It’s sort of brilliant, in a Lex Luthor kind of way…

You know, if some nation wanted to end this conflict and end a lot of the conflict in the middle east, there’d be an easy way to do it.

Just give Iran a couple of nukes.

Hear me out. Do you remember back when every week there was troubling news coming out of North Korea? A new threat, a new declaration that the US was evil, a new set of sanctions against NK, a new ballistic missile tested by launching towards the US, tensions steadily rising. Everyone wondered if they were going to start a world war.

Then they successfully tested a nuke. People shuddered and talked about that for a month or so, and then forgot about it. Since then, to my knowledge, there have not been new declarations that the west is evil and there have not been new sanctions institute against them. People just leave them alone. The only news I hear about from NK is about poverty, small border incidents, or Kim Jong Un’s steam account.

Basically I attribute this to people being scared, now that they have the bomb, just don’t poke the snake and it won’t bite you. And honestly, that’s fine.

So what would this mean for Iran/Israel? If Iran had the bomb, how would that change things? Well, I would expect the same behavioral change from Israel, fear. They might stop poking the snake, really, they’d have to stop poking the snake. Israel would find themselves in a precarious (but not impossible) position. They would need to switch their tactics to diplomacy before military force. The US may even decide to stop encouraging Israel to be provocative. In short, Israel will have to play ball, they’ll have to try to get along with their neighbors, and to do that, they’re going to have to change their policies with Palestine. A lot will have to change.

Yeah, I laughed at that.

Global CO2 production dropped dramatically for years after WW2. It doesn’t even take eliminating a significant fraction of the population to drastically improve our emissions, all it takes is a large economic impact. Less global prosperity = less CO2.

So hey, maybe this is great for the planet… (But still really bad for the human race)

Yeah, that’s cool.

Well I guess my opinion is that it’s essentially never “legitimate” to be the aggressor. Determining which party is the aggressor can sometimes be complicated, but it often boils down to this: which party is crossing the border?

In this case, I’m sure many would say that Iran took the first aggressive action by pursuing a nuclear program, but I have a few issues with that. First, Israel already has nuclear weapons, so surely that is an earlier provocation. Secondly, Iran still isn’t crossing the border, Israel was first to pull the trigger, and they pulled a lot of triggers (in Iranian territory). And finally, Israel and Iran have been in the process of forging nuclear treaties many times now, and nearly every time Israel has sabotaged the talks with provocative, often military actions, or they simply left the table - it seems clear to me that Israel does not want a nuclear deal, they will not accept any kind of compromise.

I mean, lead is a very common element and can have many legitimate uses. If we’re talking about using some amount of lead in a camera sensor, do understand how tiny camera sensors are. This is likely a very insignificant amount of lead. And it will be fused into this sensor, it’s not likely to ever leave the confines of the component’s plastic casing, behind a lens, with a phone. That’s very different from say, mixing it into gasoline and burning it.

I’ve heard there’s been some real breakthroughs in perovskite for solar cells in just the last few years. As you said, chemical instability is supposed to be their primary weakness, but my understanding is that progress has been made in finding the perfect chemical makeup for the “sandwiching” materials between layers of perovskite. I’m pretty sure that “perfect” chemical makeup is the proprietary trade secret variety, so I don’t really know much more about it.

And admittedly, I’ve never been in the field of materials science, so you’re much more of an expert in this area. But I’ve been following a lot of green energy news, and I know promising progress is actively being made on perovskite.

Man up

Fuck off. You can take that shit elsewhere. Grow a conscience.

I think it’s a few years late for purely negative action to be useful here.

I actually disagree with that. If we end the flow of weapons and funding to Israel, we’d see a totally different behavior from Israel within the week.

The question is: glass some LARPers, or world war 3? If the former is not on the table, the latter is inevitable.

And this part, you’re saying nuke them or else WW3? That rhetoric is as bad as theirs! If you can’t think of any other solutions, then please, don’t be part of the solution.

This is state sanctioned mass murder. This is state terror attacks across a national border. This is so unethical and obviously illegal, I don’t know what else to say about it.

We need to distance ourselves from Israel. We need to stop giving them weapons. Right now, the taxes I pay go partially to arming them, I am partially responsible, and this is not “ok”. I do not want to be doing this, I never wanted this…

Yeah, it’s a messed up position. It’s made more complicated by then being half right. People do often like having fewer choices. Making a streamlined OS that doesn’t allow them access to the kernel or crucial components, that they literally can’t break by accident, that is indeed an appealing feature to many. But it’s not appealing because they’re stupid, it’s appealing they’re rational.

