Europeans have still not forgotten the impact of WW2. Musk sieg heiling on live TV (twice!!!) is not something they take lightly. Tesla sales of cratered over there, rightfully so, because of his completely unforced error.
I’m European and nobody cares about WW2. References to that period of time do not go beyond punchlines. I have no idea why Tesla sales are cratering but this isn’t it.
If you're not a total doofus, you should be able to look around you and see how things still today are worse off because of the nazis than they would have been without them. But we have doofi among us, so you might just be one.
It's weird when you see an account like this on HN (a tech site) and when you check their comment history the only comments more than a few words long are in defense of American right wing political talking points.
It definitely feels like there's been an uptick in the past few months of far right brigading. There's been a number of times where I've seen incredibly low effort and inflammatory posts flag-killed from recent accounts only to be vouched for and revived.
I was in Italy over the summer and they seemed to universally detest musk, and trump there. So much, in fact, that it is embarrassing to be a US citizen in Europe with these fools “representing” the US.
did you meet people who base buying a car off of who the car company owner supported in a foreign (to them) election?
or would you say these were ordinary people or more the kind of people paying attention to international events? (genuine question).
I get that to an american it's contentious, but imagine not buying a toyota car or samsung phone because the powerful head of that company gave huge amounts to a conservative politician in their country. That's how I look at elon/trump in the us, and given I never hear normal people (not reddit/hackernews/guardian) talking about ANY of this stuff, I'd guess I'm not alone.
I'm in Portugal and I have definitely met people outside of tech who talk about Musk in ways that I'm pretty sure mean they would not consider buying Teslas.
Same applies to some friends in France.
I assume the topic comes up more with me because I lived in the US for a long time before moving back to Europe, but I'm guessing their opinions are there even if the topic doesn't come up as often in conversations with other locals, for example.
I’m not going to generalize, but I already told you, I met people who had a profound dislike of elon/trump and I don’t think I saw a single Tesla during that trip. Maybe Italy is a different case since they have a passion for high quality cars, so makes more sense that there would be other reasons for them avoiding Tesla.
You're forgetting that Musk is trying to influence national politics the world over. He's injecting money into far right movements in multiple European nations and keeps commenting on legal and judicial decisions in many countries, often complaining if things don't go the way the far right wants - all while using his influence over his companies to spread his views, like when he desperately wanted people to believe in the "white genocide".
I don't think the Toyota CEO is trying to have anywhere close to this much influence over most European countries, and I'm honestly not aware of anyone else doing so. For years, Musk has been behaving like a literal Bond villain.
Considering he is a fascist, makes nazi sign, spent hundreds of millions of the money he made to elect a mad man, yes, that’s enough to influence me not to buy their cars.
Do I know who the CEOs of all car companies vote for? No.
But also none of them spent so much capital electing Trump and threatened to destroy Canada’s sovereignty so I guess I make my consumer choices with the info I have.
My response to the money aspect of this it's just like any other business: money needs to be invested, and then a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e, asteroid mining) is one obvious example.
The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the astronauts.
As far the the radiation goes, we do indeed know exactly what kinds of radiation they would encounter. And the easiest way to shield humans from it in space is lots of water, or metal. We know this from extensive real work done on earth re: nuclear power plants.
The real issue is money, not technical feasibility. Once the dough rolls in from asteroid mining, it bootstraps the financing issue and pays for itself many times over.
NASA seems less sure than you do. And considering we have to get to the asteroids before we even start to think about mining them, talking about the money from asteroid mining is putting the cart before the horse.
Asteroid mining is one thing. Exploring the nearest star system is science expedition where the payback is in societal scientific knowledge and subsidizing technology development that is then made available here for various things (eg a lot of the space exploration tech in the 60s made its way into consumer tech)
It wasn't intended for a communications relay, but it was intended to have 2-way communication. I went down a rabbit hole reading ArXiv papers about it. Despite their tiny size, the probes could phone home with a smaller laser - according to the papers I read, spinning the photons a certain way would differentiate them from other photons, and we apparently have the equipment to detect and pick up those photons. The point of the communication would be for them to send back data and close-up images of the Alpha C system. Likewise, they could receive commands from earth by having dozens of probes effectively act as an interferometry array.
This, on the surface, makes logistical sense. Chitose (the proposed location) is the international airport for and largest airport in Hokkaido (New Chitose Airport). Setting up a fab and related facilities right next to this location would seem to have obvious benefits.
Japan tends to be a favorite for most enterprise SaaS companies when opening an APJ sales foothold - no other Asian economy is of a similar size and open to Western firms.
Additionally, a Tokyo HQ often manages your South Korea and Taiwan operations as well because of legacy business ties from the colonial era as well as the flying geese era. That said, Sapporo does remain a bit of a niche area like Seattle or Portland before semiconductors because of how dominant Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya are.
Knock on wood the Rapidus helps spark a Japanese Beaverton.
That is just logistics, but what about power consumption, environmental issues next to agriculture etc. I am wondering why Hokkaido instead of other places in Japan.
Not possible according to the laws of physics. The closest you can get is a solar sail, but that's not "propellant-less" - photons are the propellant.
If a company thinks they've broken one of the most fundamental laws of physics (momentum transfer), they need to provide some serious evidence, and publish in full so their results can be replicated. A press release on an obscure website isn't how you do it.
Anyone publishing a repeatable experiment demonstrating this would be more or less instantly handed a nobel prize, since it would have to unlock new fundamental physics.
It would also totally rock cosmology since you’d have to rework the whole age and evolution of the universe in light of those new physics, whatever they were.
This is almost definitely bunk. Either that or something mundane explained in a ridiculous hypey way.
It certainly sounds like "We managed to run our EM drive hardware in space, and our instruments say it did something" (as did EM drive proponent's, in error). Because if it really was even something like "we successfully produced thrust from ambient ions/earth's magnetic field/etc" then it would be much bigger news.
Seems like the focus is on orbital dynamics, so I’m guessing it is reacting against the magnetic field of the planet or the particulates in the solosphere.
It would be cool, though, if it were actually interacting with the zero point field or some similar bunky stuff. We can already extract minute amounts of matter from the field, ostensibly experimentally proven, so I suppose it’s not impossible to imagine that you might somehow be able to push on Casimir forces, perhaps.
I agree, but just a heads up: the front images for most scifi novels these days (and for the past few decades) have largely been out of the hands of the writer. The publishing house pretty much unilaterally decides on the cover for marketing reasons.
