Sonder's sales channel was and is primarily airbnb itself which could easily turn it off if they determined them to be a threat. So it's a business highly dependent on future competitive partners (see Airbnb plus). Their company was called Flatbook but the service and reviews were so terrible and so full or irate customers who had been scammed that they had to try and erase it from the internet and reimagine themselves as Sonder. You can still find a few places with flatbook review if you search ex. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sonder/@45.5198842,-73.587... . Anyhow miles of bad service, scams, and very serious negative reviews. Since they used Airbnb as the primary sales channel on a grand scale they would just wipe property listings once the reviews were negative and replace with new fresh listings. I do believe they have professionalized their service recently however I am surprised they were trusted with a large investment and shows you the poor judgement of VC. Their product message was cloned rather than originated, they have a history of scam level of service, their revenue channel is largely dependent on competition, not to mention their business is neither innovative nor defensible, the product is not great for cities and community. Really SV at its worst.
Ethics are super important, especially in this era of scandals and exposés. If they think changing their branding strategy alone without addressing the core issue of trust and honesty would get them far, that $135M will dry up real fast..
If the VCs continue to invest in poorly conceived and doomed ventures then they will lose money and eventually fail once they've lost investor confidence. There's evolutionary pressure at play here. VCs are incentivised to take risky investments with potentially high returns; but there is a limit. In a very real way we're exposed to the outliest out the outliers here in SV. It should eventually get better. However, nobody said that evolution, or capitalism for that matter, was efficient; so it may be quite a long time.
It's true that VCs that invest in utter nonsense will eventually be eliminated, but I think most VCs who never invest in a success invest in enough doomed models that survive until IPO, (often with built-in failures like a model of exploitation that requires obscurity.)
The highs and lows of tech average together well enough to satisfy Wall Street and then have huge profits for some that VCs that find and hold good investments, and more VCs that feed off a constant influx of sucker investors.
UBI is lazy tech guilt thinking. Not to mention it's arrogant. The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable. Just look around you. Do you think we are in a place without problems that need resolving? Or work to be done? It's truly a problem of goals of humanity that lead to this disaster of demoralizing pay people to exist UBI thinking. Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society. I'm going to write further on this but the UBI mindset is nothing more than lazy arrogant tech people who have no historical frame.
I like the leap of logic where insuring everyone has a minimum standard of living means nobody will ever work again.
UBI has a B in it for a reason. You get to Star Trek "no money replicator based economy" way later. But the fact people go hungry and homeless in a nation where companies hoard trillions of dollars in tax havens is abjectly amoral.
Yes but the lack of jobs is a political problem. It's a problem of vision and goals. Just like a housing crisis. These can be resolved by changing the rules and goals of the group.
People are not things to be engineered. This is our largest collective blindspot. Some people may look at what you see as utopia and say "no, thanks." This can happen for something as simple as UBI. In fact, I'm sure it will.
Progress is defined by enabling people to do more. Do we really want to go back to making energy with coal? It creates lots of jobs. Jobs that can replace with new better ones. I truly believe we are in a crisis of vision. We have food and many material things met but we haven't moved on to pushing for more progress that creates the new jobs politically.
There's danger there. Politics is easily corruptible and divisive when issues of resource allocation are included. Re progress, I don't have an answer. We could argue that despite eliminating all of the jobs, moving to self-driving cars would be good in the same way that reducing coal mining jobs is: both increase safety. But safety isn't everything. It never has been.
Of course there is work to be done. The problem is usually getting someone to pay for it. You need to look at why people don't spend.
One obvious reason is when they don't have the money. Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.
You mention various forms of work. Do you know they are more urgent than what people will spend their money on if given the choice? Maybe it's arrogant to assume you know better than them?
> The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable.
Yeah, true. The last time society worried that new technology and machines would lead to mass unemployment, the opposite happened. We're in a bigger hurry than ever. Maybe that will accelerate even more.
