You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?
EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?
Would be nice for oil and gas companies to pay for all the emissions say, starting when they found out about it and decided to lie to the public. Maybe also bring charges against the PR firms they used since given those same PR firms worked for the tobacco industry clearly they won't stop until there are consequences.
"Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years."
(And most of the other providers don't plan for theirs to burn up within a few years. Giant disposable LEO constellations are new.)
we cannot have private trillionaires milking "privatize the profits and social the costs"
no more, it has to end immediately
they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society
even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate
also, criminal murder charges for those who enable actions like, "poisoning a water supply," "creating an opiode epidemic," "giving millions of people cancer, knowingly"
I just don't understand why, killing one person is murder, but killing hundreds over many years is, "just the cost of doing business."
The satellites aren't worse. It is the rockets that are worse. On the way up they emit various things into the stratosphere, which is about the worst place you can emit stuff when it comes to affecting the atmosphere.
It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.
(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).
You may want to compare the flight profiles of jets and rockets, what layers of the atmosphere they emit in, and how the effects of the things they omit vary by where in the atmosphere they are emitted.
> Niobium and hafnium do not occur as free elements in nature, but are refined from mineral ores. They are used in semiconductors and superalloys.
> In addition to these two unusual elements, a significant number of particles contained copper, lithium and aluminum at concentrations far exceeding the abundance found in meteorics, or ‘space dust.’ “The combination of aluminum and copper, plus niobium and hafnium, which are used in heat-resistant, high-performance alloys, pointed us to the aerospace industry,’’ Murphy said.
if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days
Most major airports will already have a counter-UAS system, it's a huge industry.
One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
* Pilots are very concerned about life and safety and are heavily exposed to drone “incident” related anecdotes, so they err far on the side of caution with drone sightings. Which is to say a very low percentage of them are real.
* Poorly implemented cUAS systems, especially ones based on passive or active RF locating (radar) can actually make the problem worse: they hallucinate everything into drones, pilots hallucinate everything into drones, and now everything is a drone. This also happens frequently when people try to repurpose military systems (which are usually designed to operate in significantly less crowded environments and trigger at the slightest hint of an issue, due to mostly orthogonal-to-airports threat models people discuss at length on this thread like “dark drones”) into urban use.
This type of array based directionfinding system is cool and it could work as a small ingredient in a drone detection system, but it’s not anywhere near the state of the art in the space and most airports are probably already ahead of this to some extent.
If would likely need to track them well (not sure from this article/video if that's the case?) to be useful in that scenario...
Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...
There are more way advanced systems for cuas, where they infuse radar and visual and acoustic plus now AI to minimize the false positives, but practically speaking, they are not bullet proof and still fail. RID (remote ID) is a way to have a cooperative communication and was mandated in US, but there are ways too to spoof it and cloak it.
Yeah RemoteID is trivial to spoof using an ESP32. Most hobby pilots I know simply don't comply with RemoteID. And bad actors certainly won't purchase a $75 device to add to their drone.
It does become a bit more difficult with consumer grade off the shelf drones because it's built in. Still defeatable by the determined of course.
if you aren't afraid of difficult math breaking your brain, I highly recommend this youtube channel "PhysicsExplained" (sorry I forget his actual name but he is brilliant)
he has a recent two-parter on Maxwell and electro-magnetism that are EXCELLENT
but I am not kidding about the math, he starts off slow and gentle and hooks you in, but sometimes after 10 minutes in my brain is screaming and cannot keep up
Ignore that we funded the taliban and warlords for the next 50 years with 1.9 billion in vehicles, machine guns, small arms, night vision, and explosives?
I didn't ignore that. That solidly fits under "completely predictable colossal failure".
But the next 50 years of funding they received came from money we spent prior to us leaving. Certainly we could have done a better job with the withdrawal (to put it lightly), but it's nonetheless good that we aren't still spending money there.
We can't just completely exit Iran without a time machine. Dufus Donny attempting to escape his Epstein folly by kicking the hornet's nest and now Iran holds the gulf hostage for as long as they want.
guess what, Iran will hold the gulf hostage regardless if US is there or not
exactly like the nightmare Afghanistan is for women there now left to the Taliban
regardless if US was there or not it would have happened
world is an absolutely horrible place filled with monsters
you can't say all these countries should be saved by US and then end USAID to let a million people die with food and medication already paid for left rotting in warehouses
btw we are also starving all the people in Cuba to death with an illegal blockcade since the start of the year, so why is Cuba our responsibility too?
at some point WE become worse monsters, we're at that point
The US has been the monster for most of the world for the last 70 years. It's shocking that most Americans still don't see that.
The Middle-East's bad record on human rights can be traced back to in large part to the meddling of the US, because it serves the interests of Israel and because of oil. In the time of Nasser, the Middle-East was a different place.
The strait was open with no tolls before the Israel/US attacks. Everyone with a brain and a modicum of imagination (except Trump, apparently) knew for decades that Iran had the latent capability to close the strait, and hence preferred either a diplomatic resolutions or a defacto detente.
If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform.
Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great.
That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.
> If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale.
It's not about belief. It's about trust. And as they say: trust, but verify.
