The degree to which science has advanced since the Webb project started can't be understated either. We have a fundamentally better understanding of the technology available and what we even want to look at. Much better to simply move onto the next project, of which there are currently very many.
Was going to reply along these lines. I was fortunate to live with someone who was working on the James Webb and telling me excitedly about it — back in 2006! Surely even with the various upgrades/spec changes/delays, things have moved sufficiently that whatever is started even today will be a marked upgrade.
In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively limited funding unfortunately.
Paul Sutter has a great astronomy and physics podcast called "Ask a Spaceman". His "Five Exciting Missions After James Webb" episode (20 min) got me really excited for the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiYVsoxbxAI
I'd like to see a deep space version of the Gaia astrometry space telescope.
It measures the parallax shift of stars, and is basically the one reliable way of directly measuring how far away a star is from us. Unfortunately, it's at L2, and therefore has a baseline of 1 AU. Another Gaia way out at 20AU would have capacities no Earth-based telescope could ever have.
This seems like the kind of thing where two would actually be useful. Is there any benefit to making both observations at the same time? Or are the scales so great that it doesn't really matter?
You'd almost certainly want to launch several. You get one data point per half-orbit, when you're at opposite sides of the Sun. This is tolerable for the Earth, where an orbit is one year. But a full orbit out at 20AU takes eighty four years! Collecting a useful number of samples with one spacecraft would take centuries, while two spacecraft in opposition on the same orbit can measure parallax instantly.
There has been a lot of work on earth based telescopes (eg the 30 meter, giant Magellan, and some array based telescopes) that are going online in the next decade.
For the most part, yes, with adaptive optics and corrective measures being taken to deal with more satellites in orbit, ground telescopes are superior or at least comparable to space telescopes given their ability to be much larger.
Space telescopes these days are primarily being designed for observations that simply can't be done while in the atmosphere (eg the wavelengths JWST and NGR look at). The value of a space telescope in the same wavelength range as what ground based telescopes usually use would mainly benefit in terms of being able to have much longer exposures.
Yes they are very much possible, and cheaper than space too.
What starlink does is ruin part of the images, and if the thing you were interested in observing happens to be blocked by a starlink trail you're hosed: a thing literally blocked what you tried to see and you lost the nigh (because usually you get just a bit of the a night for your observation). Other things that ruins your night is clouds, so starlink effectively makes the weather at a site worse, only you find out after the night that it was all a waste.
To some extent you can plan around it, but as the mega constellations grow they'll have to avoid each other more frequently and there's no rules for how that shits coordinated, so you maybe you can know in advance that the night is wasted.
But the risk that a satellite is in an undocumented orbit by the time you try to observe will likely be very high in the future.
Have you taken a photo while someone else used a flash? The flash is also only on for a fraction of the camera exposure but you sure as hell notice when it happened and it went off close to what you wanted to depict you will just have to take a new photo.
The length of the occlusion isn't very relevant when the thing going in front is orders of magnitudes brighter than what you are trying to observe.
a leo telescope doesn't look anything like a star (mainly because it's moving too fast). the way you deal with this is by not taking hour long exposures, and instead take thousands of second long exposures. then you can composite them all together, cropping out the bits that look like satellites from each frame. it's a little annoying, but pretty easy to automate.
My understanding is ground based telescopes imaging in the same wavelengths also have to deal with distortion in the atmosphere, star link interference would be easier to filter out compared to the other stuff (which is why locations for these mega ground based telescopes are chosen with utmost care )
Disclaimer. Not a physicals or astronomer, just a enthusiastic backyard amateur astronomer who reads a lot about telescopes .
Genius is not an absolute that applies across everything one done. In fact most geniuses are very very good across one dimension + they benefit from the halo effect.
Musk can be a "genius" when it comes to electric cars and space exploration while at the same time being total wrong about almost everything else.
The only two things that matter for success in entrepreneurship are who you know and who you decide to trust. Both knowledge and attitude only matter insofar as they influence those two things.
We're closer than you'd think. Chlorophyll is only something like 28% efficient at absorbing sunlight, we have experimental solar panels pushing 45%. Collecting wavelengths the plants don't use and then lighting them only in wavelengths they do use has a significant potential for efficiency gains, though we're not quite there yet...
