There have been 412 manned space flights, ever, by anyone, anywhere.
A large commercial airport handles many times that number of flights every single day. Worldwide there are a hundred times more flights per day than the number of manned space flights in history.
I suspect every model of commercial plane has flown far more flights than all the human rated rockets put together.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.
That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.
I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe).
I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches
It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.
For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
> It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.
Challenger: Saying don't go would probably have cost them their jobs.
Columbia: It had previously barely survived foam damage. They figured out where the offending foam had come from and fixed that part--but only that part.
Does it? The Communist Manifesto famously hypothesized that those who have the replicators, so to speak, will not allow society to freely use them.
The future is anyone's guess, but it is certain that 100% of your needs being able to be met theoretically is not equivalent to actually having 100% of your needs met.
Why is that the endgame with people though? Maybe I'm just jaded but several different human nature elements came to mind when I read your comment:
Greed/Change Avoidance:
If someone invented replicators right now, even if they gave it completely away to the world, what would happen? I can't imagine the finance and military grind just coming to an end to make sure everyone has a working replicator and enough power to run it so nobody has to work anymore. Who gives up their slice of society to make that change and who risks losing their social status? This is like openai pretending "your investment should be considered a gift because money will have no value soon". That mask came off really quickly.
Status/Hate:
There are huge swaths of the US population that would detest the idea that people they see as "below" them don't have to work. I can imagine political movements doing well on the back of "don't let the lazy outgroup ruin society by having replicators".
Fuck the Poor:
We don't do the easy things to eliminate or reduce suffering now, even when it has real world positive effects. Malaria, tuberculosis, even boring old hunger are rampant and causing horrible, unnecessary suffering all over the world.
Dont tread on me:
I shudder when I think of the damage someone could do with a chip on their shoulder and a replicator.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions:
What happens when everyone can try their own version of bio engineering or climate engineering or building a nuclear power plant or anything else. Invasive species are a problem now and I worry already when companies like Google decide to just release bioengineered mosquitos and see what happens. I -really- worry when the average person decides a big complicated problem is actually really simple and they can just replicate their particular idea and see what happens. Whoops, ivermectin in the water supply didn't cure autism!
Someone give me some hope for a more positive version here because I bummed myself out.
I mean, if I could live at my current level (middle class) without working, I would gladly do so, and let others also live at the same level, anywhere in the world, freely (if it was in my power). I do give to charity, always have, but, the crazier things get, the less secure I feel in giving $$ away.
Even replicators need feedstock - people who own the rocks or sand or whatever feeds them will start charging an arm and a leg. Sure, I could feed it dirt and rocks from my own property, but only for so long before I'm undermining the foundation of my own house. To say nothing of people who live in apartments.
And then, if everyone has equal $$, how do you decide who gets to live in the better locations / nicer housing?
We have to grow out of those kind of dreams. That's like a kid dreaming that when he grows up he'll eat ice cream for dinner every day.
People when they mature have an innate desire to work. It is good for body and mind. If you're curious about the world, you'll have to do some work one way or another to achieve your goals and satisfy your curiosity.
If "society" is just a function of basic needs, then there's plenty of places in the world to visit where people live like that and use any excess energy in endless fighting against each other instead of work.
I mean... Maybe the things I'd LIKE to work on are getting my car around the race track faster. Very few people will pay me for that - especially if I'm not a very good driver. But I enjoy it immensely. I'd MUCH rather do that than work.
And right now, due to having to work, maintenance on my house is a bit behind.. Would also prefer to catch up on that - but again, no one is paying me to do that.
So that explains why the smallest parts often have spares in ikea and lego builds. Is this done because of the error in weighing the smallest parts, so they have a margin for error by allowing for an extra 1 or 2?
> Is this done because of the error in weighing the smallest parts, so they have a margin for error by allowing for an extra 1 or 2?
This is a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is if the end user loses/breaks one. That part very well could be show stopper (Ikea 110630 anyone?). Now the end user is stuck - has to call, you have to ship, do you charge? do you give for free? they have to wait. they're annoyed, you're annoyed.
No one is happy.
The supply chain headaches for giving exact number of tiny parts is terribly expensive, relatively speaking. So you give spares because in the long run it's way cheaper.
IKEA does too. You can request smaller part you're missing on their website[1]. And if they don't have them available online you can check in with their support, once they shipped one part from two countries away, free of charge (and even thrown an extra one). For bigger parts they sometimes have them in stock at local stores.
I was very pleasantly surprised when they sent me free replacement hardware to reassemble an old ikea twin bed model that had been discontinued a number of years ago. I assume they use the same hardware in other models they still sell.
