We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Some time in the next week or two, pending only FAA aproval, SpaceX is planning to fly Starhopper, a test device for their next generation Starship launch system. Starhopper looks like a water tower with an attached rocket engine, mostly because it is indeed a water tower with an attached rocket engine. Starhopper is planned to rise to 200 metres into the air and then land, testing control systems and engine technology. This is a follow-up to a previous 5 metre test flight.
The engine is a brand new design called Raptor, which has a high specific impulse, meaning it is unusually efficient. Eventually, Starship will use up to 41 Raptor engines.
The test flight will be an exciting moment. The reason space travel is so expensive is that conventional rockets get thrown away after only a single use. (Imagine how unaffordable a flight from London to Berlin would be if the aircraft were thrown out at the end of the trip.) While a Saturn V would cost roughly $1bn today, the fuel would only cost about $1m. The bulk of current spaceflight cost is thus the cost of expending an extremely expensive piece of capital equipment instead of reusing it.
So, there is an opportunity to reduce the marginal cost of getting objects into orbit by orders of magnitude. SpaceX have already achieved some re-usability with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. However, Starship will be both much bigger (it will lift 100T or more into low earth orbit compared to Falcon Heavy’s 65T) and is the first ever fully reusable orbital launch vehicle (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy do not recover the second stage). It may even cost less to fly 100T into orbit than it currently does to launch a very small rocket like Rocket Lab’s Electron that lifts only 250kg to orbit at a price of about $7m.
Because it will be able to be refueled in orbit, it will also be able take that 100T to the moon or even Mars (albeit at additional cost because of the need for flights to loft the fuel.)
In other words, we are witnessing a revolution in space travel.
And with that stainless steel design, which can be transpiration cooled to avoid the use of heat shield tiles, it looks just like space travel was supposed to look back in the 50s.
If private companies sold people water, they would regard high levels of demand as a market opportunity. When the government runs water systems, high levels of demand mean shortages. It’s insane. Instead of finding good ways to meet demand with technology, we get price distortion, rationing, and glum pronouncements about the sins of mankind.
– Perry Metzger, reacting to this drivel.
“Capitalism” is a Marxist epithet for the condition that normal people call “liberty”.
– Commenter ‘Zero Sugar’ over on Guido Fawkes.
Woman who no-one had heard of until she married a royal “set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status”. I mean I agree but she’s got her work cut out.
– Rob Fisher, commenting on this.
A new update issued by watchdog groups on climate change indicated this afternoon that we only have 12 seconds left until climate change destroys the planet.
We previously thought we had just 12 years, then 10 years, but the latest update indicates that we have well under a minute.
“The earth will be totally destroyed in the next, oh, 12 seconds,” said Beto O’Rourke at a rally. “If you don’t give the government a bunch of money and power, it will happen. Trust me.”
“So hand over the cash, guys,” he said. “Like, now. I’m super serious.”
This tragic development means that humanity won’t have time to correct climate change, and our writers probably won’t even have time to finish thi…
– The Babylon Bee
Are they really such idiots to poison you in a place where suspicions point only at them? It’s a good question. For now I can say one thing with certainty: the people in power in Russia are really quite stupid guys. It seems to you that in their actions you need to look for secret meaning or a rational purpose. But in fact they are just stupid, malicious and obsessed with money.
– Alexei Navalny
Perhaps the first blow to the technocratic mentality came with personal computers, pioneered not by bureaucratic think tanks, but by college kids and hobbyists. Then in 2000, the private firm Celera beat the government-run Human Genome Project in mapping the human genome, despite the government’s almost decade-long head start.
Today, the leaders in space technology are not at NASA but at private firms such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX. True, these companies benefit from government subsidies — some of them shockingly wasteful — but nonetheless, they are demonstrating once again economic advantages of private industry over government management of technology. According to Ed Hudgins, an expert on space privatization, “as a government bureaucracy, NASA simply can’t be efficient. Every decision must be vetted and procedures followed that have more to do with protecting butts than protecting safety and keeping costs reasonable.” Private companies, by contrast, are not only faster at changing plans when necessary, but they have the incentive to do so, because they—unlike government entities—must bear the costs of their mistakes.
– Timothy Sandefur
Also back on the front page is world-famous self-improvement guru Tony Robbins himself, whose signature line may be: “There’s no such thing as failure. There is only feedback.” Well, Robbins just got some feedback from his publisher, which cancelled his book deal after BuzzFeed reported that he berated victims of rape and domestic violence, used racial slurs, and exposed himself to female staffers and fans. (The trifecta of professional suicide in today’s era of #MeToo and #BLM.)
The Robbins affair is the latest embarrassment for a movement that has seen its share of them since Tony became the Pope of Empowerment. But America’s obsession with incubating positivity and happiness has always amounted to less than meets the eye. For at least a half-century we’ve been putting the cart before the horse when it comes to aspirational thinking, and evidence suggests that individuals and society are both suffering for it.
– Steve Salerno
I spent two summers speaking about the Modern Slavery Act to female factory workers in Sri Lanka’s free trade zones, which are industrial areas with a number of garment factories that supply many foreign companies. I found there is intense pressure on local managers to clean up their assembly lines in such a way that the western companies which hire them could not be accused of modern slavery. The pressure to appear “clean” results in an unhealthy working environment.
It also limits women’s freedom in a number of ways. For instance, a number of women I spoke to engaged in part-time sex work to make extra money outside of their factory jobs. This work was of their own choosing – and very different to the sexual trafficking or exploitation that the Modern Slavery Act is also designed to stop. But local managers feared it would be seen by Western auditors as exploitation and threaten their contracts. As one factory manager told me: “If we do not fire part-time sex workers, our factories can get blacklisted, and our orders will be cancelled.”
– Sandya Hewamanne
There’s sufficient evidence that Stanley Kubrick directed the fake moon landing film, but being a perfectionist he did it on location.
– Runcie Balspune
The UK is following the USA in adopting conviction-free, hell, trial-free presumption of guilt. It starts with ‘obvious’ bad guys but as USA’s example with asset forfeiture shows, it doesn’t stop there.
– Perry de Havilland, discussing this.
In terms of the massively deluded concerning economics as we all know John McDonnell is one of life’s winners. Anyone who can possibly observe the past 40 years and decide that capitalism as failed is clearly, obviously, either nuts or ignorant. True, he saw through the Senior Lecturer but still. He is though insisting that a Labour victory, with those associated policies of uncompensated nationalisation, yet more of the country’s investment running through government, will raise the value of sterling.
This might, you know, not happen.
– Tim Worstall
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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