I’m not NASA or BOEING, but I’m going to imagine that before, Nasa would be calling the shots, essentially designing the craft, and overseeing (as in breathing down their necks) what contractors built.

You’re exactly RIGHT on this part. This, in the industry, is called a “cost plus” contract. What this means is that NASA can ask for whatever they want no matter how outlandish and the aerospace contractor (such as Boeing in for Space Shuttle) will build it for them. NASA is bill for all of the actual costs of the design and construction PLUS a set percentage which is pure profit for the contractor. Aerospace contractors LOVE “cost plus”!

What frequently happens with big space projects like this is that design objectives change or material limitations are uncovered during construction over the years. NASA may start by saying “we want this to carry 10 Astronauts”. Contractor designs and starts building the main vehicle. Then during a unit test, they find the G forces produced on the angle of the seats is too high for safety, so the angle needs to be changed. All the money spent designing and building the old seats NASA still has to pay, and the contractor still gets their fixed Plus profit. The new design and construction of the safe seats are ALSO paid by NASA as well as a Plus profit for the new seats.

Now NASA goes “I want a thingy that goes up” and the contractor makes the decisions, cuts the corners it wants, and creates mind boggling cost overruns.

You’re exactly WRONG on this part.

Now what was used for private spaceflight companies (SpaceX cargo, Northrop cargo, SpaceX crew, Boeing Crew) is called “fixed price contracts”.

Ideally, NASA writes out the specs of the vehicle they want to exist. The aerospace contractor looks at the specs, determines how much money they would need to design, build, and profit from the exercise and gives NASA a fixed price. They compete with other contractors bidding on the same work. The Commercial Crew program had 3 bidding contractors, Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Space. NASA looks at the general designs, considers the contractors, and makes their choice. This is the end of how theory matches reality.

In reality, some of the same problems found during construction come up, or NASA changes their mind halfway through the construction. NASA originally wanted the crew vehicles to carry 6 Astronauts. However during landing tests, they found the G forces were higher than they liked on the humans. To lower the G forces, they had to lean the seats back at a less steep angle. However this means that they now can’t fit 6 seats in, but only 4. In a “cost plus” contract this would be business as usually, and the contractor would simply carry on charging NASA more money, but this is supposed to be Fixed Price. But the contractors didn’t sign up for 4 seats in the contract, and they’ve already done a lot of work they won’t be paid for, so contractors reasonably pushed back saying “no we’re not going to work for free. We built what you asked. Now you say you want something different. You want a change, pay us.”. NASA agree, and there were some additional payments made to the contractors.

So “Fixed Price” isn’t exactly fixed price when NASA changes the specs halfway through. Even with ALL of these challenges, Fixed price SpaceX and Northrop commercial cargo and SpaceX commercial crew have been HUGE cost savings over the old “cost plus” model.

The problem with Starliner is that NASA kept paying Boeing for milestone completion when Boeing didn’t complete the milestones.

If you want to see how much, check out the costs of the most recent “cost plus” human space vehicle Lockeheed Orion capsule. Your eyes will pop out of your heat.

I’m not sure you understand who makes spacecraft that NASA uses in the past or present. There are not “NASA [built]” spacecraft.

• Orion is built by a private company Lockheed Martin
• The Space Shuttle was built by a private company, Rockwell International, which is now Boeing
• Apollo command module was built by a private company North American Aviation (which was acquired by Rockwell, which is now Boeing)
• The Lunar Lander was built by a private company Grumman Aerospace Corporation, which today is part of Northrop Grumman.

The difference between what you’re calling “private company spacecraft” and “NASA [built]” is just contract terms used on how to pay for it.

You’re also leaving out how (fuck Musk) SpaceX Dragon is also a private company spacecraft and has been wildly successful and saving billions of dollars of tax payer money over running the Space Shuttle in its place.

It’s exactly for these kinds of anachronistic things that when I see someone right now agitating to have some kind of age cutoff for people in office, I have a lot of skepticism.

It’d be ironic for government to put a cap into place for age of 65 (say) and then soon after, humans often start having longer and longer healthspans, extending over 100 and possibly beyond.

