Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years - should they move forward with Dragonfly. Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
This is a very selfless way of living, and for that you have my respect. But the chief cause of loneliness for many people is the fear that the person they were waiting for will never come:
There is a fire which burns inside me, but no-one stays 'round long enough to warm themselves.
Knowing this, if you can truly remain steadfast in your positive outlook on life, then you have achieved true strength. Hard to do in an oversocialized world.
The OP said he would have felt fine had his returns been limited to 10%. I hope you realize your characterization of returns ("profit without creating value") can be applied whether his program yielded 10% returns or 400%. The moral dilemma for someone who has a conscious that you describe would be choosing to invest in the first place (is investing on the stock market creating value?) or choosing an investment strategy (is this certain strategy creating value?).
Hey, it's in to criticize tech companies. That's not to say there aren't problems, but most people get outraged at whatever society tells them to get outraged at in that moment. No thoughts of their own. This place is mostly a safe haven from that.
Now, it will be interesting to see how soon Amazon workers unionize and how that'll play out.
Air is listed right beside that, which is probably closer to what he was referring two. Combined, they sit at 10%. Not as much as he thought, but nothing to scoff at.
While your number seems like a lot, it's really just a drop in the bucket. The US consumes close to 8 billion barrels of oil annually. I was, however, surprised that it was still as high as 0.5%.
Did your desire to use the word fungible outweigh the fact that the US has drastically reduced its dependence already?
Anyway, you're right that decreasing oil demand will lessen dependency on foreign oil. You're wrong that our current approach "isn't feasible". Our oil imports from Saudi and worldwide are falling. See: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epc0_im0...
see the top of page 534, figure b. You are correct that the initial forward momentum is from the launch rail, but the graph clearly shows that the ion engine provides thrust.
Is the title of the HN submission misleading? Yes.
Did the plane achieve flight with the ion engine alone? No.
Was the plane able to maintain and gain altitude because of the ion engine? Yes.
A step forward in the right direction but not as much of a breakthrough as the submission title would have you think.
>As far as I can tell it doesn't exist outside of the person's mind.
Based brah. I'm being serious when I say that I think HN needs more of this type of comment. They seem to love rigidity in comments, but not any bluntness or banter thrown in there.