Right. I was talking about passenger safety. But sure, if you purposefully designed a vehicle that has poor pedestrian visibility and end up getting hit by that same vehicle due to that poor visibility, you shouldn't be surprised.
I agree that car analogies should be taken seriously.
Sure, cars are useful. But aiming to sell as many cars as possible is no more ethical than selling as many yachts as you can, especially if it involves making the living conditions worse for anyone who doesn't own a yacht, for example by bribing politicians, or destroying non-yacht-capable waterways.
You know “Ghostship” was the name of an incredible East Bay artists’ community that was destroyed in a fire which killed multiple people. Is this really the name you’re going with? It’s not ancient history, either - less than 10 years.
I immediately thought of the Oakland loft disaster in relation to this startup name -- but I'll admit I've been and on-and-off again loft occupant (not the ghostship loft, but other lofts) and East Bay/SF resident so that's probably skewing my view of this naming choice.
I know about ghostship, but I don’t immediately associate the word ghost ship with that disaster. I’ve always thought of them as the spooky abandoned ships that float around and I think it’s a good name.
I haven't lived in the Bay Area ever, although I had plans to move there at the time (plans which were sidelined because I didn't get the H1B then), but the fire was pretty big news even halfway across the world.
It wasn't the community that sparked attention, but the shoddy living conditions and that people had to resort to living in a warehouse in the Bay Area because of unaffordable housing (and which indirectly led to the conditions for the fire to happen).
But again I wouldn't expect recent YC people who just moved to the Bay Area to know about it.
I’ve never lived in the area, didn’t even know what city he was referencing with “East Bay” and I have been on hacker news since before this fire according to Wikipedia.
I have never heard of this event.
Also according to Wikipedia 36 people died. 31 people have died in Nepal due to their political shenanigans the past few days and I highly doubt anyone not involved in the region is going to remember in 10 years.
It seems really weird to me to be calling out random people for naming collisions with incredibly local, niche, news events from a decade ago
The Ghost Ship was massive news - it was the deadliest fire in Oakland’s history and the deadliest fire in the US since the Great White show at The Station in 2003. It had big impacts on everyone who threw renegade parties as it changed the liability from civil only to criminal against the master tenant and civil against both the city and the utility.
Finally, East Bay is a very common term, even encompassing a well known guitar player. Would you consider that if you’re not familiar with that term, you’re maybe not a very good judge of how common the knowledge of an event is? I’m from nowhere near San Francisco, but both East Bay and Ghost Ship are front of mind for me.
Bruh, I only need to extract this sentence fragment
> It had big impacts on everyone who threw renegade parties…
To point out that you are out of touch. How many people as a percentage of the population do you think even know what those are?
> Finally, East Bay is a very common term, even encompassing a well known guitar player. Would you consider that if you’re not familiar with that term, you’re maybe not a very good judge of how common the knowledge of an event is?
There is an East Bay in every single city with a West Bay. How many people as a percentage of population do you believe know specific guitar players names from niche bands like the Dead Kennedys ?
This entire thread reads like “how dare you not know the culture of San Francisco”
Perhaps you slept through the year leading up to the 2024 election, when Democrats sent riot police into student protests? They arrested thousands, and were plenty violent. Democratic president & governor & mayor (NYC and LA and Boston, for example).
Or perhaps you missed the Occupy movement which was violently disrupted on a national scale with coordinated raids across the country, organized through the “Fusion Centers” (FBI + DHS + State & Local law enforcement)?
Anyhow, my point here is that organized violence against leftist protestors is a fully bipartisan policy, and has been for more than 100 years.
NY Times reporter Ryan Mac has the receipts on the AI generated commentary that defended the KKK alongside an opinion article in the LA Times. LAT has removed the comment and disabled the AI feature for now.
THIS is what your “disruptive” heroes have bought & paid for. Yes, I’m talking specifically about paulg and his buddies in the VC world, who’ve stepped up their funding & lobbying to levels matching folks like Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaifie. They’re on an ideological vendetta to DESTROY functioning government and leave themselves with near-dictatorial private power, unconstrained by governments anywhere.
These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate.
This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for.
May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.
The hero worship is one aspect of a much larger problem, I think, which is that technology culture is almost entirely defined by trends in the startup and VC spaces. It's been that way for at least a decade and a half, by my reckoning.
There is very little genuine technology subculture anymore that is willing to critique dominant trends, raise up our own heroes, and create alternatives.
I'm really hoping that demystifying "disruption" will create a moment of reckoning for technologists.
I actually assumed that was part of the impetus for creating their own ship – standard cargo ships probably aren't well-suited to the job and simultaneously are a bit concerned about transporting such cargo.
Specialized car carriers are fairly common. Maybe they added some changes to make this one especially well suited for EVs, like modified fire suppression systems. But it may well be a standard ro-ro ship with an LNG engine.
Realistically, what is the concern for EV batteries? They already make up a pretty substantial amount of market chair in the US, and yet I don’t hear stories about EV’s being more dangerous or more prone to fires or anything. The only time you ever really see an EV burning is one that was in an accident, and guess what, gas cars also blow up when they’re in an accident sometimes
Can you provide evidence of this strong claim? It looks like you’re conflating his population genetics work with eugenics/race science (which in turn have significant differences that I won’t go into).
I find Schneier to be one of the most cogent observers and commentators on the influence of technology and corporate organization on our society. His writing is compelling.
Agree with others that I’m left wanting for solutions to the challenges he so clearly articulates.
The trends he is discussing are so macroscopic that it’s hard to even identify a single thing that can fix the system. For example privacy, yes it would be nice to have some basic privacy laws but there are entire industries dependent on the status quo, and government/police as customers. So as a politician doing “the right thing” immediately makes entrenched national security interests into enemies.
We need to find opportunities for more and better means of civic engagement. Democracy can’t just be a thing that happens every 4 years. One small example: maybe something like a “customer service hotline” at a local level. Local government could also send out “UX” people to better understand local pain points. Hyperlocal representation at the subdivision or even block level would also be interesting.
Starship HLS can lift much more than 50kg, but since Congress/NASA requires Orion to be the return vehicle, the amount they can return is limited by that, which only has a 100kg payload return capacity (and presumably a chunk of that is going to be taken up by food, spacesuits etc).
Same with why each stay is going to have to be just ~1 week. Starship can obviously carry more than enough stuff for 2 people to live off for months. But Orion is only able to stay undocked for 21 days.