I tried that the other day when when my kid rebuilt a 3 in 1 set. I couldn't justify 7€ shipping for a 10c part so that the baby orca could have it's dorsal fin. My kid didn't care. I was disappointed.
Hmmm, so if I wanted to assemble the lovely Cloud City, all I would need is 697 of my best friends to call in and report that they had lost a different piece...
Just tacking on to mention the smallest parts are most likely to be lost, they’re the ones that - if dropped - seem to bounce and roll under a refrigerator or into the ether. They don’t give extras on the larger parts because they’re not likely to be lost. Frequently enough all it takes is a violent/careless bag opening to send the small pieces flying.
Being aware of this, I am waiting for a solution to what to do with the leftovers besides chuck them into a landfill. The problem, of course, is scale. No one is mailing 3 screws and an Allen wrench anywhere. Maybe once you hit 5 pounds of spare Lego . . .
I've often thought about this when assembling Ikea furniture. I have never been shorted. There's got to be someone at Ikea with the job of calculating the target acceptable ratio of over/under supplying small hardware pieces. I figure they can probably give out thousands if not tens of thousands of extra little screws/dowels/plastic bits before it exceeds the cost of missing just one. Between the cost of a support call, maintaining a supply of spare parts, labor and shipping to send out replacements... not to mention the less tangible to calculate loss of reputation to the brand. Quite interesting to think about at scale.
You grab a "rough amount" and by using weight all you need to do is diff 2,3,4? Ideally 5 and under.
it's very easy to count <=5 visually, but if your package requires 12 nuts, repeatedly counting up to 12 is so stressful the poster built an entire counting machine.
Yes, the question is how exactly you grab a "rough amount"? If you need 4 parts in each bag, is it really much easier to construct a system that can dispense 4-6 parts, than one that can dispense exactly 4?
Sorry i completely missed this. If you don't see it, it's okay - I probalby miss any replys going forward.
Being upfront, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Just some arm chair engineer.
The poster needed 6 parts which is JUST into annoying. My personal thoughts are what they need isn't dispensing but alignment. Thinking deeper I can agree that weight might not the most efficient here.
They're building the aligning and dispensing tool but I argue that's over engineering the problem. If it's aligned it's VERY easy to count 6 via a mark along the track and just push it to the end against your finger and based on the mark you know you have exactly 6.
To me the hardest part to make "just work" is the dispensing, but if you remove that it becomes a much easier problem. There's enough sales volume, you can make a vertical fixture that is a stack of fixed aligning tracks. Your fingers become the dispenser. Sweep and move to the next track.
> It's not zero knowledge for me then. Also - if there is ANY possibility to track anyone. And/or centrally mark someone "nonverified" then it makes more problems than solves.
> Even if I trust my govt (no way), even if it'd be fully ZK with no way to track anyone… still govt would have a way to just block some individual "because".
Is this even actually possible? If you want any sort of identity verification you HAVE to trust someone, whether age or full ID. Literally impossible.
Zero trust systems in society don't work. If you don't care "who" then yes, zero trust is just fine... but then what's the point of "age verification"?
I was more responding to the part about not trusting your own gov cuz how do you build a system where you don't trust a central authority when identity is required.
You don't have to trust somebody not to track how the resulting credential is used. And that is what "zero knowledge" means. It means that after you finish the protocol, nobody has learned anything but what they were supposed to learn (in this case, "the person at the other end of this connection is over 18"). If it leaks anything else about the person, it's not zero knowledge. If somebody learns which of the issued credentials was used, it's not zero knowledge. If parties can collude to get information they're not supposed to get, it's not zero knowledge.
It's a technical term of art, not some politician's bullshit. And it isn't complicated to understand.
At a personal level, I've been through this with my grandfather.
I want to know. My family wants to know. I want to prepare because there are things I want to do today that I know I won't be able to do in the future.
In many ways, it's just like many terminal cancer diagnoses. You're going to lose that person, but you have some time.
But it is a wildly variated, almost meaningless diagnosis. 3 of my 4 grandparents got Alzheimer's diagnosis as well as my mom and mother-in-law. The variation of progression and symptoms is so wide that it really seems like a catch-all. One grandmother was fine until about 72 and in 2 years forgot who people were and 4 years had lost all executive function and passed away. The other one was diagnosed in her early 80s and lived to be 96 with no major progression, like slightly more repeating, but never forgetting people or not knowing how to talk etc. Similar dichotomy between my mother and mother-in-law but with considerably different presentations of symptoms.
It's a weird disease and IMO not even really a disease it's a bunch of different causes of cognitive impairment under one umbrella but shouldn't be separated out much further to find actual causes and treatments.
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For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
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