Thrashy

The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who'd take them back to the conservative approach?

Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they'd celebrated those attempts that didn't quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship's failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX's initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That's not the case for many others.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything -- very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially -- and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn't blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That's arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren't afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing's case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

Another perovskite hype piece. You'll know that they've got something that's commercially viable once they're making these sorts of efficiency claims and not omitting information about cell degradation.

Israel has been on dubious moral ground from the beginning. There is, perhaps, a future in which Israel either accepts existence as a pluralistic, multiethnic state, or forces Jewish settlers back into its internationally-recognized borders in order to facilitate the existence of an independent Palestinian state, but those futures seem remote and unlikely -- and unless one or the other of them becomes reality, Israel will continue as it began: a settler-colonial state enforcing a regime of apartheid on the native people they have intentionally displaced, disenfranchised, and dispossessed.

Given that the first perovskites studied had lifespans that could be measured in minutes, this is great progress, but the fundamental problem is that as a class of materials they just don't want to exist outside of an inert atmosphere. Without significant progress in stability and encapsulation materials, they're more of a research curiosity than a viable real-world PV tech.

Commentators in the industry have been prognosticating about a subprime auto loan bubble burst for years and it keeps not happening, for whatever reason. Frankly I'm a bit surprised it hasn't happened yet, but without some sort of engineered soft landing it feels like it has to be coming eventually. Car prices keep going up, loan terms keep getting longer, and the cost of borrowing is punishing right now. Negative equity in new loans keeps rising too. It's only going to take a small systemic blip in people's ability to pay to create a sudden spike in repossessions.

It's worth pointing out that there's a marked division within the genre between Black gospel music (which is the tradition rock-'n'-roll has its roots in) and "Southern" or "Christian" gospel which is tightly interrelated with southern evangelical fundamentalism, and is (not surprisingly) both overwhelmingly white and extremely conservative musically.

I've not rewatched Voyager since its original airing, but my recollection is that they had been playing up a Seven/Doctor pairing for a while and then Chakotay just swept in out of the blue as the Designated Guy in the final episodes. I always wondered if there was pressure against pairing off the two most "synthetic" members of the crew as being too much like having them "keep to their kind?"

So this is something that I already have to deal with at the state and local level, in the form of building and fire codes. Most such codes are developed by standards organizations. Is it a little bullshit that these organizations are able to maintain copyright control over parts of the law? Yes, but also organizations like the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association generally do a very good job developing these documents, and the current state of affairs is such that these organizations and other like ANSI and ISO are de-facto part of the fabric of law in the specialized areas they write standards and tests for. Requiring their publications to be freely and publicly available will actually be an improvement on the current state of affairs, where much of their work is locked behind paywalls.

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD's lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

Colm Meaney was associated with Sinn Fein (formerly the political arm of the IRA) for a long time, so "Pro-Union Irishman" took me a minute.

The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, "let's do that for submersibles!" even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there's nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren't for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.