Huh, good point, I never thought about that. Makes sense. I only ever heard about options to get shares when the company becomes publicly traded. Of course, publicly traded is what I meant.

Do the owners also get money based on the shares?

Which shareholders do you mean? SpaceX is private company, no shares.

Launch vehicle development by NASA is by their own admission slower and more expensive. It’s no coincidence that the whole industry started moving forward much faster when a driven private company with financial interests at heart and without strong dependence on politicians started their own serious development.

As for the tax money paid to SpaceX, NASA simply bought services. They also helped with development. But whatever the expenses were, they were much lower than they would be if NASA did it the old way. By the way, the old way is similar, but instead of SpaceX, the money went to Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc. and there wasn’t a limit on how much money it will be in advance. Now you know that if the costs exceed the agreed sum, it won’t be paid by public money, but by the company. As seen with Starliner, which went so badly that Boeing said they are never doing fixed-price contracts ever again. They are used to the excess money paid from the public budget. In exchange for these advantages to the public, SpaceX can use the vehcle developed unther the contract on their own, without NASA. Therefore you can get missions such as Polaris, Inspiration4 or Axiom. Your opinion on these may be different, but I think private missions and influx of private money into spaceflight is good for spaceflight in general. It makes it more financially sustainable and more efficient.

Oh, thank you. I stopped reading when it started to talk about someone else 9 years later, I thought it would be some other controversy. I wish he crowdsourced the $150 though. I wonder how many citations it could have gotten…

And how did it end? Was it published? Did they get off the fucking mailing list? Wikipedia doesn’t say.

I think pokemon used to be an oncosuppressor gene, but since its mutations caused cancer, Pokemon owners threatened (or mayvbe even sued), until the name was changed.

The reason for the 50 years of oil, as I heard it explained, is that this is how far ahead the oil companies plan. They look for enough oil to cover the timeframe they plan for. When they have that covered, they don’t look, until they need more. When they need more, they go and find it.

I honestly don’t know how tall I am. I know I’m taller than last time I was seriously measured, but I don’t know by how much and I don’t care. But everyone shrinks during the day anyway. Measuring height to precise centimeters has just a little more sense than weighing someone with precision of ⅒ of kilogram. I have basically no chance but to estimate and possibly round.

Cviridis or whatever they used here? Cviridis (and other scales constructed with the same philosophy) does.

There are colour scales that combine colours and intensities consistently, so that if you discard (or can’t percieve) colour information, you still get a nice black to white scale. For a moment, I though the map used cviridis scale, which has this property and is designed to look as similar as possible to people with various variants of colour blindness. But then I realised that the scale used here has the brightest point in the middle, not on one side.

I use Pocketbook. It opens just about anything - epub, mobi, pdf, pdb, and many more formats. Just get a book anywhere and copy it via USB. Or send it as an email attachment to your special address and it will download automatically. You can even replace the reading app with another relatively easily, if you want.

I thought these were disproved by lack of gravitational microlensing?

Frankly? Yes, a bit. I wouldn’t have expected Tesla to make it that high and I would expect Google somewhere near the top. And I guess it focused only on american companies, or I would be much more surprised.

I didn’t check the calculation, but I guess it assumes perfect conversion of motion to heat. But it’s good to know that if you can get a perfectly static chicken, you can hypersonic-slap it cooked.

Tell me more!

You mean like official EU data? https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/demo_r_d3dens/default/map?lang=en And “go see in person” is a very bad advice to anything data-related in most cases. Compating population density anywhere in Europe with Netherlands isn’t fair. Poland, Hungary and Romania (and north Balkan as well, it seems) have denser population than rural France, for example. Spain is less densely populated, but still has about as many tennis courts, so it must have much more per capita. It just isn’t a population density map. It is another Iron curtain division map, but even so, Czechia and Slovakia stand out as exceptions. There is interesting information in there.

Are we looking at the same pictures? Spain is less dense, but Poland seems mostly denser than rural France and Balkan roughly the same.

Is it, though? Is Spain, Poland and Balkan so much less populated than Germany or France?

Do they actually work? I don’t have actual experience, but I heard that they are only used by people who might benefit from them and thus the authors are automatically suspicious to the reviewer, plus you almost always cite your previous papers in a pretty obvious way, so it’s hardly blind anyway.

Cool, thanks for the info!

How does Plantnet fare in tropics?