Yes, soil, temperature, and weather control are huge, as is the lack of need for pesticides. Hard to over-state how much controlled environments can improve yields and crop quality and reduce costs of maintenance (in return for large initial capital investment).
That assumes outrage is motivated primarily by flawed systems and not the psychological and social benefits that accrue to those who express the most outrage. It may also be true that outrage is not the best way to solve systemic problems.
I think in some cases though there are systems that funnel people into places that seem designed to evoke engagement and often the engagement triggers outrage.
I wish Jack Dorsey at Twitter would take a look at the absolute shit-show that is "Trends for You" in the Explore section. It's nothing but the most outraged people trying to whip everyone into a frenzy. I try to resist going in there, but every once in a while can't help but be sucked in and almost always regret it.
> And taking on debt to do it isn't inherently irresponsible. In fact, it's just a wise financial decision when interest rates are low. New revenue streams aren't required to be generated -- it's just shifting a subset of future revenue to the present.
I don't know how someone could possibly make this statement RIGHT NOW of all times? How many businesses are sitting on the edge of folding right now? Whoops! Looks like all that future revenue didn't show up! Guess who's going to suffer for these decisions? Not the investors, they sold out! How about all the employees who just had all the blood sucked out of their job security and future livelihood?
In what sense are investors in this scenario not just hostile parasites? At least if it were dividends then the investors would have any sort of remaining long-term interest in the success of the company, and not just how they can most quickly disentangle themselves from taking any responsibility for the survival of the company that they ostensibly had ownership over by gulping down revenue it didn't even generate yet? In what sense is the investor not crippling the company and leaving it weaker than they found it? It's vampirism! Just because the money is there for the taking doesn't mean you should, it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't irresponsible and even morally reprehensible.
You create a nightmarescape of shambling zombie companies just waiting for a global pandemic to remind them that they're all already dead. Enjoy your artificially juiced stock value after it craters because our entire economy is short of legs to stand on.
Well, this was a one in a million thing. Nobody could have predicted the world to just shut down for six months, and it's not productive to plan for it.
It's far more reasonable to do business as usual and then take loans if things go south.
As Matt Levine put it: the dividends they gave since the GFC come to $15 billion, and their equity comes to $12 billion. So it's not even given it would have been the appropriate thing.
> How about all the employees who just had all the blood sucked out of their job security and future livelihood?
Right. It's like banks. How do we handle it?
Insurance: if you want to be a FDIC-insured bank, you must pay the FDIC insurance, and in return they will backstop your creditors up to a certain limit if they go bankrupt.
Why couldn't we do the same for employees? If you're an employer of systemic importance, you must have employee bankruptcy insurance: if you go tits-up, your employees get their salary paid up to a maximum limit of $X/yr until they find a new job. The insurance premiums are set by the free market, purely capitalist.
> It's far more reasonable to do business as usual and then take loans if things go south.
How can a business take out loans when things go south if it already leveraged itself in good times? Why would new investors buy into a company saddled with debt used to pay the old investors?
> Well, this was a one in a million thing. Nobody could have predicted the world to just shut down for six months, and it's not productive to plan for it.
This is the most shocking hubris I've witnessed in a long time.
If you're going to plan for all of the one-in-a-million events, you're not going to be able to get anything done. It's more reasonable to round small probabilities to zero and deal with them on an ad-hoc basis.
This is not a one-in-a-million event, this is not something that no one could've predicted, many people predicted it and we blithely ignored them. This is the direct consequence of our consistent policies and behavior. This is like standing 99 feet from a cliff and saying "well the next 100 feet in front of me is 99% solid ground and 1% air, sounds safe to me!" and then walking right off of the cliff.
> If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog?
This statement is worse than wrong; it's nonsense.
Even if you come up for some very specific metric of intelligence that you think is valid (which will always involve the use of some limited test constrained by subjective considerations) you're still wrong! Not every single Border Collie will perform better than every single English Bulldog, at best you will find some consistent comparison between averages, which is absurdly far from the same thing.
Let's say that our measure of intelligence is "good at herding sheep". Are you certain that all we will find is "some consistent comparison between averages"?
So if a crippled person needs somebody to go to the bank and withdraw $1,000 for them, and they figure they can hire somebody trustworthy for $50 to do the errand, is that person not being paid what they’re worth, because they added $1,000 dollars of value?