But, if the human labor need for the trucking industry goes away, for example, it doesn't matter whether we've solved all problems, we will have a very large class of people out of work, even if it's temporary.
> Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society.
I agree with this too, but one way to think about UBI is that it could, for the first time, pay people for doing things that are valuable to society, but not profitable. The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics. If it doesn't lead to more customers or more dollars in the next year, it doesn't get funding. At it's imagined best, maybe UBI could enable an economy of social good rather than profit.
> down syndrome students get a lot more funding than genius students.
Uh, Wow. The magnitude of this problem is...? Your solution is...? This rant is relevant to UBI because...?
> How can our economy be driven by 'short term economics' when we have trillions of dollars locked away in 20+ year investments?
20 years is not long term in my book, but that's entirely beside the point. The private profit motive is the short term thinking I was referring to. Financial investments seeking a return for the benefit of a private party are a completely different thing than funding climate change research or education.
> We do pay a lot for education
We spend a lot. That's different than paying teachers a lot or giving students performance based incentives. It's different than having adequate facilities and training for teachers.
> We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
How? What actual change are you proposing here that utilizes short term profits to produce more scientists than criminals?
>How? What actual change are you proposing here that utilizes short term profits to produce more scientists than criminals?
I'd make it much easier to expel students. Some bad kid brings a gun to school in elementary school? They're out for the rest of their life - freeing up resources to spend on better kids. Some bad kid molests another? Gone for life. Some bad kid punches a teacher? Gone for life.
I'd bust the teacher's unions just so I could align pay with performance. They complain about being underpaid, but they have Cadillac health insurance and defined benefit pensions - both of those have astronomical costs and make their compensation much higher than their salary.
I'd also give teachers top cover to conduct the classroom how they like. Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics. Ideally, teaching would be a six-figure position (albeit with an HSA and a 401k) so we would want to respect teachers' time.
I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
> I'd make it much easier to expel students. Some bad kid brings a gun to school in elementary school? They're out for the rest of their life - freeing up resources to spend on better kids. Some bad kid molests another? Gone for life. Some bad kid punches a teacher? Gone for life.
This would do the exact opposite of what you claim. It would produce criminals faster than now. This would also tend to transfer the burden from education to social services, and somewhat to incarceration. Both of those are more expensive than education. You're proposing to increase taxes to pay for people's bad behavior, rather than do anything substantive to fix it at all. No thanks, and good luck.
> Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics.
What are you referring to? How big of a problem is this? Do you have children in the public education system?
> I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
Again, what percent of the system is special education? How much effect will this have? And what do you propose to do with people who need extra help? Leave them to rot? You again are proposing to transfer the special education burden onto even higher cost social services. And with less education, people with special needs will have less power to contribute back to the economy.
Kids who molest other kids and bring guns to school are criminals. We should lock them up early, and we can reduce the cost of prison by getting more labor out of prisoners and busting the guard unions.
Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
> Kids who molest other kids and bring guns to school are criminals. We should lock them up early, and we can reduce the cost of prison by getting more labor out of prisoners and busting the guard unions.
This seems like short-term economic thinking to me. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school, rather than kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens. Inclusion, not exclusion, is how to feed the virtuous cycle.
Also, if it's so easy to reduce the cost of prisons even though people have been debating it for centuries, why hasn't it happened already? How do you just extract more labor out of prisoners?
And what happened to your plan to produce more scientists and fewer criminals? For three comments in a row you've ignored the question of how to convert more would-be criminals into scientists, and talked about reducing dollar costs instead. Pretend I don't care about dollar costs and help me understand how increasing expulsion and
incarceration rates leads to more scientists.
> Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
So what? Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. Some parents will take up more time. What is the actual problem here? What is the economic cost to teachers talking to parents? Since teachers mostly talk to parents outside of school hours, how much extra money for the education budget or the economy will solving this "problem" yield?
> In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
It sounds like regular students take ~60% of the budget. By your math, we could get more bang for our buck by eliminating the non-special-ed services.
