Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com
NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
I was in SF in the 90s this kind of talk is nonsense. Crime was far higher in SF back then, area near the stadium was a no-go area, there were open gang wars in SF on TV. Hell, go watch the Michael Douglas TV show “The Streets of SF” from the 70s80s
Crime is down, mic of the city is gentrified and the total number of homeless in CA and SF is roughly in the same range it’s been since Reagan was governor.
A lot of this BS about CA and how bad things are seems to be from people who haven’t been here long or people overdosing on right wing media which has
Non-stop been attacking CA for 30 years nightly, all the while it has continued to become more and more dominant economically.
But is Oracle a great company? :) [I'm a former employee, and my opinion is, it is not]
SpaceX and Tesla leaving CA are bigger loses, but they haven't left yet, and it's unclear he'll move them, other than opening up more plants elsewhere. Boca Chica/Austin might eventually become the new locus of new hiring for example, but the Dragon/Falcon business might remain in CA for example.
HP leaving is basically a zombie company leaving on life support, it would be like IBM or Kodak leaving.
The real power of the Bay Area is the startup economy, and I think it will be hard to dislodge that, just like it's hard to dislodge Shenzhen, because of the "nexus" effect, or chicken and egg as you mentioned. If all of your customers and workers, and supply chain, and investors are in one spot, as an entrepreneur, you're going to gravitate there, even if the costs are high.
I mean, you get can Silicon Hills, and Silicon Alleys elsewhere, but I don't think they'll overtake the Bay Area.
However, I could see Texas, Arizona, Nevada, becoming the "Mars Plateau" in the future. Realistically, Musk needs a coastal port for logistics, ability to mine resources, and a state that would be complicit in dealing with angry laborers or neighbors who don't like Sonic Booms going off all the time.
CA's just not going to let him run as roughshod as he wants, e.g. the worker safety and labor issues at his plants, the environmental impacts of what he's doing in Boca Chica, etc. That slows down his time schedule a lot, I don't blame him, he wants to get to Mars quick, but then again, if I were living near a Starship test area, I'd also be annoyed by all of the traffic, tourists, and explosions, so I don't object to him trying to get as far away from regulated residential areas as possible.
Well your political fantasy happens to be wrong. California experiences a net influx of highly skilled workers draining them from the rest of the US (https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...) and red states mostly lose their brightest people or absorb California residents from older failing industries who can’t afford the rents. The majority of this is about cost of living not taxes. Corporate taxes and income taxes have not really changed in recent years and California overall ranks in the middle of US states by EFFECTIVE tax rate (not the top marginal which few people pay but conservatives love to cite)
Go read that study by the government on internal US migration.
These “shackles” you’re talking about took me from someone who used to live in a ghetto to someone in the top 1%. The taxes are a small price to pay. Obsessing over marginal income tax rates is the wrong variable to optimize in life.
Do what you love, where you love, because it’s your passion, not because you can shave 3% off of your effective tax.
Most entrepreneurs don’t obsess over taxes, they’re focused on growth and solving problems, profit comes later.
The constant hyper focus on marginal tax rates is a form of bean counter myopia. It’s what you do when your company is effectively in maintenance mode and beholden to the bean counters on Wall Street, not when your trying to win your market space.
Wake me when Apple decides To move its HQ to a red state.
The dream of AI is to build a StarTrek like computer that can read and understand all human knowledge and answer questions about it, synthesizing answers.
Web Search for factual answers is a stop gap on that road, but distributed knowledge databases are inexorably going to be centralized, melded, and transformed.
The 90s “content is king” business models just aren’t sustainable if what you’re publishing is static mostly factual content.
It radically simplifies everything. Every commit is reproducible across the entire tool chain and ecosystem.
It makes the entire system kind of pure-functional and stateless/predictable. Everything from computing which tests you need to run, to who to blame when something breaks, to caching build artifacts, or even sharing workspaces with co-workers.
While this could be implemented with multiple repros underneath, it would add much complexity.
Maybe he felt he didn't need to apologize because he was forced to rush and release in iOS6?
What if the following conversation happened internally:
Scott: "Maps is not ready"
Cook: "Maps must ship as part of iOS6, it's the headline feature. We are committed to this time table."
Scott: "But there are lots of issues, lots of bugs."
Cook: "Fix as many as possible before release, but we are shipping."
Then, after the fiasco, he is asked to apologize, wouldn't you feel that the people who didn't take your advice should be the ones to apologize?
I think it is pretty refreshing for an executive to be self critical and admit big mistakes. Sergey sounded authentic in that interview.
Scott Forestall was axed for Apple Maps, but seriously, you rewrite a Maps service from the ground up from scratch and race to release it in iOS6, of course it's going to be beta quality for a long time, since these things take time to mature. I highly doubt the decision to include it in that state was solely Scotts.
I like to see companies admit major strategic mistakes as opposed to pretending everything is awesome for all time. (and no, Tim Cook's letter was a kind of non-apology, only a single sentence really admitted any mistake 'We fell short of our commitment')
Google has also hired a huge number of Microsoft people, that's going to have an effect on company culture. As well as consultant types from places like Mackenzie, Accenture, etc.
That's the problem with growing fast, hiring like crazy, acquiring like crazy, is that you don't have enough time to assimilate people into company culture properly.