If Tesla succeeds in their FSD ambitions (vision only), and they are actually correct that HW3/4 (current tesla hardware) is capable of full self driving, the economics will make sense, and we're a software update away from having millions of self driving taxis already on the roads
That's a lot of ifs, so I'm not at all saying its right around the corner, but it's within the set of possible outcomes. V12 is looking quite promising, but then again so was V11 and V10
I think lidar is going to get cheaper much faster than tesla figures out vision-only FSD. Consider that solid state lidar capable of scanning a room is integrated in smartphones today.
The problem with Elon Musk constantly over promising and under delivering on this is that it's impossible to tell how close Tesla actually are. A year? A decade? Who knows! The CEO's statements on the matter are best treated as random noise.
From the few interviews I've watched, he seems like a real life manifestation of an Ayn Rand hero character. I doubt he has any public sector or welfare in his plans
Ayn Rand heroes are all sophisticated, educated artists and artisans. This man is more like a psychotic Ron Paul (I say this with some affection). He's an anarchist and very Austrian in his economics affiliation. Definitely not an affiliation that Objectivists favored at all.
He's not an anarchist. The creator of the mislabel "anarchocapitalism" was himself an Ayn Rand fan until she basically told him he wasn't an anarchist and he decided to take that personally. Anarchism is the abolition of hierarchical systems of power. "Anarchocapitalism" only refers to the abolition of the state while maintaining all other hierarchical systems and capitalism in particular.
You can not enforce property claims without violence. "Anarchocapitalists" either handwave this with private armies (which is just feudalism with extra steps) or insist on everyone following the Non-Aggression Principle, which is nonsense without a system of enforcement. The more honest types usually fall back to minarchy, i.e. having a small state that basically only consists of a legal system and police force to enforce property claims and resolve disputes.
Heck, the person who came up with the name opposed not only taxes but also the civil rights movement and universal suffrage. The only coherent ideological thread in his life was not wanting to pay taxes, not wanting to have to follow regulations and being convinced he was very smart.
I'm well aware of the argument that left-wing anarchists make that anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism. As per usual, only left-wing anarchists care about this semantic argument. Anarcho-capitalists keep using that term, and 99.9% of the rest of world doesn't know, and wouldn't care even if you explained your point of view to them.
Also, is Murray Rothbard like Voldemort to you? You seem to refuse to even say his name.
Most people on HN likely don't know who Murray Rothbard is and he didn't have any coherent ideology or philosophy so he's not interesting beyond being the guy who came up with the label.
Anarchism is by definition "left-wing". If flat earthers redefined "globe" to mean a saucer shaped object and the media started to run with that because flat earthers made for "good content", opposing that usage wouldn't be dismissed as "arguing semantics" either. Sometimes it's important that words mean things. Heck, the entire political right in the US has spent the past years making the changing meanings of words their main issue. Clearly "arguing semantics" matters sometimes.
Calling yourself "anarcho-capitalist" is like calling yourself "punk" because you're knee-deep in Sex Pistols merch. It's using a label as a fashion accessory, not a political statement. Clearly you think political labels have some use or else you wouldn't refer to "left-wing" anarchists.
There's no historical basis for the label "anarcho-capitalism". Ancaps claim they're building on individualist anarchism if asked to justify their label but even Stirner was to the left of them. "Anarcho-capitalism" isn't promoting individualist anarchism, it's promoting autocracy. Anarchism is the absence of oppression and power hierarchies, "anarcho-capitalism" is the absence of regulations and limitations on individual power, relying on The Market instead of Divine Right as a justifying cause.
"Anarcho-capitalism" is not only not "real anarchism", it's not any anarchism, just like throwing bricks at Starbucks windows is neither necessary nor sufficient (i.e. almost entirely orthogonal) for being an anarchist.
A SLS launch costs about 2 billion dollars. A Starship launch is estimated to cost around 40 million. It'll probably end up costing more than that, but it would need to cost a whole lot more to make the SLS a better option
Starship has a slightly larger internal volume than the ISS, so yeah, a single starship is directly comparable to the current largest space station we've got
Oh the whole tube is way bigger. Just the pressuriseable payload space is bigger than the internal volume of the space station. Here's a view of what Starship docked to the ISS would look like. Or is it the other way around?
In fact Starship may make space stations obsolete, for the same reason we don't have anchored floating research stations out on the sea that we go back and forth to using little boats. We use research ships instead.
Plus if you wanted to, you could send up a slightly customized Starship to serve as the crew portion of the station and then send up a Starship-shaped “equipment pod” with redundant life support systems, fold-out solar panels, etc and dock it to the crew quarters. Just like that, you have a rough equivalent to the ISS in two launches.
That process could be repeated N times to quickly build a station that’d dwarf the ISS.
If we’re talking science fiction, then sure, you could do anything.
You’re talking about metal tube that never reached the orbit. You thing you just need “slight” customization to make it a space station?
That thing doesn’t fly yet, is not human rated, has no life support capabilities, has unknown lifetime in space, has no propulsion system that would keep it in orbit for long period of time and bazillions of other things.
It’s just a metal tube at this point. I know it’s cool to fantasize what it could be, but so far its metal tube that doesn’t even fly and is hugely behind schedule.
And it’s built by guy, who’s known for overhyping.
You mean the company that's been launching one rocket every 3.5 days this year?
I mean when you have a company that's shipped nothing and they are saying big things, that's one thing. But when you have a company that's actively launching and reusing more rockets than everyone else combined, that's another.
All the things you've listed are previously solved problems that have existing solutions. SpaceX isn't even inventing anything new here.
>That thing doesn’t fly yet
Starship has flown and landed in low altitude flights. It's the booster+starship that's in testing now.
Basically what I mean is - if it can do what it's meant to do - go to Mars - then it's also an easy space station replacement.
You can argue if it will get to Mars of you want. But silly to argue that anything that can get to Mars with human occupants won't be able to also orbit the earth with human occupants
At the same time it's much more likely that a company that makes rockets that do one thing would also make rockets that do another thing much more easily and faster than a company that does not make rockets at all.
Starship and Superheavy have missed their aspirational timelines, but that’s largely moot when there’s nothing else with remotely similar capabilities in development. Even if it doesn’t fly until 2030 (which I think is unlikely) it’d still be lightyears ahead of the competition thanks to the larger industry deciding it didn’t particularly care to meaningfully advance past late 70s technology until very recently.
But that doesn't mean it's a viable replacement for space stations.
Those are 2 totally different topics and it boggles my mind how people can write whole science fiction story around and argue that it's basically a fact.
It’s just casual spitballing of possibilities with oversimplification for the sake of brevity. The main point is that any number of things can be set atop Superheavy as long as it has the general shape of Starship and some kind of attached propulsion, and there’s a lot that can be done with that level of lift capacity paired with a volume that large.
That's a lot of ifs, so I'm not at all saying its right around the corner, but it's within the set of possible outcomes. V12 is looking quite promising, but then again so was V11 and V10