Do you have any policy study or experience at all? The more suggestions you add, the more it sounds like you aren't aware of any policy or government or education funding history. People have tried some of the kinds of things you're suggesting in the past, and gotten wildly different results than they expected.
1. Expelling a student for bringing a gun to school is hardly tantamount to 'kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens'. It's preserving the safety and the integrity of the school.
2. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school
To the extent that school can persuade people to trade a life of crime for a more virtuous path. There are some people who are going to be criminals regardless of how much schooling is available to them, those people are lost causes and we should stop investing in them the moment they reveal themselves.
3. The cost of incarceration is high because people are concerned with human rights and getting their cut of the expenditures. Prison would be much cheaper if we just put all the convicts on an island and catapulted basic supplies to them, and just made sure no one swam off the island.
4. I never claimed that my plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals - just that we'd spend less money on criminals and free up resources that could be spent on educating scientists or funding their experiments.
5. Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, but some parents demand extensive communication that's above and beyond what we should expect. And you're right that parents talk to teachers outside of school hours, however, there's no free lunch - we have to pay for it in some way whether that's teacher job dissatisfaction, teacher salary expectations, etc. We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
6. the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI. Ideally we'd have more of it, but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
> I never claimed that my plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals
You literally said this morning: "Hilariously, the solution to education funding is more of the 'short term economics'. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists."
> Expelling a student for bringing a gun to school is hardly tantamount to 'kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens'
Expelling a student for hitting a teacher is, and you mentioned that too. The gun issue depends entirely on why it happened. Some kids are already expelled for bringing guns to school. Some kids don't have a clear concept of why bringing the gun to show off to their friends is so bad. Education, not expulsion, is the only way to prevent it, and the only way to (literally) teach them the lesson. Expulsion only does one thing: disenfranchises the child and leaves them more likely to escalate their bad behavior outside of school. It leaves them at a disadvantage socially and economically and more likely to have to resort to crime in order to live.
How about instead of having a contrived debate about a very tiny minority of kids with guns, we enact some actual gun control in this country, and prevent any kids from having any guns in the first place like other countries do? Then we don't have to criminalize children, and we don't have to expel them in a fit of incredulity. Best of both worlds, and far cheaper than expulsion and incarceration.
What does any of your tirade about child criminals have to do with solving education funding? How many kids in the US are bringing guns to schools, and how much money does it cost in the aggregate?
> We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
What does that have to do with education funding? What is your point here? You suggested that keeping time-hogging parents from teachers was a solution to the education funding problem. How, exactly?
> the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI.
Lower than average achieving healthy students make up 50% of that group you say has a positive ROI. There are also plenty of special needs kids that are physically handicapped and not mentally handicapped.
What is the ROI of education, exactly? How is it measured? Care to share any sources to back that claim up? You just ruled out both all school administration and all special education. How do schools function without administration? Do you believe that school principals and school districts are useless?
If you stopped special education programs and the social services that go along with them, as you suggested, suddenly the parents of those children will need to find alternative care. In many cases that will mean the parent has to care for them during the day themselves, which will pull them out of the workforce. Regardless of the cost of special education, your suggestions could be a net drain on the economy.
> but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
What data do you have that it's failing? Under what metric are you declaring all school admin and special education to have zero return? I'm pretty stunned how deeply discriminatory your statements have been repeatedly. I hope you never have to be on the receiving end of your own ideas.
> If you don't get why someone might think special education is overfunded, go visit a special ed classroom and wonder "how much does it cost society to give these kids places to drool on each other?".
Man, I hope some day, maybe when you have kids, you come to realize what a truly awful thing to say that was. In the mean time, it might be worth reading a bit of history to understand why our country has repeatedly re-affirmed it's decision to uphold the values in the Declaration of Independence to spend money to take care of all it's citizens and not just the lucky healthiest smartest richest ones.
> Your needling for sources is derailing this discussion.
I can totally empathize with feeling like you're being needled, as you say, when you're asked multiple times for evidence to support your claims that you don't have. I will stop asking. Is it possible that the lack of evidence says more about the value of those claims?