If person A in your narrative was capable of creating $100 dollars of value all by themselves, they would do that instead. But they can’t. The $100 opportunity exists because of the company.
The company needs a shovel strong enough to dig up the $100. If one person will sell such a shovel for $40, and that’s the best price available, they’ll take it. That was the market value of shovels. It would be wrong to say the shovel was worth $100. Even if all the shovel sellers in the area knew about the details of this opportunity and decided to set they’re prices at $99, it would quickly become apparent that shovels aren’t really worth that. Two things would happen: sellers would defect and set they’re prices lower than $99 to secure the deal; this would happen as long and there was still and profit to be made. And the company would remember what a shovel was supposed to cost, get suspicious, and look in to manufacturing a shovel of they’re own, or commissioning a rake shop to make one.
This game of price setting is pretty good at approximating worth, especially compared to your proposed strategy of measuring the delta between company profits in reality, and in an alternate reality where the employee didn’t exist and the company didn’t attempt to fill their position with anybody or anything. The latter is not worth talking about.
If the company could not possibly get that $1,000 in any other way, then yes the employee is worth $1,000. Without the willing participation of labor, a company cannot produce. If labor is fooled or coerced into working for less than it's worth (say, because otherwise they'll starve or lack health insurance), they are not operating in a free market. They are not getting paid according to their value.
So if a crippled person needs somebody to go to the bank and withdraw $1,000 for them, and they figure they can hire somebody trustworthy for $50 to do the errand, is that person not being paid what they’re worth, because they added $1,000 dollars of value?
This is a terrible example. Moving something is not the same as creating that something. Moving $1000 could be worth nothing. It could have negative value. It could be worth millions.
Right, and there are many things in between. Maintaining an object, improving an object, combining objects to make complex object, etc.
If you’re in the business of creating useful objects out of basically nothing, you don’t even need a company. Maybe you hire somebody to sell your objects for commission, or maybe you sell them yourself.
If you’re looking for a closer analogy, try the shove analogy. Why is it that despite the fact that the shovel makers are creating an object, even out of nothing, that they aren’t worth what is dug up with them? Software engineers are a lot like the shovel makers. Sometimes the shovels we make are used in extraordinarily profitable ventures. But their value is still determined by how hard it was to make them, and to learn the skills to make them. Not what the company uses them for.
I think it becomes hard to see when all the shovels being made are bespoke. Lots of software is written to fill one role for one client. That client will often use that particular thing to make lots of money. So maybe it appears like that thing bit of software created all the value? But this is clearly false. The fact that some part of a system is essential to the whole system’s success does not imply that the worth of every piece of the system is equivalent to the worth of the whole system.
This is a good way of putting it. All these "run your own agency" self-help courses have been pushing "value based" pricing with the promise that you can slap together a Wordpress template and charge $40k for it because of the "value" a website brings to the company is mostly nonsense IME. Stuff is built by the lowest competent bidder, period.
...and then you go on to describe the reason it's a great example.
I'm contending with the belief that somethings "worth" is determined by the effects it has, specifically the effects on the profits of a corporation. As you've pointed out regarding my "move $1000 example," the effects something has can vary in scale from the actions that brought them about. The cost of moving an object of a certain weight a certain distance with certain security measures is pretty stable. The secondary effects, on the other hand, could be massive.
Employment is the same way. One is paid to do a task in proportion to how much others who are capable of it would do it for. That amount is almost totally disconnected from the profits (or losses) the employer reaps from having that task completed for them.
I see. I think you worded it quite badly. This in particular; "because they added $1,000 dollars of value?"
This suggested that they had added a thousand dollars of value, whereas you presumably meant no such thing? Your example gave me the impression that we were in direct disagreement.
Continuing the discussion, now that I understand what you were saying; having recognised that what people are paid is disconnected from what value they bring to a company (and thus that someone could be worth millions to a company, but paid peanuts [0]), is it right that recompense is "almost totally disconnected from the profits (or losses) the employer reaps from having that task completed for them"? This is something of a moral judgement and we stray into different grounds; the great god Market is very popular hereabouts.
[0] Some argue that by defintion, what someone is paid is what they are worth. Fortunately, because that is presented as a simple definition, we can discard it as easily as it is presented.
