An array of steerable ion engines hanging below the station (ie on the edge not in the center) can provide both reboots / stationkeeping and precess the axis, eg once per year to track the Sun.
Because trig, by "mixing" both maneuvers together it uses less propellant vs doing the two maneuvers separately.
the stated justification is that it will let the government finally get immigration under control. but ID has never been the bottleneck for immigration enforcement. there have been countless cases where we have someone dead to rights, we know they're in the country illegally (and have committed other crimes besides), yet the judge finds a way to block deportation on ECHR grounds.
mark my words, they'll find a "right" to digital ID somewhere in the human rights framework, regardless of immigration status. and then we're back to square one.
>The Senate on Thursday approved a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and China, allowing U.S. firms to provide China with materials and technology for its civilian nuclear power program. The Senate approved the agreement via a voice vote passage of a resolution with no debate before its passage. This approval happened amidst a long-running debate on a farm bill. The agreement had been shelved due to fears about China using technology to help other nations build atomic weapons. President Reagan's trip to China marked the initialing of the agreement last year.
china in many respects a better steward of american nuclear technology than america
I think the "hoax" is itself partly a hoax. It's one of those exaggerated tales, like the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio play. Supposedly there were thousands of credulous people writing in to inquire more about the spaghetti trees; probably a great many were fully in on the joke and were just dryly "yes-anding", as we say nowadays. Perhaps on behalf of their children, rather like how one would "write a letter" to Father Christmas.
50s Britain wasn't that ignorant of the outside world (especially compared to other 50s countries). There were hundreds of thousands of servicemen who had been in Italy in the war and for the occupation, and the Empire was mostly still around. People knew what spaghetti was.
The Empire was largely a thing of the past by then, but the recent past.
I wonder whether some people were more familiar with things from former parts of the Empire than they were with European things? There are lots of references to things like Indian food in fiction going back to the 19th century, at least.
I agree the effectiveness of the hoax might well be exaggerated. On the other hand there are always some credulous people.
the government banning this is immediately harmful: it prevents a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
People can't go to concerts despite being just as hardworking or just as big fans and start shooting CEOs on the streets.
Some systems need to work and be accessible to everyone so we can sustain peaceful and healthy society.
This is not charity, this is to account for externalities and the miscalculations in the free market. Awful lot of people are underpaid and overpaid as they progress through their lives because the markets are actually not that efficient and prices are not formed under perfect information or instantly.
You want your mechanical engineers to be able to afford decent life even if all the market current wants is JavaScript engineers because when the tides shift you may end up needing mechanical engineers to produce physical stuff so you want them around and happy.
Also, the price could actually be too low too when its optimized for short term profits. Re-sell 100GBP tickets for 500GBP, filter for money and leave out the actual fans and maybe lose all the events for the next year. If you are going to do a daytime robbery, better not ever need money again from the people you are robbing.
Not sure about your situation, but the only situation I ever experienced out there were scalpers getting ridiculous amounts of tickets beforehand, sometimes via shady contacts and then reselling them for profit.
What about some middle ground - allow sale for and below the purchase price and punish severely any profiteering? The only reason scalpers do it is for money - if the punishment and risk are big enough it solved itself.
Where I live, the biggest festival in whole country (Paleo @Switzerland) explicitly bans resale for some time and nobody real is complaining, its fair and tickets are sold within minutes of becoming available.
The last point - if some psycho is starting to shoot others because they can't go to some fucking concert then the underlying condition needs to be targeted, not sweeping reality in front of them so they never trip on some obstacle in real life. 'Eat the rich' trope is stuff immature frustrated kids tell to peers, nothing more.
Sure, the issue isn't ticket resale but profiteering that damages the scene. An alternative could be the tickets be assigned for the individual like plane tickets but be transferable so if someone is transferring tickets all the time you can block them.
There is no requirement for perfect information in order for a free market to function. The term for lack of perfect information is "risk" and is factored in to negotiations and the price.
I wonder what would happen in a world where sellers have instant information about how rich the buyer is, and they all raise the offered price accordingly, for every product.
That's already being done at some scale to consumers but the actual monumental shift can happen if it can be done to everybody. People are leaving a lot of money on the table by not gauging the prices for individuals that can pay much much more. If Musk is thirsty and forgot to bring his bottle, it should be possible to sell him a billion dollar bottle of water. Anyone around him can just coordinate and gauge the price to the limit and share the profit. The profits from such a trade will greatly exceed the pay of any PA etc, if the opportunity arises just resign don't give him the water for the optimal deal.
