Watching the video, when the rocket lifted-off, it stood on a couple small risers. When it landed, the risers were gone. Did someone run out there and grab them?
One of the most mind bending facts I tell people, even sailors, is that sailboats are not limited to sailing at the true windspeed. Sails are wings, not bags. In fact, a boat's top speed is directly dictated by its ability to point into the wind (assuming, for example, the boat is not physically limited by it's displacement hull speed, as in the case of hydrofoils). The consequences of this simple truth are manifest.
First, consider the edge case where the sail is acting as a bag when you're sailing downwind. As the boatspeed approaches the true windspeed, the apparent windspeed falls to 0 and the sail will luff. In this specific case, the boat can not go faster than the wind.
Now consider the boat cutting across the wind at a 90 angle. When the boat starts moving, the wind comes 90 degrees off the bow. As the boat increases speed, the apparent wind shifts closer to the bow. Apparent wind is just vector addition of true wind and boat wind. If the boat achieves the same speed as the true wind, then the apparent wind is sqrt(2) ~ 1.4x faster than the true wind. More wind means more power, so with that additional wind, it can go faster. Continuing the example, as the apparent wind increases, it appears closer and closer to the bow. Eventually the sail will stall and produce less lift. This is the point where the boat will go no faster.
The slowest point of sail is directly downwind. In a race, it is often much faster to gybe back and forth rather than ever go directly downwind. When a boat goes directly downwind, their boat speed cancels out the true wind. In the strangest case, if a high performance boat going faster than the speed of wind (say, on a broadreach) goes directly downwind, the apparent wind will appear to be coming head on. They've effectively gone 'into irons', yet they're facing 180 degrees off true wind.
If you ever get the chance, you should see the SailGP boats race. Their sails are almost always hauled fully in, even downwind. The other thing is that they gybe downwind because to go directly downwind would be to stall. In effect, these boats can achieve multiple times the true wind speed, but so long as they aren't pointed directly into, nor directly away from the wind.
> What if, for example, tariffs incentivize technology development that allows hydroponic wine - making previously unviable land suddenly productive?
This is a variant of the Import Substitution idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a great track record. Instead of investment in innovation, sheltered industries tend to become less competitive and increasingly reliant on the shelter granted to them. Indeed, even if innovation occurs, it often becomes very hard to undo the sheltering once it’s no longer needed.
Far better to allow countries with comparative advantage in growing grapes to use their land to make wine compared to investing in hydroponics. The irony of that very example is the vertical farming sector has recently learned this very lesson and is undergoing a market realignment after hopes of improved productivity have been found to be less than expected.
Vancouver, IMO, is a far better developed city than Seattle. Vastly better transit, denser, more walkable neighbourhoods, and just overall very thoughtfully developed.
It’s just an enormous shame it’s become grossly unaffordable— on an income adjusted basis, it’s more expensive than the Bay Area. That, and the weather, although the summers are perfect IMO.
8km really isn’t too bad. Millions of people do the 8 week couch2 5k program, once you’re at 5km/half hour, scaling to 8km is easy, like a couple more weeks tops.
Also, running (rather, jogging) isn’t terrible aerobically taxing, if you can’t keep up a convo, you’re running too hard.
Once you’re used to running, it’s an insanely efficient way to create a calorie deficit. Not the most glamorous exercise, but cheap, easy, requires no significant equipment and most all, incredibly time efficient.
> I didn't want to buy a checkbook, stamps, and envelopes just for this one bill.
How much is a checkbook? My bank (FRB, RIP :( ) gave me, for free, like 8 years ago, an enormous box of checks that I have hardly made a dent in.
Domestic postage is like $0.69, envelopes are, what, couple bucks for a box of 50? Amortized over a couple years, you aren’t looking at more than a dollar or two/month.
Either send a bunch of post dated checks at once or set a calendar reminder to send a new one each month. Either way, I don’t really see a market here
Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author decries and says won't work this time: technological change and adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we are quite good at adaptation in the face of adversity.
The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.
It's interesting to see the federal government taking a strong industrial policy approach to AI through this executive order as well as physical computing via the CHIPS act.
Couple concerns:
- I loath to believe in silver bullets. The executive branch seems to believe that investing in AI (note: the order, despite the extensive definitions, leaves Artificial Intelligence undefined) is the solution to US global leadership, clean energy, national defense and better jobs. Rarely if ever is one policy a panacea for so many objectives.
- I am skeptical of government "picking the winners". Markets do best when competitive forces reward innovation. By enforcing an industrial policy on a nascent industry, the executive may just as well be stifling innovation from unlikely firms.
- I am always worried about inducing a _subsidy race_ whereby countries race to subsidize firms to gain a competitive advantage. Other countries do the same, leading to a glut of stimulus with little advantage to any country.
- Finally, government bureaucracy moves slowly (some say that's the point). What happens if a breakthrough innovation in AI radically changes our needs for the type, size or other characteristic of these data centers? Worse still, what happens if we hit another AI winter? Are we left with an enormous pork barrel project? It's hard to envision the federal government industrial policy perfectly capturing future market needs, especially in such a fast moving industry as tech.
Respectfully, the Canadian accent (really, Canadian English) is noticeable and distinct from US English, in its pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Yes, there is a lot in common with US English, but calling them the same loses an enormous amount of nuance.
On the other hand, the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy, neither of which Canada has much of.
I'm a Canadian living in the states. The joke I tell my family is that I go to Canada to hear about US news. The other joke I have goes like this: the problem with Canada is that America thinks Canada is Europe, Europe thinks it's America and Canadians think they're American.
PB Blaster is the product everyone thinks WD-40 is. Even still, I wouldn’t use it in the place of real oil/grease/lubricant but in a pinch it’s far better than WD-40 for those odd chores.
> But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century
The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.
Canadians have elevated Clamato juice with the Caesar, the purest nectar of the gods. Mexicans come close with micheladas and Americans have bloody Mary’s but nothing compares to a proper Caesar.
Bowling has been in a long decline. If I had money to get into the PE game, I probably wouldn't choose to invest in bowling, but hey, if someone wants to shovel a bunch of investor money into renovating bowling alleys, that can only be a good thing. The way I see it, there's two likely outcomes:
- The PE guys prove bowlings alleys aren't dead, and inject a ton of money and interest and arrest the decline, leading to a growth in the sport
- The PE guys don't arrest the decline, but end up injecting a ton of money renovating these locations, they eventually sell them at a loss to enthusiasts who now can keep these places running for a lot longer.
Either way, it's a win.
Pretty tired of the trope _PE == bad_. I wish HN could develop a more nuanced discussion of these ideas. Sometimes it's a wonderful thing to get someone else to prove viability.