This discussion was derailed right from the start when you decided to pin the country's economic problems on difficult children and parents with questions -- things that objectively don't affect the overall budget very much, if at all. I've just been trying to figure out where your anger is coming from, what makes you think that some parents talking to teachers is some kind of drain on the economy, what you think makes it a serious problem that needs solving.
The irony here is 1) you jumped on me over a comment about education that I didn't make, the parent comment did, and 2) your entire calculus of fixation on short-term budget efficiencies is obsolete under UBI & other future possibilities. Using ROI for education is at best specious today. Should UBI come to pass, ROI will not be a meaningful metric at all.
This comment is so deeply uncivil that we've banned the account. If you email us hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll never do anything like this again we can unban you.
Ooh, you might have had a point about spending on education for mentally disabled people far outpacing that for the average student, but adding in the part about having to pay to feed children and "would-be gangsters" makes me think you might have an ulterior motive beyond fixing the education system.
I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers. Because teaching is not something teachers should be doing
>you might have had a point about spending on education for mentally disabled people far outpacing that for the average student, but adding in the part
Do you discredit an idea because of the person espousing it? If so, go hang out with normies who read gossip mags.
>you might have an ulterior motive beyond fixing the education system.
My ulterior motive is a society where the productive people are unleashed to be as great as they can be, and the lazy/incompetent aren't given things at the expense of better investments.
>I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers.
Yeah, I want to live in a society with a norm of parents reading to their children and participating in their child's development. The expectation that only teachers are responsible for an individual's education is the reason we can dump so much money into the system and have little to show for it.
You can just say eugenics. Hiding your argument behind vague terms like "My ulterior motive is a society where the productive people are unleashed to be as great as they can be, and the lazy/incompetent aren't given things at the expense of better investments." when one of the things you mention is food, just makes your argument seem weaker.
Just to clarify, do you donate to planned parenthood cause you support people having a right to an abortion and/or access to other health services, or do you do it so that there are less undesirables in the world?
I don't support the right to an abortion, but I do support abortions. My motivation for donating to planned parenthood is altruistic - if the mother doesn't want the kid, society really doesn't want the kid and doesn't want the mom to have a kid. Society can't be more invested in the kid than their parents.
Ideally we'd tie (reversible) sterilization with welfare participation but the horseshoe of fundies / progressives make that neigh impossible.
And I don't support eugenics at all. I just think that the social contract should have an 'out' and there should be a place in the world where we can put the undesirables (a la Australia). This is why we need to colonize mars (and other planets). There should be enough societies that people can find one that works for them and that societies can isolate themselves from factions they don't want. Look around, liberalism is failing and doesn't offer a credible alternatives to tribal politics. The only way we can make tribal politics safe is to reduce friction in interactions which means more space.
How can you state that you don't support eugenics, but you want to take a set of people and put them in a more hostile environment. That is going to kill off people, in the set you defined, which is eugenics. Your idea about there being enough societies that people can find one that works for them has some merit, but I don't see how that fits with you choosing another group and moving them to an area with less resources. That's not people choosing a society that works for them, that's conquest and exile
If you think taking away resources (which people are not entitled to) is tantamount to murder, then every regime that collects taxes is murderous.
Your definition of 'killing people off' is asinine and lacks nuance. I'm not strong enough take your points seriously, so allow me to take them to absurd conclusions:
Right now, you're taking oxygen out of the air and depositing CO2. Right now, people are dying from polluted air and lack of oxygen, are you responsible for their deaths?
I think there's a pretty good argument that if you create pollution you're responsible, at least in part, for people who die early because of it. I also think you could argue that taxing people, and providing no benefit in return, is murderous.
That benefit part is important though, which I don't see your system providing by just removing people.
