Please tell me what would happen if Putin states "Job well done in Ukraine, all Nazi's are killed", and then withdraws his troops. NATO is going to invade Russia?
That's a dangerous prediction to make. Russia spends a ton of money supporting it's nuclear weapons/fleet ($10B in 2022 alone). Even if half fail it wouldn't make a difference.
Put yourself in the shoes of a senior Russian official in charge of spending that money. There's no way for him to get caught. If his superiors ever find out that he 'misplaced' the funding needed to keep their nuclear weapons ready for action, tracking him down will be the least of their concerns.
There's multiple different types of nukes in Russia. So again it's dangerous to assume every part of their large organization is corrupt. Especially given how important this stuff is.
There's also multiple things that all have to function for a nuke to function. I don't want to under-state how bad even a 10% chance of these working is, but I think there's a only a 10% chance of any given nuke reaching its target and exploding as intended. Some of that's correlated and applies to all the nukes, some of it isn't.
Just for the sake of examples as I don't have any real insight, consider a tritium-boosted weapon that's expected to have a yield of 1MT. If this is set to detonate at the altitude that maximises the area of destruction, but the tritium was last replaced in 1990 and has been slowly decaying without replacement since then, then it's a nasty fireball in the sky that you can sit directly underneath with minimal risk.*
Part of the reason the Soviets went for ever-bigger nukes was that they couldn't aim very well (also a reason for the US to briefly attempt air-to-air nukes, which is how I know you can hang around under an exploding fission bomb without ill effect). If the avionics are all filled with some combination of Soviet-era vacuum tubes but the vacuum leaked, and/or old-and-leaky electrolytic capacitors that no longer hold charge, they won't even reach any specific target.
US anti-missile defence has been improving over the years. I wouldn't want to hubristically claim they're now "good" (I mean, look at the US space industry outside SpaceX), but the defences are likely to be better than they were when the USSR was still a peer.
Someone might have decided it was much cheaper to get fuel for a nuclear a nuclear reactor by replacing a bomb's core with the same volume of depleted uranium.
And of course, if they are ordered to fire, the submarines might accidentally sink themselves instead, like the Kursk did.
* My best guess is that an unboosted primary is about 15kt, but this is still true for somewhat larger primaries as https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ says a 1MT nuke maximising 5psi overpressure damage area would be at 3120 m altitude. I assume that if I were in-the-know for exactly what yield was in the un-boosted primary, I'd be under some obligation of secrecy.
Standard rotations are about 6 months - Butch and Suni were supposed to be up there for 8 days... Their families, their lives, and everything normal for way longer than planned. Health routines or not, that’s a brutal toll—mentally, emotionally, not just bones and muscles. Stop downplaying it like it’s no big deal
Just because they signed up for it, doesn't mean we shouldn't try our best to prevent it. Staying for 9 months in space is not a small deal for people's health.
So NASA did indeed try to prevent it, and weighed it against a multitude of other considerations, and actual experts running actual missions have explicitly and patiently explained the what, the how, and the why.
>All you said are literally in the descriptions of the jobs they signed up for.
Dismissing every exceptional circumstance as "the jobs they signed up for." is absurd. That's like saying the crash of flight 5342 that killed 67 people is what those passengers signed up for, so it's no big deal.
Turns out they were prepared for this circumstance, had a back up plan, and communicated this plan many times.
Just because you don't like this plan doesn't mean it's bad/political/whatever other fantasy you may come up with.
> That's like saying the crash of flight 5342 that killed 67 people is what those passengers signed up for, so it's no big deal.
Nope, it isn't like that at all. None of those passengers trained, rigorously, for an extreme number of extreme situations. Unlike astronauts whose training includes all that, and more.
And risk and exceptional circumstances are absolutely one hundred percent in the job description. Unlike the passengers in the your analogy you pulled out of an unmentionable place.
SpaceX is private, however this whole Starship program has NASA (public organization) funding parts of Starship's development for lunar exploration, as part of the Artemis program
I haven't had to take my Tesla in for any maintenance. My VW Golf however needed annual maintenance and taken in to the dealer service center. Completely different experience
They've been peddling compute since mid-2000's, however Nvidia has been around for much longer. To the revisionist history point, I'm unfamiliar seeing any of this prior to that. Unless I'm missing something, they were very much a graphics only company competing with 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATi, etc
They were founded in 1993, but until 1998 had only put out 2 chips, the first was a quadratic surface renderer that didn't sell well, and the second was a normal triangle rasterizer that saved them from bankruptcy. Then in 2001 they released the first GPU that could run code, each subsequent generation expanding on that capability until they were able to do general purpose compute with CUDA.
