Thanks to Trump, hospitals will have to disclose prices for procedures starting in 2021.
What a concept.
[Late-morning update]
Hospitals sue to be allowed to keep their prices secret.
Gosh, it’s almost as though they have something to hide.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Advanced Space Propulsion
It’s the power supply, dummy.
I do think that ultimately, absent something like anti-matter, or perhaps fusion, beamed power is the solution to opening the solar system. It could either push sails, or provide power for electric propulsion.
Back On The Air
We drove back to CA from Colorado this past weekend, and tried to get in Sunday night, but as we approached the California border, we ran into a jam of people returning from Thanksgiving weekend. It took us an hour to get from Jean to Primm at the border (a few miles), so we gave up and turned around to go back to Vegas, which had cheap rooms on an off-season Sunday night (though infuriatingly, the room at the Luxor was only forty bucks, the “resort fee” took it up to seventy). Add in ten bucks for parking and taxes, and it was a hundred, but still a good deal for a luxury room.
Anyway, we drove home yesterday, getting in mid afternoon. My back is quite a bit better, and the painful spasms are gone, but now the problem has migrated to a pain on the inside of my right thigh when I walk, probably as a result of how I was walking when my back hurt. I’ll be going in for epidurals this week, and starting some kind of physical therapy, which will probably just be standard strength training, which I should have been doing anyway.
Of course, the new problem du jour is a furnace that’s not lighting, which apparently started over the weekend, according to our house sitter. Last time this happened it was a bad igniter, and I’m hoping that’s the problem this time as well, because it’s an easy and cheap fix.
But the fun never ends.
[Late-afternoon update]
As I suspected, it was a bad igniter. These things seem to be like light bulbs, in that they have no predictable life, and can fail at any random time. Of course, in a sense, that’s exactly what they are, in that you’re heating a filament with electricity, except not in vacuum.
Starship
…had its first test-stand failure.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speculation: Bad welds from working in cold, dark, and wind.
[Friday-afternoon update]
Was the loss of Starship a setback?
No, it shows that they’re making rapid progress.
[Bumped]
Meat, Saturated Fat, and Long Life
It’s just amazing how much crap nutrition advice we’ve been given for decades, and many continue to spew the nonsense.
Girls In STEM
My buddy Chantelle Baier just put together an event in Cincinnati in which they launched fifty Estes rockets at a time. Chantelle is the one in black standing by the wall in the left center of the picture.
Boeing
How and when the company started its downhill slide. I always thought the move to Chicago was a bad idea.
They’re Always The Last Place You Look
The Air Force inventory misidentified the locations of 79 nuclear missiles.
Can’t anyone play this game?
Android Phones
Hundreds of millions of them are vulnerable to having their cameras and mikes hacked.
I’ll have to check the Motorola site to see if they have a patch for my G6. This kind of thing is why I avoid the use of my cell unless I’m traveling.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, it seems that one way to prevent this is to not grant an app permission to access device storage. I rarely do that, so I’m probably OK.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, link fixed.
Sand
Are we really running out of it?
The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete.
We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives – Pascal Peduzzi The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand.
Ironically, as we discussed at the Space Settlement Summit last week, lunar regolith dust has ideal properties in that regard, which is why it’s such nasty stuff to deal with. Probably not worth the cost of importing it to earth, though.
[Update a while later]
For some reason, this reminds me of the old joke about what would happen if socialists took over the Sahara Desert.