But let's ignore all that for a moment and just say we go ahead with your system. Why are other groups moved to Australia, Mars, etc but you and whatever group you've decided you belong to get to stay where you are? What makes these other people move, because you asked? Paid? Forced? I am legitimately curious as to how your plan would work
We have huge problems that could be solved with Ubi. Has nothing to do with working or not working for those already without work, a home, food etc. Besides people are capable of creating a tremendous amount of value in their spare time and often do. Ubi could prove to be a decentralised way of paying people for all the things you mentioned.
What percent of ios users never create a passcode / pin ? I'm just thinking that if face id is defaulted on it would be better than the crowd that never create a pin. I agree it is better to have a pin enabled than faceid and even better both.
Why? I am not terribly upset if someone has my username, but I would be very concerned if they had reproducible biometrics of mine (fingerprints, facial, etc).
Usernames are fixed values and are generally public. Biometrics are also fixed values and are generally only slightly less public. They're both identifiers.
Passwords can be changed and are secrets. They're authenticators.
The difference between them is exactly the difference between identifiers and authenticators. Misunderstanding this difference causes tons of issues, in a wide variety of situations. The most notable one recently is probably Social Security Numbers being used as both, which leads to identity theft.
Because biometrics are usually relatively publicly accessible information. Passwords aren't. You're arguing reproducibility. Well, your face can be replicated by a picture you put on Facebook, fingerprints are left everywhere you go.
Perhaps I was too flippant. Point being, the “public availability/replicability” of the biometric would seem correlated to the point on the username->password continuum.
This will probably matter less once our future devices can interact with our sci-fi personal nanites, or rfid implants in the meantime.
Curated odesk/elancer/freelancer is area of strong need. Original thesis around fixed price generic development was a false offering that did not work well for clients or them - logical that they dropped this. Marketing of top tech talent is also a fraudulent statement according to many who have worked with them. They would do better to pursue the real opportunity with out the misleading marketing.
100% this. At Upwork the ratings are clearly setup to make you select people. You see people with top ratings but when you go through the individual they are much worse. Something is going on with their aggregation. I find freelancer is the best platform for getting decent people but still have issues.
I wonder if there is a model for something like freelancer where they set up offices around popular freelance cities, and people have to work in the office with a quality control manager for X years (3?) before they can work wherever, assuming they don't get weeded out.
Reality is California is terrible at the mega projects - look at LA metro as an example. We are out of practice and the graft level is through the roof. Any public funds are likely far better spent on smaller projects that are chosen for the outsize benefit.
SF to LA is already solved by airlines and the freeway. The benefit of a rail will be marginal and temporary when cars become good at driving the freeway autonomously.
The human mind wants freedom and to have options. That's why the grass is always greener. Spend a month traveling and being back at home will sound ideal. Get stuck in an office and traveling sounds perfect. Finding the right balance is the key. In my case though I have had the freedom at times to be anywhere I still gravitate to keeping a home base.
The hogging of VC funds by airbnb, uber, and many other not startups is super unhealthy for the startup ecosystem. The public markets will eventually punish these companies for valuations that lack transparency. Airbnb is on the way out with their current short term renting business in most large cities. It's illegal and the quality of service is suffering dramatically. Supply side quality is on the way down. Demand side quality is terrible too. To justify their valuation they are opening up the gates to terrible customers. I get it, they may go into other markets with all this money like the long term rental business or tours business or airline flights.. maybe hotels? Reality is they are not going to be great or better at any of these things than the current companies in those markets and certainly not by any significant degree to own the market.
Upvoted but sadly you can't take YC prodigy and downvote. It's a lose-lose propositon kinda like staying in an airbnb. Say something nice about YC or don't say something at all.
I didn't downvote, but your claims could use some justification. What makes you think quality is declining? Personal experience? Second hand anecdotes? Media stories?
Personal experience. It's fairly obvious if you have been using the service for any length of time in cities like SF, NYC, LA, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, really any large city that has banned or curtailed the legal offering of the service. The result is you have a lot more people offering properties where it is banned leading to awkward situations for customers. The listings are not permanent and get removed as soon as they receive a bad review. There are no checks on host providers at all. I actually think it is not any better than craigslist at this point.