I would certainly entertain an age cap on office holders. What we have right now with almost entirely geriatric leaders is the lack of representation of those not in the senior citizen demographic. Its a version of tyranny of the few. This is exacerbated by the voting power being focused in those that don’t have the suffer the consequences of their choices, and instead leave those for younger generations.

I’m open to other ideas about how to address this too, but I don’t dismiss an age cap on office holders immediately.

For that matter, it’d be interesting to see how the Social Security system responds to longer and longer healthspans.

You don’t have to wonder. We’ve experienced this already in the life of Social Security. The original blueprint wasn’t designed to have a large retired population. You were supposed to die before reaching retirement. Social Security was to support the aging survivors that didn’t die yet to keep them out of abject poverty.

Retirement age increase is only one of three or four big levers on how to alter how Social Security operates and is maintainable.

If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards.

It looks ass-backwards when viewed in isolation and today’s tax policy. When the cap rule was put in place in 1937, the marginal tax rate was 79% and this would be for income over $5million ($115million in 2026 dollars). The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.

We broke the system by removing that large marginal tax, but leaving the Social Security income cap in place.

Social Security would be the easiest thing to fix, and honestly, it’d be hugely popular, too.

Just raise the cap.

I would be “negatively” affected with the raising of the cap. I still support raising the cap.

I’d also like what Al Gore wanted to do in the year 2000, a “social security lock box”. Stop letting Congress spend the annual contribution surpluses on non-social security spending.

I don’t like people like your sister. She benefited for her entire lives by people of all ages paying taxes for social local services she consumed growing up, going to public school, driving on maintained city roads, being protected by fire/police services, and using local libraries. The moment its her turn to pay for the younger generation then suddenly that spending she considers wasteful and ducks out of that society.

You correctly pointed out many of the difficulties about old age in rural environments. I hope she doesn’t die because she has a health event, and the closest hospital is an hour away in the closest big city, and the ambulance service may take an additional 45 minutes to arrive.

Reusing names of critical system directories in subdirectories in your home dir.

I did read the article, and that’s true, but insurance companies have been using that as an excuse to drive up premiums at record rates for years now (and making very healthy profits as a result, no pun intended).

I don’t disagree that health insurance companies (and their business practices) aren’t serving Americans well. However, as the article lays out the couple had the ability and will to pay for insurance premiums. The issue during the 90s was that any gap in coverage would mean health issues found during the gap wouldn’t be covered even when paying new premiums. That was fixed with the ACA. I was commenting on the article and their situation.

In my state, the exchange prices went up an average of 21% this year due to the loss of ACA subsidies. It doesn’t help a lot to know that they are legally required to offer you coverage if you can’t afford to pay for it.

I’m in my early 50s. Over my life, I’ve been very diligent about saving, and I expect to have what I thought would be enough to retire in my 60s. But I’m looking at the cost of health care going forward and I’m very concerned that I won’t be able to afford it.

I agree with everything you said here. Republicans are poisoning that portion of the ACA unrelated to the article. I’m also doing the same math you are about making sure I have healthcare until Medicare kicks in. For many, health coverage will be the defining metric to when we can retire. Some of us are discussing that exact topic in a different Lemmy community.

Except that the Republicans in congress have refused to allocate funding for ACA subsidies, which means this WILL happen again.

If you read the article you’d know the ACA benefits point I mentioned has nothing to do with subsidies on insurance premiums. It has to do with prior to the ACA insurance companies could deny coverage for preexisting conditions.

Nobody commenting is reading the article.

The headline suggests that medical bills drove them into poverty so much so that he’s had to be driving for Uber at 76. Thats not the case, and the article lays it all out.

It looks like about 25 years after the medical bills wiped them out financially, they recovered financially:

I really didn’t want to retire in my 60s, but we were getting older, and my wife wanted me to be spending more time at home. When I retired, I had some equity in my home and around $300,000 in my IRA. I also started to fund an IRA for my wife, which I built to mid-five figures. This allowed us to travel extensively within the US for the first few years. But a part of me felt like we probably weren’t going to live that long anyway because everybody around us was dying.