We could trust the data, but we should, of course, verify it. And that's generally how it worked. And both sides of the aisle happily trusted this data and verified it. It wasn't always correct, but not so much that you should start by not trusting it at all.
But now we are at that point. I've taken the attitude of simply assuming the opposite and starting from that position, and it has served me well most of the time. I take what the current administration is claiming, assume the opposite and start from there.
To be fair, I agree with your sentiment, don't just believe what the government is saying. But there has been a dramatic shift since January 2024.
People will both-sides this, but you are right. When your express purpose and position is to promote unitary executive theory and destroy US democracy, everything is suspect.
Marketplace (APM) has had several discussions about how difficult it is to mess with BLS numbers, but it's only a matter of time as Vought and Heritage make their way into these organizations.
that might be a evolutionary step where you just pump in electrolyte under a housing into waterproof container and every 10 years just pump it out again for fresh electrolyte
doesn't burn like LiFePo4 so no fire risks, though I am not sure what a short-circuit would do in damage/danger
why even under a structure though, just do it like a septic tank?
note sodium-ion is no longer two or three times the weight of lithium-ion, there is only a +33% penalty
apparently the problem is there is not yet enough volume in production to compete on price, which I thought was the whole point?
> sodium-ion specs have improved to the point that the technology could break into the general EV market. A recent study by Moritz Schütte at Aachen University in Germany and his colleagues found that a sodium-ion battery by the manufacturer Hina rivals Tesla’s lithium-ion batteries on most parameters, although it would still be a third heavier
> But CATL claims its sodium-ion battery has an energy density of 175 watt-hours per kilogram, which can compete with the lithium-iron-phosphate batteries in low-cost models from Tesla and others. And while sodium-ion batteries still haven’t quite beaten lithium batteries on price, that could change as they expand, according to Schütte
> sodium ions generate less heat in electrochemical reactions, reducing fire risk, so less money can be spent on cooling. They also form weaker bonds with the electrolyte, so they don’t slow down as much in the cold
That's competing against LFP chemistry, so 33% penalty on a chemistry that itself has a penalty versus NMC.
My understanding about sodium though is that the performance in cold and heat is excellent. So even if you pay a penalty for weight, you can drop the thermal management, which saves quite a bit.
For grid storage, this chemistry will be a game changer. For vehicle, I think it has a ways to go before being preferred over LFP, but that's a guess.
I do wonder if there will be a convergence between sodium-ion battery architectures and cheaper, renewable-powered desalination. Could industrial seawater mining be competitive as a sodium feedstock source?
I just realize we have heaps and heaps of seasalt sludge around desalinization units. Dirty sludge, but salty nevertheless, right there at the fingertips. Maybe some of it could be useful?
Trump Inc is a white-collar crime family which is why he pardons every white-collar crime they can find
BTW you know those classified records he took to Mar-a-lago that almost put him in prison?
They were all the records about his family businesses, it's documented, they were unique investigation records and he was trying to end all investigations
1. try taking Saccharomyces Boulardii asap, it is a very different kind of probiotic, a yeast actually, that tends to push out the bad and promote the good
2. JAK-STAT inhibitors are the only known drug to get the body to stop attacking itself from autoimmune diseases, but not a cure and unfortunately they cost an absolute fortune without insurance but importing from Canada and India is possible
I would normally be inclined to jump in and top your recommendation with other, spore forming probiotics, eg Subtilis, Coagulans, etc.
My old friend in Aussieland has been struggling with a multitude of ailments, gastrointestinal among them. After doing a few hours of well-intended research, I gave him a list of things I thought might help, all with disclaimers and contraindications noted. He chose to pursue the Coagulans. It nearly killed him. At first I was skeptical and insisted it was something else, or perhaps a tainted batch (which it may have been). He nearly lost consciousness, became weak, turned red, and swelled with difficulty breathing. Neither of us have an official professional evaluation of the cause, but it seems he had a severe allergic reaction to that strain, possibly as a result of microbial conflict, endotoxins, who knows, but it sure did scare the hell out of him.
That did not change my perspective on probiotics, but it was a reminder that each individual is, well, individual, and much of what we do experimentally is a gambit.
Saccharomyces Boulardii is not like any other probiotic
go ask google or chatgpt to explain why and you'll get it, more than I can narrate here
it will not colonize and can even be taken with antibiotics to help the gut survive
as long as the person is not allergic to yeast they would be fine in theory
once a person stops taking it there is no trace of it in your system 3-5 days later
ps. never take multi-strain probiotics, if you think the supplement world is sketchy there is absolutely no regulation or consistency to the probiotic world
Just in case you thought I had anything to do with your comment being d-voted, I didn't. I almost never d-vote anything, and my comment-voting 'privileges' have been suspended due to excess u-voting. That said, I was not disputing your suggestion, but rather adding a pinch of anecdote. Saccharomyces Boulardii is one of the only 'probiotics' regularly used in clinical environments, and for good reason. Its protective effects in C-Diff alone give it credibility lacking in many prescription medicines.
No dispute here, other than for cases of compromised immunity, where pretty much everything is a potential risk.
make them pre-pay a multi-trillion cleanup and cancer fund for all the toxic waste, not just the launches but pollution burning up in the atmosphere
* https://satellitemap.space/
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787042
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