Agree completely that our space program needs a new significant mission to stay relevant. However, I don't think going to space matters as much as it did last century. During JFK's reign catching up in space with the soviets was more than about going to space, it was about being able to defend the country. Today I think our new Moon Mission should be about solving climate change. That's an issue the country and world need to come together on to solve.
Gerard Degroot argues in "The Dark Side of the Moon" [1] that going to the moon was mostly about (1) allowing Democrats (LBJ and JFK) to score political points by criticising the Eisenhower administration and (2) cashing in on American cultural enthusiasm for space (Buck Rogers, Orson Welles, etc.). Space exploration didn't actually make much sense in terms of defense policy, international relations, or scientific research.
Eisenhower hated the idea of throwing money away on expensive programs that offered poor return on investment and were primarily funded for political reasons (his famous comments about the military industrial complex were made in a speech at the very end of his presidency). He funded development of American ICBM and space reconnaissance programs in the late 50s, but did so separately from space exploration programs. By the time of the Mercury missions we already had mature ICBM and satellite programs and it didn't have much to do with real defense needs.
Even in the late 50s the US was never really behind the USSR in terms of space technology, but for strategic reasons it was sometimes unclear how far ahead the US was (for example, we had extensive photographs from satellites showing Russian nuclear missile launch sites; these indicated that we had far more missiles than the Russians, but at the time the satellites used to collect these photos were still secret, and so the intelligence they revealed was not widely known, even though most Americans believed at the time that America lagged behind the Russians).
Sputnik may have been the first satellite in space, but Eisenhower had intentionally stopped von Braun from launching a satellite even though we were very close to having that capability. Eisenhower was mostly concerned with establishing a precedent that would allow satellites to fly over foreign countries, and didn't mind if the Russians were the first to space if this meant that one of their satellites would establish this precedent instead of one of ours.
Just from the look of it, without having read the book nor Degroot's critics, looks like a pretty unbalanced viewpoint:
"In the things the we seemed to be behind, we actually were ahead but it was a secret. In the things we irrefutably were behind, it's because we were just waiting for them to set the precedent".
When an argument has such an onanistic appeal to patriots, it's suspect.
That book is fairly critical and a far cry from a patriotic tome. If anything, its anti-patriotic and is overly critical of NASA and US space policy while being fairly mum on the Soviet program and not having too much criticism of the costs of the Soviet programs. That book is the anti-Apollo and dismissive of US accomplishments. Sadly, we live in an age where ahistoric claptrap gets popular because internet forum bubbles encourage "alternative" thinking for the sake of being contrarian.
It is also full of dishonestly. The son of one of the engineers claims a interview in the book never happened:
"But the final word goes to Eisenhower, who once vetoed Apollo. He reminded Americans that "every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed".
This was in reference to the war machine, not our civilian space program and its disingenuous to apply it to NASA.
Lastly, yes the US could have beat sputnik. Recent declassified memos which seem to be authentic have revealed this possibility. Von Braun had a 4-stage Jupiter-C in 1956. It had the capabilities to launch a satellite into orbit. Apparantly, the 4th stage was left ignored due to political concerns of setting off a arms race, or even a war, with the USSR if a US satellite flew over its country every 90 minutes or so.
> Recent declassified memos which seem to be authentic have revealed this possibility. Von Braun had a 4-stage Jupiter-C in 1956. It had the capabilities to launch a satellite into orbit. Apparantly, the 4th stage was left ignored due to political concerns of setting off a arms race, or even a war, with the USSR if a US satellite flew over its country every 90 minutes or so.
Do we have access to the USSR's declassified materials regarding Sputnik? Can't really assume they launched as soon as they could, given that there existed arguments to hold it.
I agree that we need to solve climate change. It's the single most important issue facing humanity at the moment. Where I don't agree though is the general idea that it's mutually exclusive with space exploration. A common theme is that space research often pays of in advancements down here.
