They are GO for loading propellant.

In the words of a great man…

Squeaky bum time!

Power = energy per unit of time.

So the comparison is Joules per second for both Super Heavy and the USA.

It is the amalgamation of power that is scary.

Separation of powers and regular succession are good principles for maintaining a free and fair society.

Anarcho systems are unstable vacuums that invite bad outcomes.

It only burns for a few minutes, but whilst it’s rising through the atmosphere the power output is absolutely ferocious.

You just have to love the ambition of it, right?

I have no idea how this makes money, there are a lot of things that /could/ make money eg Starlink.

But 🤷‍♂️ it’s a huge gamble to commit to building all this infrastructure, and I really love that courage.

Hadn’t really appreciated that before.

SpaceX’s Starship launch is 3 hours away.

The 33 Raptor engines of Super Heavy first stage will generate 265 GW of power.

For reference the entire electrical grid of USA is currently consuming 95GW of power.

During the launch… This one single vehicle will be generating something like 3x the power of the entirety of America.

The biz plan is to fire these things several times per day.

T minus 15.5 hours

It’s an amazing piece of engineering and a reusable launch system really does change the economics of space.

But I’m still not sure what the biz cases are beyond Starlink which is basically an ISP.

What new things are people going to build in orbit?

What voyages could actually be profitable?

Any volume of commodity from space would probably crash the market.

It’s the most powerful vehicle ever made, correct?

Starship launch is all set for tomorrow. 🚀

Success or failure it promises to be a must watch event. It means normal people can suddenly afford to put stuff in space.

Would be super cool to build a cube sat hardware wallet!

🤔

Most people derive their happiness from reference to their peers. This is literally how their neuroendocrinology is wired.

Most people are happier to fail as a group than to succeed alone. and I stress the “most people” part.

This is an evolutionary trait. It’s OK, this is just how people are.

One thing that you might consider Lyn, the emergence of decent AI has really introduced a lot of uncertainty in the near and medium future (much more so than usual), and this likely makes it a lot harder to achieve a market consensus that truly represents reality.

There are a lot of divergent hypotheses out there, and that should make all funding more expensive for everyone. However… conviction is sky high! So funding is actually cheap, too cheap.

It’s quite likely that most people get rekt.

People are extremely confident about predicting first order disruptions of AI, but those will immediately be made obsolete by second and then third order disruptions.

A tiny group of people (maybe 5 people?) might emerge from this, owning absolutely everything.

I agree with everything you have said, but the first nostr client to target traction with teenagers is going to immediately dwarf everything else and if/when it happens that client will likely persist as a 900lb gorilla for a long time.

Also, teenagers like to escape parental oversight of their social life.

Also also… The on ramp for whatever comes post TikTok is probably YouTube.

I take the point, but be careful not to minimise slavery.

There are 40 million slaves in the world today, more than any other time in human history.

Slavery is booming on our watch.

🚨 Developer Community 🚨

If you want any online social space at all to achieve widespread adoption, you must target teenagers. This is an unfortunate fact of life.

Very few people past 30 ever change their purchasing habits or their lifestyle habits in a meaningful way. This is why people still use Facebook, sometimes people break habits but it’s very rare. People are literally locked in by their endocrinology.

Brand loyalty and learned patterns of behaviour are very real things. There are tangible biochemical reasons for it.

There is a reason the entire advertising industry has learnt from experience to target first time users.

If we want nostr to succeed then developers should really be targeting products and services for teenagers or people in their early 20’s. If you want to build a niche, you are of course free to do so, but if you want societal adoption you must surf demography.

All successful social platforms have surfed a cohort. To succeed at scale we really need to stop focusing on displacing Twitter and start focusing on post TikTok.

All the work to date on nostr apps has been extremely valuable, people have demonstrated ferocious pace of progress and speaking personally… I am blown away by a lot of the talent here.

A number of people have been able to self identify as incredible talent and many have observed this.

I see some of those same people now running out of road in terms of Ramen money. Collaborate, go further together.

The post TikTok window is now opening.

Target it with this open source technology!

There are so many new frameworks and protocols available now. So many excellent devs here are making great products but are targeting long saturated markets.

It’s also a noble mission, get the propaganda Dues Ex Machina’s tentacles off our kids.

I’ve realised that AI agents are such a productivity boost, because they suddenly allow me to scale my own time… that I shouldn’t be working on anything else until I can spin up an army of Stu’s to work with me on my various projects.

One single brilliant instance of intelligence is not necessarily the best model, I think that idea is probably a monotheistic bias that society has.

For example… Capital markets are awesome, and they are massively decentralised intelligence systems.

Assume they monitor 100% of the web, 100% of the time…

… and that these numbers will only increase now that they have AI.

Today I have been thinking about the future and some demographic challenges facing the world.

I now have a theory that falling birth rates are not connected to rising income / wealth, but are instead a consequence of rising life expectancies.

This is a statistical simplification and so any personal feelings or individual experience is irrelevant in this larger context.

Here goes…

Life expectancy fits the data much better than wealth. It’s why Japan went through japanification long before the richer USA.

I propose that many people do not really desire children until they consider their own mortality or frailty. Once your current age forces you to think about your own mortality you immediately think about children and who will be around you near the end. This is a natural thing to think about. It doesn’t really go away.

At the population level, as life expectancy has increased from 50 to 80, people have greatly delayed this train of thought until much later in life. For most people in the modern world, they never actually consider this train of thought during their years of high fertility.

This then assumes that people today mostly have children as an accident of sex, or because of the (significant) momentum of cultural norms and not really as a functional decision of self interest.

Birth rates aren’t going to 0.00 because there are lots of reasons to have children, but I think the fact that most couples of child bearing age can rationally assume they will live another 50+ years, they are not thinking about their mortality or frailty.

As a result… birth rates are falling everywhere, or rather everywhere that has a life expectancy that is double the female age of fertility.

I think this is a much more satisfying hypothesis about falling birth rates than the idea that richer people choose to not have children. That doesn’t really stack up for household income distributions within a society with a particular life expectancy.

And yes, I understand that life expectancy is also correlated strongly with income and wealth.

I just this this hypothesis is a more realistic fit. What do others think?

I understand this will be an emotional topic for some and not everyone is fortunate enough to realise their preferred choice regarding children. I think most couples have some level of compromise between partners and obviously some couples are just painfully unlucky.

I do long trips often, my top suggestion is avoid sugar or anything with a high glycemic index. You want slow release not boom bust boom bust.

Also stay hydrated. Coffee works until it dries you out and then your brain starts to fry and misfire.

Maybe plan 2 stops for bathroom and a stretch?

Get some podcasts for when kiddo takes an inevitable sleep.

Yeah this is it.

I’m currently toying with AI agents and then going to tilt that into something like this.

Lots of pretty powerful technologies keep landing in quick succession and it’s not easy to navigate.