time. Transpiration cooling was not dropped until 2020. The heat shield has been steadily growing since then, with the addition of more tiles to cover a larger area and an ablative underlayment to provide more protection to the underlying steel.
> It is not. In 2019, carbon fiber was $135/kg with 35% scrap (so effective cost was $200/kg) vs. $3/kg for stainless steel. That's a two orders of magnitude difference in raw materials.
And what did aluminum cost at the time? Yes stainless is cheap compared to the most expensive alternative, that does not make it cheap.
> 300-series stainless (301/304L) is widely used precisely because it is formable (301 work-hardens to high strength) and readily weldable (304L).
Work hardening is bad for formability.
> it's still much easier to work with than aerospace aluminum-lithium, which requires specialized friction-stir welding and tight process control.
Lithium aluminum is an exotic aluminum alloy. You would use an alloy like 7005 which is weldable.
> There's no evidence that Starship has reduced safety features to compensate for stainless steel + heat shield weight.
That is what reduced margin means. Every rocket has less safety features than it would if weight were not an issue. The more weight increases, the more everything has to give to still remain capable of completing the mission. IFT 9's failure was due to Starship relying on autogenous supercharging to save weight. No one can say how much better starship would be if it had more margin, but it undoubtedly would be better.
The best doctors in the US are more often than not also the best in the world. The US disproportionately attracts from abroad and produces domestically the MDs that are at the forefront of medicine.
The good and the okay doctors, i.e. the vast majority, are also very good. Probably a wash with most large Western nations.
America's actual problem, and failure, is prevention and uniform access to primary care. No surprises here.
Some US doctors are rich. With a strong bias toward certain medical specialties, where you can bill X thousand dollars for a "procedure". And do a lot of those procedures every week.
Vs. merely billing by the hour - then having to pay your office rent, utilities, medical school loans, nurse's salary, receptionist's wages, etc. etc. out of that. I've read quite a few accounts of that sort of doctor going bankrupt...unless they were being supported by the specialists, to whom they were referring patients who needed procedures or other expensive care.
Just anecdotal, but I visited Shanghai this summer and toured a top clinic - from my perspective, their standard of care is on par with, if not better, than many large (and quite good) groups like Sutter Health or Straub. The doctors there were educated in the U.S. and Germany (Massachusetts and Munich if memory serves).
Plus, if you can wait, treatment is nearly free, but you can get same day service for many procedures, like overnight ecg, for say $100 -$200.
Chinese public hospitals, at least ten years ago, didn’t provide nursing assistant care, so families would be responsible for cleaning and feeding someone in the hospital. Private hospitals are another matter, and when I lived in Beijing, I would go private even for ER services. And the private hospitals were pretty affordable, most of the doctors were foreign or foreign trained, most Chinese med students go to the public hospitals for residencies and after they graduate (my wife has a cousin in Shanghai finishing up her Med degree now). The program is different, it’s a 5 year degree plus residency, though you can go for a masters or PhD also (many doctors do), I think the American system of medical school is the odd one out.
Private health insurance had a cap (~$100k/year) for some reason. I thought that was risky.
If anyone has a friend or family member in the hospital, the best thing you can do is spend a few hours with them every day until they get out, or arange a schedule with other friends and family members.
Patients need advocates (and someone to help them from getting lonely, which also helps their recovery).
There is a very important difference: real investors risk their own money, the money they saved over their entire life making decisions.
Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money.
We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States, central Banks with central planning expending over half the money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia.
As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians, specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent on their own companies of friend and family).
Even then, the people the money came from voluntarily chose those institutions. If you don't like risky investments, there are lower risk institutions or products you can put your money in. It's still ultimately the will of the individual what they do with their money, and the consequences of bad choices are still mostly contained to the individuals who make them. But when it's done with tax money, everyone's dragged into it and has no personal choice in the matter. Even worse, when it's tax money without democracy, even if the majority of people don't like how it's used, they even collectively have no choice in the matter.
The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.
Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.
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