Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.
I think we’ll eventually have some technology to make this realistic.
Supersonic flights powered by jet/rocket engines might not be it for all we know. IMO we are still pretty early in the history of aviation as a technology.
If you are already mentioning rocket propulsion, then you should know that Gwen Shotwell foresees Starship flying E2E (point to point on Earth) flights with paying passengers, competing with airlines. One hour to anywhere on the planet.
Hopefully we discover some sort of gravity physics/tech that makes chemical rockets obsolete!
I don't see Starship being useful for civilian transport use cases, but for military operations sure! But there's not much to distinguish a starship from a nuke launch during a war, so it remains to be seen whether that risk is worth it.
I can imagine Starship landing on a sea launchpad (in coastal cities), and the last 30 miles can be taken by a speedboat in half an hour. The sea usually isn't as traffic-jammed as land communications, and boats, unlike high-speed trains, don't require that much infrastructure.
There's no mention of the underlying cell chemistry on the landing page or under the "battery" tab, and only three people listed under the "About Us" of which the only one who sounds remotely technical is Ville Piippo, so I punched him into Google Scholar and found this:
I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious.
(OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)
Benzene is far more degradable than DDT. In fact the primary reason benzene causes cancer is because the human liver can metabolize it, producing the reactive carcinogen oxepin. It doesn't always degrade fast enough to prevent toxicity to humans or animals, but it doesn't last forever.
The British pound was displaced by the US dollar. Currently, the US dollar just doesn't have a proper rival. The euro, yuan and rupee are considered politically suspect (each for its own unique reasons); the pound and yen have too small a base. Without further transformation of the global financial system, the only alternative is for banks to hold a basket of currencies, and in such a basket the dollar would likely still play a significant, if reduced, role. This is a slow process because it means changing the nature of currency reserves from a single safe haven to a "nest". What this means for USG spending power is not immediately clear.
Ok, let's see - yuan isn't a freely traded currency, it's heavily regulated by China. From that alone it can not be used a reserve currency by anyone - unless they want to hand over all control over their assets to CCP.
The rupee is better, but there's not a lot of trust in Indian institutions globally, so black swan events are more likely. I can see it becoming a better proposition as India further matures and taps into its population more.
No, euro - that's a solid contender. Not only it's already used in a lot of countries, and therefore backed by more than one economy, the EU institutions are legit to a fault - they continuously refuse to seize Russian assets, because there's no solid legal grounds for it, despite all political will towards doing so.
That alone makes it far removed from being politically suspect in my book, unless there's some blatant case against the euro that I'm missing.
The main issue with the euro has been the stinginess of the ECB. The Fed always makes plenty of dollars available but during the Great Recession this was not the case in Europe. This is a problem for euro-denominated debt. (It is also a problem for the yuan.) The unusual political structure of the EU — not a single country — is also potentially concerning, as is its apparent dependence on the United States for defense.
> That alone makes it far removed from being politically suspect in my book, unless there's some blatant case against the euro that I'm missing.
Lack of integration/solidarity. A common currency is a pretty bad idea if economies are allowed to diverge (see previous sovereign debt crisis, there's no reason why eg France can't be the next trigger).
You need a common tax base, and solidarity across member (much more than the current state) to have an effective monetary policy.
The in-between status quo for EU really isn't great (either you need to keep building EU institutions/start having proper eu taxes and budget -- something that is not really popular at the moment--, or euro should be reconsidered). (From what I understand it's not really a controversial opinion in economic circles).
Who considers them politically suspect? I’m guessing the people who live in the countries that use them don’t, and on the contrary would increasingly be seeing the USD as politically suspect.
The people who live in the countries that use them aren't relevant, because we are talking about them as reserve currencies. What matters is whether other countries see them as politically suspect.
Gold's resistance to oxidation is pretty unique and valuable. Every metal with similar properties is also expensive — palladium is the most common and its price hovers around several hundred dollars per ounce despite being much less popular for jewelry or currency.
An advantage of seximal is that it takes a lot less time to memorize the times table: there are only ten "nontrivial" entries, whereas in base ten you have 36.
>An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving.
Averages do not work that way! The average of 48, 48, 48, 3 and 3 is 30. The study findings remain interesting but the actual proportion of impaired drivers may be less than 40%.
I think there are basically two kinds of micromanagement that need to be distinguished. The first one is encouraging your child to do something which you think has direct benefits, like learning to swim, which is good exercise and prevents drowning. The second is encouraging your kid to do something because you expect indirect social benefits: either some admissions officer will be impressed by an applicant who plays the oboe or the child will socialize with "the right crowd" or something like that. It's the second kind that can become pernicious because it creates an opportunity for the parent's own status anxieties and prejudices to be projected onto the child, like "lacrosse players are smarter than basketball players" so you want the kid to play lacrosse and not basketball even though they are basically comparable activities and this is dismissive of the needs and capabilities of children to learn to navigate social environments and pressures for themselves.
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
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