> Anyone around him can just coordinate and gauge the price to the limit
That's called a "cartel". Cartels are unstable because they have every reason to undersell the cartel price. OPEC had a lot of problems with its members selling on the sly at lower prices.
> and share the profit
They're not going to share the profit. They're going to pocket it.
If executed perfectly, I imagine this removes all incentive to make money, since you can't obtain any more stuff with more money. It wouldn't even be nicer water. Trading is cut off from ability to accomplish anything. This kills the economy.
All these theories have been tried one way or another. The only one that works is the free market, because the free market is the only one that relies on people being selfish.
Any system that relies on unselfish behavior fails.
That's a little happy fairy tale with extra sparkly fairy dust on top but what all that free markets have given us in practice is misery, despair, war, destruction and environmental catastrophe.
Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”
P.S. It doesn't help of course that "free" markets are never really free because they are very quickly taken over by the "nastiest men" etc. and the last thing those people care about is freedom, particularly that of the markets they make their money from.
See for instance the subject of ticket touts. There is no free market in online ticket reselling because the entire market's cornered by bot farmers who buy tickets in bulk automatically the moment they are made available and leave none for anyone else. "Free" market, my sweet little hiney.
And btw, in the UK the same thing happens with driving test slots:
the shortage of driving test slots is entirely the fault of inefficient government bureaucracy. people are rationally responding to the scarcity by using bots.
if the supply of tests were allowed to rise naturally to meet the existing demand, this problem wouldn't exist. we are only in this situation because the government artificially limits the supply.
this is a very common pattern where people get upset at high prices but are completely incurious as to where the shortage really comes from.
But the idea is to tailor prices to what the individual is willing to pay, compensating perfectly for any willingness to do extravagant spending caused by having more money, cancelling out its effects so that the buyer gets the same old goods at a new price. The seller isn't undercut by another seller, because the buyer is willing to pay that much.
It probably falls apart on that last assumption: rich people aren't really willing to pay proportionately more for goods.
if they want to go to the concert they should pay the fair market price for a ticket. and in addition, they should refrain from murdering people, because murder is wrong.
the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market. they indicate that the music industry is not supplying concerts in sufficient quantity/quality as the market demands, or perhaps not in the right places or at the right times. prices are a signal; you outlaw them at your peril.
this is a case where the monkey-brain fairness intuition is simply flat out 100% wrong. scalper economics has been studied for decades; it is known that banning these trades exacerbates shortages. lot of ppl in this thread who would not pass introductory microeconomics.
>> the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.
How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?
>the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.
Always amuses me that the wannabe market experts ascribe theory of mind to markets. Personal risk tolerance and ability to execute without starving is what constrains supply of talent, who are not intrinsically born with either the knowledge or capability to begin the market based transaction process.
God (or your market) does not magically whip up concerts in response to spreadsheets. People taking risks do.
Amazing isn’t it, people don’t want to think about the implementation details at all. Things just happen magically, if the market demands more concerts and less coders then programmers start doing concerts!
That sounds true, though. Some of the coders can play an instrument, or if that's not important these days they can sing through a filter and dance in spandex. It can be their day job, to support their coding hobby.
"Can play instrument" is almost never good enough to sell tickets, just like "is good with computers" isn't good enough to be a professional programmer.
So, by diverse ways, the market can reassign suitable people to performing. For instance the programmer can go into sound engineering to replace a sound engineer who is now fulfilling an ambition to be on stage.
no it doesn’t happen like that, those who lose marketable value start doing something much less complex like driving taxi. There are numerous examples of such things.
market doesn’t reassign anybody to anything because people don’t change overnight or after some age.
It is one of the primary reasons why many people from the subway times and I’m not having a good time, like rocket scientists becoming taxi drivers
Can't parse your last sentence, but OK: the programmer drives a taxi, a talented taxi driver gets an opportunity to perform music. Maybe I didn't understand your issue and you're really complaining that the surplus programmers will be miserable, not that new music acts won't emerge.
That would be an auction. Now we have a situation where a third party gets between seller and buyer, purchases large quantities of tickets then sells them for an inflated price to the buyer and both buyer and seller feel ripped off.
That argument should be equally valid for US healthcare, prison phone calls, price gouging during natural disasters, housing prices, and college tuition.
Yet many people, possibly most people, feel something is broken.
Seller agrees to sell ticket at PRICE. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it at $PRICE+$markup. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it to a reseller, which artificially limits the supply available to buyers at any given moment. Buyers have to go to resellers, who then pay $markup2 back to the monopoly provider to transfer the ticket to the ultimate buyer. This may even repeat several times, resulting in the monopoly provider reaping more in markup fees than the seller receives for the actual product.