Anyone saying this package is unreasonable likely doesn't know that:
- This compensation package was approved, and he would only obtain payout if and only if Tesla reach some considerable aggressive milestones.
- This was in 2018 when the company was not doing well relatively.
- The shareholders at the time voted 74% in favour of the package.
The judge addresses all of these points and still came to the conclusion that the package was unreasonable.
> - This compensation package was approved, and he would only obtain payout if and only if Tesla reach some considerable aggressive milestones.
The judge points out that the package was approved by a committee consisting of close friends of Musk's who testified during the trial that they did not view the compensation negotiation as adversarial. They were not standing in for Tesla's shareholders, they were collaborating with the CEO to set his own compensation package.
> - This was in 2018 when the company was not doing well relatively.
The judge argues that this doesn't matter: Musk already had a nearly 22% stake in the company and had every reason to pursue its success. The board didn't need to offer him 6% of the future value of the company to keep him interested.
> - The shareholders at the time voted 74% in favour of the package.
The judge found that sharedholders were misled as to the independence of the people who put the package together, which meant that this vote could not be used as evidence of fairness.
A few relevant extracts:
> Delaware law allows defendants to shift the burden of proof under the entire fairness standard where the transaction was approved by a fully informed vote of the majority of the minority stockholders. And here, Tesla conditioned the compensation plan on a majority-of-the-minority vote. But the defendants were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.
> The concept of fairness calls for a holistic analysis that takes into consideration two basic issues: process and price. The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed. Musk had extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf. He had a 15-year relationship with the compensation committee chair, Ira Ehrenpreis. The other compensation committee member placed on the working group, Antonio Gracias, had business relationships with Musk dating back over 20 years, as well as the sort of personal relationship that had him vacationing with Musk’s family on a regular basis.
> At a high level, the “6% for $600 billion” argument has a lot of appeal. But
that appeal quickly fades when one remembers that Musk owned 21.9% of Tesla when
the board approved his compensation plan. This ownership stake gave him every
incentive to push Tesla to levels of transformative growth—Musk stood to gain over $10 billion for every $50 billion in market capitalization increase. Musk had no intention of leaving Tesla, and he made that clear at the outset of the process and throughout this litigation.
The last part is an interesting argument because I don't understand the limiting principles. It would seem that any anyone who already has a lot of skin in the game can't be incentivized by more skin in the game.
It's not an interesting argument by itself, it's in conjunction:
1. The shareholders weren't aware of the lack of independence of those negotiating the deal with Musk, making the shareholder vote irrelevant
2. Because those negotiating the deal (and the board) weren't independent, it also follows that it cannot be assumed that the deal was fair
3. Because those negotiating the deal actively collaborated with Musk over setting the terms it opens a large possibility that the terms would be favourable to him
4. The deal was reasonably outlandish (compared to to other deals for CEOs), so it's hard to make the argument that a properly negotiated deal would have come anywhere close to the same level of compensation - this was hardened by the context that Musk already had significant incentive to perform.
It's impossible to know for certain that Musk would have performed if he hadn't been given 6%, but on the balance of probabilities it seems reasonable to expect that he would have performed if he'd only been given say 1%, or perhaps even nothing. The Judge has decided that a properly negotiated deal would have offered Musk less.
And of course Musk only ends up in this position of having the deal questioned because he put himself in a position where he exerts control over the board, the compensation committee _and_ didn't fully disclose these relationships to the shareholders.
I suppose the question isn't whether one would be incentivized at all by an additional grant, but whether the additional incentive would be worth the cost. Another question is whether one could get other benefits (e.g., attention/time guarantees) that may have a better return on the price.
The company was worth 50 billion at the time, and the options (worth 2.6 Billion at the time) vested if the company hit a 650 billion valuation, plus revenue milestones.
Shareholders made 550 billion from performance, and Elon made 50 billion.
I have a Dream Machine Pro (UDM-Pro), and disabling remote access is as simple as finding the setting and turning it off. I disabled it on mine a while ago as an extra security measure.
