Big supporter of renewables, but what's missing here is the make up of what's getting imported. The overnight baseline appears to still be majority imports from, I assume, non-renewables?
In Canada we have something like this.. Flex Delivery. Let's you just enter the address of the nearest postal outlet to you. Boxes are left at that depot, you get a notification when it's ready for pickup.
Edit: since our gov't postal service is teamed up with a pharmacy/general store (Shoppers Drugmart), there's a tonne of convenient locations. Closest one to me is 4 blocks, on my drive home from work.
If you're willing to print enough cash to pay for the smart people to come to you, you can probably import them. It seems to be more the exception than the rule that people dislike a country so much that no amount of money could get them to go there to do research on the topic they're interested in.
A $50b program from 1 country would likely have the same problem (as indeed would a large private program). Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.
If so then it's impossible to advance, which would be annoying.
What's needed is people who know the subject matter and are experts at running large companies.
SpaceX turned rockets into a production line, experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems with landing. But that's productising last year's thing, not inventing a new possibly impossible thing. Interesting to see how Starship goes.
Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a committee where every country gets to make one of the 12 magnets because they're a primary school and everything has to be "fair"
Questions about how effective this would be aside. What is there to really lose? If we inflate the economy via current means or inflate the economy via employing scientists and engineers ineffectively, it’s inflation nonetheless.
> Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.
SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the best option instead of what was required by some buffoons in Congress.
Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash" program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but it is undeniable that he is a very effective and inspiring leader.
ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental technology with no hope of direct return on investment (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had to be built at this scale because they had reached the limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense here.
SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and processes that have been battle tested over many decades. This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very different.
Yes, but still - instead of all the components needed being manufactured on or near site, they are shipped from across the world... so parts end up damaged [1], not made according to spec or the spec having errors introduced somewhere among dozens of companies and institutions. With sometimes weeks or months of shipping round-trip times, that is causing a fucking lot of delays. Not to mention that shipping all the stuff around itself is also causing issues given the current COVID-caused shipping delays.
The problem is that ITER, ULA, EADS, Airbus, the ISS and a bunch of other international cooperative projects all are considered by politicians primarily as a way to distribute pork, secondarily as a way to show off on the international stage and only then as a way to actually advance scientific knowledge.
Airbus is an inefficient port project? They build almosy half the world's aircraft.
Boeing has 1 boss and what are they better at, defrauding regulators to sell dangerous aircraft? And all other private manufacturers combined are a rounding error?
We solved this by issuing company owned and controlled laptops to our contractors.
Disk encryption, screen time outs, remote wipe etc. contractor machines with code and production access are treated as critical assets and are fully under IT control.
People think of the kinds of income that makes the same money as doctors, lawyers, etc as upper middle, and the kind of people who can afford 10k sqft mansions, private jets and lambos as upper class, even if the numbers shake out to something else.