Original seller is free to sell it with the stipulation that original buyer is the only person that can use the ticket.
However, entertainers have an image problem that conflicts with the desire to maximize profit. Entertainers are often times in the business of appealing to the broader public. But if they restrict their ticket sales to the highest bidder, then the broader public's appeal is limited.
Having a third party engage in the price discrimination allows the entertainer's image to remain intact, while also collecting higher prices (perhaps not from the ticket sales directly, but the third party willing to pay more for the entertainer if the entertainer allows them to resell tickets).
"Face value" is constantly changing. Why must you forbid someone from buying and selling something? If the performer has a problem with it, they can easily enforce ID requirements that require whoever buys the ticket first to be the person that attends.
idiotic populist move. resellers exist because the listed price is much lower than the price people are willing to pay. banning them doesn't make the demand go away. this will just create a black market in resold tickets, with no legal recourse against fraud etc.
yookay government's crusade to outlaw all useful economic activity continues apace. you can't legislate away scarcity.
EDIT:
>How is scalping a useful economic activity? What new value is created by for example buying up loads of Taylor Swift concert tickets and selling them at a marked up price?
if I don't want to wait in a queue or spam F5 on a website at 4 in the morning so I can be one of the first, I can instead pay somebody to do all that tedious work for me, and they can profit from it. this is a valuable service that I'm willing to pay for, and have in fact paid for with no regrets whatsoever.
SCARCITY IS A FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC FACT. more people want to attend a concert than there are seats available. this scarcity must be rationed in some way. there are many ways: queues, lotteries, clientelism, theft. prices are one of the more efficient mechanisms, because unlike the others, money can be directly traded, stored, accounted for, and is a means by which the value of other goods and services can be compared.
if I wait in a queue, that is a cost I have to pay, but it is simply lost. it goes nowhere. but if I pay someone else to sit in the queue for me, I can do something else useful with the time I would have spent in the queue, and that other person can then use the money to buy something else in the future. that is the value of scalping! moreover, that one other person can sit in the queue on behalf of N other people; we all benefit from this economic specialisation and reduction of redundancy.
scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.
>resellers exist because the listed price is much lower than the price people are willing to pay.
This is such a copout, resellers inflate the price.
>yookay government's crusade to outlaw all useful economic activity continues apace.
How is scalping a useful economic activity?
What new value is created for concert goers or artists/venue by for example buying up loads of Taylor Swift concert tickets and selling them at a marked up price?
No value is added by paying a huge extra margin to rent seeking scalpers.
Not everything in the world has to be a stock market.
The people willing to pay those prices inflate them. I could buy a $1k car and list it for a million dollars tomorrow. If no one buys it, then it's not worth $1M. If someone does, then it's worth that amount.
It’s not like you really had much recourse before anyway, if someone sold you a fake ticket or one that’s already been used, are you really going to sue them or the platform? Charge back and hope you get the money back?
>> scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.
Right? Scalpers are only the latest in a long line of wrongly persecuted financial minorities like black market sellers, smugglers, drug lords, pirates, slavers, pimps, and Ponzi scheme entrepreneurs. Freedom to the heroes of our markets!
No, I said reselling pokemon cards. That's an example of scalping. You lumped them all together.
Scalpers are only the latest in a long line of wrongly persecuted financial minorities like black market sellers, smugglers, drug lords, pirates, slavers, pimps, and Ponzi scheme entrepreneurs.
Why won't you confront what you actually said? Why are you trying to twist words around instead?
the problem is it’s a lot of work (not actually worth it for me for a thousand dollars) — but you cannot win
just one scenario, I write 100 rather short, very similar blog posts. run 50 through Claude Code with instructions “copy this file”. have fun distinguishing! of course that’s an extreme way to go about it, but I could use the AI more and end up at the same result trivially
why? LLM/AI use doesn’t denote anything about style or quality of a blog, that’s the point — and why this type of commentary all of HackerNews and elsewhere is so annoying.
obviously if a million dollars are on the line I’m going to do what I can to win. I’m just pointing out how that can be taken to the extreme, but again I can use the tools more in the spirit of the challenge and (very easily) end up with the same results
People object to using AI to write their articles (poorly). Your answer to them saying it's obvious when it's AI written is to.. write it yourself, then pretend copy-pasting that article via an AI counts as AI-written?
my point is using AI is distinct from from the quality of blog posts. these frequent baseless, distracting claims of AI use are silly
this wager is a thought exercise to demonstrate that. want to wager $1,000,000 or think you’ll lose? if you’ll lose, why is it ok to go around writing “YoU uSeD aI” instead of actually assessing the quality of a post?
this is when time-travelling fugitives hide out