If we actually have a stable outpost on the moon or Mars. We'll likely advance the state of solar systems and energy storage. We'll also likely need research into maintaining a stable biome on said station. And then there is the next generation of scientists that will be inspired. So in a roundabout way, space exploration could help save our butts down here.
Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up. Climate change will never be solved until (to paraphrase a quip from memory) global inequity has been evened out to a level a Pakistani brickmaker would consider prosperity. I don't see countries with higher standards of living making those sacrifices for the greater good of our planet.
I'd sleep much better betting our species on space expansion than on sustainability.
PS: To say nothing of the possibility of peak global output. Maybe we only get one shot at the level of resources and technologies required to seed space.
If peak global output is barely enough to colonize, then there is no way any of the colonies will ever reach that level of output, and then whats the point? It should be done sustainably, or it doesn't really matter at all.
"Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up."
Agreed. Not only screwed up, but screwed up in multiple ways. Throwing more money at the dozens of money sinks here does nothing to significantly help ensure our long-term survival. It might be the right thing to do, and over time continuing to do things like this may mean that mankind enters into some new wondrous universe free from pain and suffering. But right now, right here? We need an insurance policy. We need to get the hell off this ball of mud.
Want to know why the space program never went anywhere? Because back in the 60s and 70s, people said exactly the same thing "We need to spend our money on earthbound problems"
We've spent trillions on those problems. They are still here. In fact, the places we've made the most progress are the places we didn't try to fix.
I'm not in favor of a new huge national mission. I think a huge national goal to decrease LEO launch costs by 99.9% or more would be worth spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on. But heck, if we narrowed our focus to just that, we could probably get it done a lot cheaper than if we went down the mission creep road again.
To be accurate, we did go to the moon and do the other things.
The other things at the time happened to be ensuring people weren't lynched for the color of their skin and ensuring Vietnam didn't fall to communism on the current administration's watch.
Care to go back to that porch in the Appalachians that LBJ sat on when he declared his war on poverty -- a war that has cost trillions -- and take a look at the results?
Or heed Bono, when he states the obvious that dumping money on things because they are politically important is a counter-indicative factor of success of the effort. In fact, just look at the evidence.
Political systems exist for political reasons.
The danger, as I have outlined it, is that instead of spending money in some kind of mathematical way, we behave as humans always have, and spend money based on immediate pain or rewards.
If you can't sustain a a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, what are your chances of getting one of the ground where there is none, and then sutaining it?
Are we really sure this isn't just a bunch of rationalization because really, we ought to confront the people who carve up resources and people? Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice, rather than celebrating and comforting them. So yeah, if we can't do the serious things, I guess toy stuff is all we're stuck with.
I believe we can sustain a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, but I don't think we should want to:
Building the capability to get into space will be hard.
Building the capability to get into space while trying to preserve the self-repairing ecosystem of the Earth that birthed us, may be much harder, and might be impossible.
If a catastrophic event is truly inevitable (and whether it's an asteroid, or too many cows is irrelevant to me), then getting into space is absolutely essential for our species long-term survival, and a conversation about sustaining our ecosystem really needs to be about how long we need this ecosystem to last us: At the current rate of pollution, it's very possible the earth will never become uninhabitable to humans simply because humans aren't yeast.
That being said: A more measured conversation about increasing quality of life by reducing pollution isn't necessarily in conflict with the goals of getting off the planet. It'd just be nice to have that conversation instead of the polarizing one that most people seem to want to have about climate change.
> Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice
I'm all for creating as much justice and sustainability as we can with an efficient amount of effort, but still for stopping short of perfection. In a thousand years, which of your options is going to matter more to our future descendants?
You're going to need to look beyond NASA for earth sciences for the time being - there's about to be a certain change in the US that has already said earth science research is to be scrapped.
The new moon mission will likely literally be a moon mission, as the incoming change has alluded to.
Honestly, not sure what the future is for NASA, other than perhaps the past, and a return to primarily propaganda rather than scientific activities.
