sending people to the moon was never useful. We can get more done with robots, both cheaper and safer. There are plenty of more useful things we can do instead.
okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it
I've never understood this hyper-utilitarian perspective. It just seems divorced from what emotionally inspires most people.
Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.
Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.
That’s fair but the amount of interest in this crewed mission vs. prior uncrewed and robotic moon missions shows that many people find manned missions more compelling.
Then you are wrong (and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that). An estimated three orders of magnitude of more science was done in the 12 days astronauts were on the moon than if robots had done those missions. HSF costs about, but it returns a lot of results as well.
We didn't have robots in 1969, and the Apollo missions resulted in many of the technologies that make modern robotics (and robotic space missions) possible.
My grandpa used to be a concrete inspector (for the state of Minnesota - if you ever drive i394 there he was one of the inspectors for that). Different plants within a normal commute of his house often had very different sand and so needed a different mix.
Oh cool, did he work for MNDOT? I sell and run a lot of work at their facilities, they have a materials lab over in Maplewood off Hwy 36 and English St, and also the weird test surface area on 94 west of St Cloud.
There is a lot of expense in the wasted concrete from all the different pours that are slump tested. There is a lot of cost from concrete that leaves the plant only to fail slump testing when it gets there - not only do you have to empty the truck someplace else, but there maybe contract provisions if you fail to keep the workers busy. Often more than one test is done - if the plant has an order that they know will be tested they test before it leaves the plant (if it fails they can redirect to a different customer who will knowingly accept lesser concrete - but concrete cures on the truck so it would be unacceptable if rejected at the site to go elsewhere). Many smaller jobs skip the test, but they would like it done if it was free.
That said, I'm not sure if the value can ever be greater than a slump test just before pouring.
> it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas.
We could do this if it is important. There are mines in Wisconsin the export sand to the middle east because that is known to work well for fracking and they don't want to risk a local sand not working well. (AFAIK they have never tested local sand properties, but it is possible they have and it doesn't work). In this case the value of the "perfect" is well worth the high shipping costs.
We certainly could - it's absolutely possible. The question is if it's economical and so far the market has ruled in most cases that it isn't. Either the project doesn't need such a perfect amalgamation of materials (maybe there is an expected deprecation that doesn't justify such an outlay - possibly earthquake risk would minimize any expected lifespan gain - possibly the materials contractor just can't internally justify the added material cost while remaining attractive to local contractors).
It's all a balance. Imagine a scenario where you can ship in specialized materials to build a bridge with an expected lifespan of 100 years and it'll cost 50M - or you could use local concrete that has an expected lifespan of 15 years and materials would cost 5M. This is a vast simplification of the math but, assuming those expected costs it'd be cheaper to build using local materials and just schedule replacement every 15 years. And, of course, there'll be egg on your face if you build the 50M bridge and then suffer a massive tsunami in two years that destroys the foundations anyways.
To paraphrase a Grady quote: "Engineering isn't a study of building the best thing - it's optimizing the quality we can get for the cost outlay."
for fracking, what they want is a perfectly uniform sized quartz grain thats rounded. You find this sand where multiple processes occur, notably glacial geology. You want uniform grains because frackings goal is to open, then support an porous structure when you can then pull the fluids/gas out without clogging.
It's not really hard to test for this property, but the cost efficiency is notable when you find a massive amount of it in one place. It still may be washed to remove further silt/clay, but they absolutely know the product works and they generally know the geology in other places don't tend to produce the same material.
There's a fair amount of materials size thats mostly "we found this geologic material and this is some magic shit" rather than some wholly manufactured human endevour.
When they generate such code I hit delete and start over. I mostly don't have a problem understanding the code that Claude writes (or whatever AI I'm using today - my company keeps changing what they want me to use). It sometimes takes some time to figure it out, but it isn't any worse than figuring out what other programmers have written.
I do however need several rounds of "review this code", and pointing out trivial details that are wrong, before it is worth me trying to figure out the big picture.
> double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.”
This is bad advice for a rocket where we are already on the edge of what is even possible. If earth had just a little more gravity it wouldn't be possible to escape our gravity well to a moon. Good engineering is a lot more complex than that simple little advice and a good engineer should already know all the ways that advice is wrong in the real world.
Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a candidate for getting rid of.
IT is still a signal because you only need to look at things with few dots. Maybe that charger is for something that broke years ago and you can get rid of it this time. Meanwhile you don't even need to ask about the boxes of things you use often but don't think of (nor do you confuse them for the boxes of almost the same thing you never use)
The point is you don't have to. You instead just look at the boxes a few years latter and if at a glance you see one box with few/no dots you know it is safe so you spend just a few seconds thinking about only that box - then you move on to something else. Sure there might be more boxes you can get rid of, but you only need to do one box at a time when you have a few seconds. (or you look at the box and decide you are not ready to get rid of that so you put a dot on it making it less likely this one will come up next time you have a few seconds)
okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it
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