This has always been Apple’s method, make everything intuitive, easy to use for anyone and their mother. And a big part of that is removing all the extra clutter from the interface, all the options users would rarely if ever use. This is also the contentious part, removing the advanced options that power users might want access to.

But at least initially, they understood that the reason for doing all this, their goal, was to make their products better. These days it seems like they’re less clear on that goal. The idea that they’re “dumbing down” their products and controlling everything because their users are too stupid, this is a new attitude, and it shows a misunderstanding of the principals their company was built on. Apple was only successful because they made very good products which were comfortable to use. They certainly never won popularity through competitive pricing or having the most powerful machines…

Personally, I think it’s a foolish move to be this controlling over their iOS ecosystem. This is really making the product inferior. Sideloading apps will not destroy their walled garden, it just gives power users the options they want. Apple should be afraid of losing more market share, they don’t have all that much to lose…

Nah, not stupid. But yeah it’s hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.

But programmers tend to use some form of a “versioning” system like git. This will record everyone’s changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.

Not with that attitude!

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you’re relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Sure, but you can safely deorbit something from Leo with like 100 m/s of Delta v, you just need to dip into the atmosphere and then drag does the rest. Getting something to a sufficiently high graveyard orbit is more like 2000 Dv split between two burns. You’d need to stay with the trash for half an orbit and then do the second half of your burn, and then presumably you’d need to travel back to your original point, costing another 2000 Dv.

All together, going up could take 40x more propellant than going down.

If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?

That’s a fair point. Keep in mind though, it takes a while to get a whole constellation up in orbit and get all the kinks worked out, Starlink was first usable in 2020. So in total it took them in the area of 14 years from start to finish. It’s also worth noting, that nobody in the space industry has really ever been able to move as fast as spaceX, they’re something of an anomaly, not the norm.

So could a new company do it in 14 years? Yeah, that’s definitely possible. It could happen by 2039, but I wouldn’t put money on it. 25 years seems more likely.

Again, the only possible player that could do that any time soon is blue origin/Amazon.

Stoke Space is working on a fully reusable rocket though, I’m really impressed with their rocket concept, some very smart design choices were made. They do have working hardware and have demonstrated their core engine. But I have no idea how close they are to first launch tests, I expect it will be a while

That’s a fair point. The alternative is taking things up to a “graveyard orbit” somewhere between LEO and GSO, to a particularly unpopular altitude, where nobody’s fighting for real estate. Satellites can sit there indefinitely, you could even clump them up in a big ball, the tiny pull of gravity they have is actually enough to keep them bunched together.

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I’m not sure how to make that feasible.

Yeah, it’s a bad situation. I’m against monopolies, but I also see how filling the sky with redundant satellites is a terrible plan, so I don’t like the idea of lots of competition either.

I think low orbit satellite communications is a pretty awesome concept. It has the potential to become like a second Internet backbone, but a backbone that can bring data directly to users without the additional router hops that local ISPs introduce. On paper, it’s amazingly efficient and can distribute service to all of the world… But in practice the business and management side is deeply problematic. One company should absolutely not be in charge of global Internet service. And one country would not be any better.

The only solution I can see is to make it safe and feasible to have way more satellites operating in low earth orbit. I’m really not sure what that solution might look like…

Here’s an off-the-cuff idea though: One solution could be an extremely robust low earth orbit maintenance and “pruning” system. All satellites would need to be monitored by third parties. And those third parties would need the authority and ability to quickly deorbit (prune) any satellite that deviates from its exact expected orbit. If satellites can ensure no deviation from their path and can safely maneuver to avoid collisions, it could be possible for many more satellites to safely share an orbital altitude.

Well this wouldn’t be that. It would be a competitor to space junk, so increase the number of satellites in orbit by say 25%.

Well yeah, blue origin has already successfully orbited their rocket. Their rocket which has a 45 ton to low earth orbit payload capacity, about the same as the Saturn V (so actually impressive as fuck).

So the head start is what keeps Honda from out competing them. They’re at least 10 years ahead of Honda (but likely more). And BO is solely focused on space, Honda on the other hand isn’t going to prioritize that arm of development over others. So I can’t really see Honda winning that sprint, if they’re not totally committed to the race.