Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Falcon Heavy

15 Comments

Leonard David has a story on its prospects for initial success, with quotes from Yours Truly.

To expand on the point, while he didn’t include it, I told Leonard in email:

The other issue is not launch reliability, but schedule reliability. SpaceX has aborted launches of the Falcon 9 when one or more of the engines was indicating performance issues on ignition. Three times as many engines means a lot higher probability of having an issue with one of them. For example, while I don’t know what the ignition reliability of a Merlin D is, suppose it’s 99% (that is, there’s a one in a hundred chance of failure to perform up to spec on ignition). For nine engines, that means the probability of a Falcon 9 aborting on the pad due to an engine issue would be one minus 0.99 to the ninth power, or about 8% per flight, or about once every dozen flights (which doesn’t seem that far off from their record). I don’t know what their flight rules will be for the Heavy, but if they have the same rule that they can’t take off with an underperforming engine, the reliability for twenty-seven engines will be one minus 0.99 to the 27th power, or 24%. That is, if they’re only 0.99 reliable per engine, and require all engines operating properly to take off, they have about a one in four chance of aborting a Falcon Heavy every single flight. That says to me that either they think Merlin reliability is greater than that (which it could well be) or that they’ll relax the rules to allow engine out from liftoff, or perhaps both.

Regardless, here’s hoping for a successful flight in less than three months.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

White Nationalists Versus SJWs

57 Comments

They’re not fighting over ideological differences, they’re fighting because they have so much in common. Much like the Nazis and the Communists.

I’m always amused when the most race-obsessed people in the world accuse normal people of being racists.

[Sunday-morning update]

The thread seems to have drifted into discussion of Joe Arpaio. He was a sadistic scumbag, but the people of Maricopa County re-elected him multiple times. There are many Joe Arpaios and terrible county jails in this country. The only reason Arpaio was prosecuted by the Obama Department of (In)Justice was because he refused to knuckle under to their insistence that Arizona not enforce federal immigration laws.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Don’t call these people (or anyone, really) “anti-fascist”:

We may not take today’s anarcho-communists as seriously as we did back when they had the power, the weapons, and the infrastructure to murder tens of millions of people. But their goals are no different. As they put it, they don’t want a “U.S.A. at all.” The country they want to occupy the center of North America has no First Amendment, no freedom of expression, and people with opposing views (of any views, not just Nazis) are beaten, imprisoned or murdered for intellectual dissent. They may run the gamut from anarchism to revolutionary socialism in their views, but they have far more in common with fascists than they do with the people they seek to attract with the sweet-sounding “anti-fascist” label.

Davies notes that the propaganda value of “anti-fascism” in the West reached its apex when Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War, with help from the fascist governments of Italy and Germany. It then fell out of favor when Stalin aligned with Hitler in hopes of devouring half of eastern Europe. Before the Germans turned against them, the Soviets seized half of Poland, annexed the Baltic States, and invaded Finland in the 1939-1940 Winter War, casting its democratic government at the time as a fascist enemy (of course).

So always with these little would-be tyrants. When you use the label “antifa” or “anti-fascist,” you are helping and enabling a resurgence of terrorist liars in the exact same tradition, who are indistinguishable from neo-Nazis except in the specific motivations for and targets of their authoritarian impulses and irrational violence.

Yup.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Yes, “antifa” is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.

Yes, as noted above, going back to Stalin.

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