We should be celebrating two things:

• the fact that the ACA passed into law and that what happened to this couple in the 1990s can’t happen again under today’s law
• the hard work they did rebuilding financially to have over $350k in savings + home equity and have have a comfortable retirement to be able to afford extensive travel they did in retirement.

I think you may want to read the quote again. He can afford it “barely” without working. The working 3 days a week at Costco is what makes it not barely.

Puton won’t be able to keep going back to the same wells for long,

I think its already hit this point. Reports of recruitment from Russia has fallen dramatically in the last couple of months with a net loss of troops Russia is fielding considering the losses every month.

and other countries won’t be willing to send mercenaries for his meat grinder.

This is still ongoing, less so that countries are intentionally committing troops, but more from scams where nationals from abroad are tricked into coming to Russia being told they will be doing regular jobs, and only then finding out they are being assigned to Russian frontline combat units for the meat waves. The most recent high profile version of this was the adult daughter of a prominent South African politician scamming South African men to going to Russia. Some of these men lived as POWs capture by Ukraine.

IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity.

I know this is a common philosophical statement, but I haven’t yet seen a great implementation of it in reality. I’m interested if your approach is viable.

Scenario:

Lets say we have a 25 year old worker named Jim. Jim was hired and his job for 1 year was to log into a system, look up specific values, and populate these values into fields in an Excel spreadsheet. At the beginning of the second year, a small Bash script (computer code) was written by an engineer and set to run on a repeating daily schedule that did all of the lookups and sheet population that was Jim’s entire job. The entirely of Jim’s job has been replaced by automation.

Result:

Jim no longer has any work to do for the organization. There aren’t any other open positions at the company for Jim (or if there are Jim is not even remotely qualified to do those other jobs).

• So how would you apply your philosophy to this situation?
• Do you believe the organization should continue to employ Jim even without any work for him?
• Should he be let go, but still paid? If so, how much, and for how long?

At 325,000 dead, literally every Russian must know a victim, or the family of a victim. Every neighborhood, every high school graduating class must have several dead.

Part of the reason Putin has been able to do this for so long is that this isn’t the case. Moscow and St Petersburg have largely shielded from the loss of their populations through drafts. Putin has drawn significantly from the rest of Russia instead, especially those in impoverished regions.

Does anyone else just like…not care about this?

If you see how common kidnapping for ransom is in some other countries, and that now it is appearing in a nation where it was rare before, that should be concerning to most.

If the kidnappers are not found from this one, I would expect other copycats to start the same practice.

Interesting story, but headline not accurate:

When asked if he could cover all of his expenses using Social Security without a roommate, Ferber said, “Barely. What really helps naturally is working at Costco three days a week.”

So, yes, he could afford rent without a roommate, but its understandable why he has a roommate anyway.

imagine wrecking your life working to advance a thing for which the ultimate end goal is to replace you entirely

That isn’t new with AI. Non-AI Automation has been the goal (and achievement) of business for decades.

But in general it’s just understanding what makes people happy: dopamine. And then understanding how that specific person varies from average.

Like, it’s entirely possible they keep doing all things that would make most people happy, and they’re just wired differently so it’s not working.

This is where my answer would go to. I’d extend on what you said about dopamine though in two specific directions:

• Learn what drives you as an individual. Besides chemical inducements, what actions/accomplishments/behaviors give you a sense of satisfaction? For most there is some form of creative or active pursuit like artistic painting, dance, woodworking, moto racing, skydiving, sport, memorizing trivia, study of a field of science, organizing, home design, or any number of the endless activities that exist. Figure out what it is that you like doing, and do more of it.
• Cut back on the chemical inducements of dopamine. If you can get the 10x-100x the dopamine hit you need from just putting a chemical in your body, the tiny bit of natural dopamine you get from a non-chemical activity won’t even register with you. You’ll be desensitized to the natural dopamine you get from the things you like doing. The things you like doing that would normally give you dopamine won’t anymore that you’ll be able to detect. This means you stop doing the things you like. So the only way you can get any measurable amount of dopamine you detect is by the chemicals.

Remember when the church used to sell “indulgences” for cash as pardons for sins? What trump is doing is the modern day version of it and its just as disgusting.

Before the TSA existed (pre-911) airport security was run and paid for by the airlines.