Can downvoters please explain which of these facts they disagree with?
As a non-american I still think that climate change is the wrong problem for the US to focus on, and space exploration and colonization goals are better targets.
The US has a huge concentration of wealth and brainpower. Neither of those are what's need to solve climate change. You'd need an army of Mahatma Gandhis and the new breed of "social entrepreneurs", not of Einsteins and Oppenheimers.
And you know, that concentration of wealth and brainpower is actually one of the problems that would have to be solved to solve climate change: India and China and soon Africa and all the other poorer countries will keep not giving a fuck about climate change and polution if it helps them pull up their living standards. Those CO2 and methane taxes: they'd rather fight a nuclear/chem/bio war than pay them! Only thing that would incite a more global cooperation towards reducing climate change would be a massive global redistribution of wealth.
And that would mean the end of US as an economic superpower among many other things.
So imho, US should shoot for the stars while you still can and raise the standard of the international space race at all cost! ...cause after the next either world war or "global redistribution of wealth" there might not be enough concentration of brainpower and wealth left to do these things, and the human race needs some kind of plan B!
New Einsteins and Oppenheimers are precisely what's needed to fight climate change. "Social enterpreneurs" will do jack squat, other than make people feel better. The only way to actually beat climate change is to improve the relevant technology to the point where the route to high standard of living is cheaper to do with clean tech. Constantly reducing the cost of solar power, and better batteries mean that we are halfway there.
The job of carbon taxes is not to be the cause of reducing global emissions in the long term. It's to make development of cleaner energy production more economically viable in the short term, to drive investment that way, so that the cost can eventually be driven below fossil fuels.
It's not necessary for some to be pulled down for others to climb up. The rest of the world catching up (and they will) will do nothing to the capability of the the USA.
While I try to avoid politics on HN - I'm one data point in disagreement with you.
The only thing to realistically fight climate change is de-population. At least if you want everyone to have a similar standard of living as the "West".
Cleaner energy is something we need - but simple math can tell you that at our current population growth and developmental growth of incredibly poor but populous nations - it only extends the inevitable.
Any environmental program that doesn't make population growth it's first concern is simply a feel-better program in my opinion. It's ignoring the mountain to focus on the molehills.
Anything a future environmental Einstein comes up with will be instantly used to slam the world population right up the the new limit (e.g. the invention of nitrogen fixation).
You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...
Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.
We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!
But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.
Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.
But... it just feels totally backwards to me!
Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.
Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.
No, I was just trying to avoid the downvotes for a potentially viewed as anti- or pro- trump comment - I'm expressing no opinion on him, just an outcome according to his purported policies. I'm not prepared to say whether I think this is a good or bad outcome, just an outcome. Up to others to decide their own view.
The election is now being referred to as the "recent unpleasantness". I do agree that not saying "Trump" makes him seem a little too Voldemort for my tastes.
He's not being clever. The incoming administration's own statements back his sentiment up. There's going to be more show than science. The incoming administration -- or those making up the incoming administration -- want to use NASA as a propaganda piece, not a problem solving institution.
> there is something to be said for the concept that anything directed by science or engineering almost always results in better outcomes than what is directed by politicians
People had the same complaint about the space program in the 1960's. That it was feel good fluff. That it was a boondoggle with no substance.
And if you watch old movies, you'll hear it echoed it many places.
Clockwork Orange has the quote from the wino:
Men on the moon? And men Spinnin' 'round the earth?
And there's not no attention paid to early law and
order no more?!
I don't really agree. I think it's of profound importance to solve the problem of being able to sustain life in an artificial environment.
If we can confine ourselves within an encapsulated environment, and keep ourselves alive by recycling all biological exhaust, and drawing energy from highly durable, efficient power sources, and/or solar power, we can roll those capabilities into ways of life that dramatically reduce human impact on their surroundings. The two concepts are related, because space travel involves the problem of trying to replicate a sustainable terrestrial environment through artificial means.
