bmcusick

13 ms·

91.
by bmcusick 9y ago
Ugh. He completely misunderstands what PoW (or PoS) are for. The entire point of PoW is deciding between two valid & correct blockchain states. Alice owns a bitcoin. Alice validly signs a transaction transferring that bitcoin to Bob.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
According to the latest energy report from Lazard, the subsidized cost of solar and wind is now below the marginal cost of operating nuclear and coal plants. And the unsubsidized cost isn’t far behind and is still falling. It fell 9% last y
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Correct https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-ro...
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I bet this will get the employee plenty of high-fives and maybe a few paid-for drinks at the bar, but it won't help him replace that job. Any employer would have to ask themselves whether they'd do something similar to one of thei
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by bmcusick 9y ago
My theory is that ETH is a useful medium of exchange for buying compute resources from "the world computer", but BTC is better as a store of value. And the dollar continues to be better than both of them as a unit of account. Basi
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Remember Peak Oil? Good times.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
The only hard part about that is the municipal permitting. Home construction is not rocket science! This is a mature industry and purchase, demolition, and new construction all have predictable costs.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
You can almost always build more housing on a given lot though. My detached single family home uses 1/5 or less of the land on my lot. You could build four town homes of the same size as my house on the same lot. If you went to four st
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by bmcusick 9y ago
And yet many of the longest-lived populations on earth have diets rich in carbohydrates, like the Okinawans. I hate associational studies like this which don't distinguish between types of carbohydrates (sugar vs starch) or other facto
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Yup, that's what I meant. I don't know how reliable those Elonian schedules are though. :-p
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by bmcusick 9y ago
You mistook my point. Not that New Shepherd can be used "as is", but merely that Blue Origin and SpaceX have developed propulsion-based landing technology and NASA/Boeing have not. There's a much shorter development path
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> It means establishing a renewed American presence on the moon... > And from the foundation of the moon... This is potentially bad news for SLS/Orion. They have no ability to land on the Moon. SLS doesn't do retro-propulsio
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Well you and I are just speculating, so who knows. But I sort of doubt it. People would have noticed if SpaceX was hiring nuclear engineers. I think they have enough R&D on their plate getting to full reusability.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
NASA is working on it, but until there's a working engine available for private rockets it seems premature. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/201...
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Maybe. I understand the physics says there's an ISP benefit. Standard rocket engines are well-understood though, work well, allow for retro-propulsion, and you can synthesize methane easily on Mars. In the long term when the space tran
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by bmcusick 9y ago
The Sun shines on Mars too. Solar energy is a practical source of energy as far out as the asteroid belt. Nuclear energy isn't needed to accomplish anything that Musk wants to accomplish in life.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Sorry, but your theory doesn't work because plenty of other fusion projects are attracting VC. There is something wrong with Lerner specifically , not fusion generally, that's stopping people from putting money in.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
This, exactly. I don't know why you're getting down-votes. It's indisputable that both (1) the economy improving on average and (2) the distribution of those gains is highly skewed to the right-side of the income/wealt
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Lerner has been beating this drum for years, and presented at many conferences. And yet no one has invested. I'd love to know why. Either there's a catch to the technology that he's not disclosing (and the smart money doesn&#
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by bmcusick 9y ago
SpaceX is already 10x cheaper than the Space Shuttle. Reusable rockets will be another 10x or more cheaper. Access to space will be cheap and routine.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
One of the main benefits of a LEO colony is you can design it with 1/10th or less of the shielding mass of deep space colony, because it's shielded from radiation by Earth's magnetic field. Such a design would not be able to
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> This is assuming we can even get a person to mars, which has not been demonstrated as feasible. Let alone a whole community. Landing per se shouldn't be impossible. We landed people on the Moon a long time ago. Recent advances in
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Eh.. right off the bat, you have to doubt "analysis" that comes from an article that doesn't know the difference between the Falcon Heavy and ITS. But then it gets really stupid. The idea that you'd transport water from
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by bmcusick 9y ago
This can't be about direct revenue. We all know that Android handset business is barely profitable. Even Samsung makes a fraction of what Apple does, and the rest are rounding errors. I expect this is Google trying to prevent the Andro
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Your first claim was so interesting I had to Google it. But this article suggests it doesn't hold up. https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/will-shading-your-air-co... Moneyquote: "The temperature of the surrou
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Yeah, this seems like a probable trademark violation as it's likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. I expect they'll have to change it.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> More productivity is not somehow a bad thing. I didn't say it was bad! I'm pro-productivity. My contention is simpler; that going from a pre-industrial economy to an advanced economy has a path that's been well trod by t
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by bmcusick 9y ago
All three over the next 10 years. Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples. Food Service: The real killer app
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.

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