China makes space program breakthrough, bye bye Elon!

China is fairly good at copying stuff.

Except copying Chinese.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

A more direct source is the South China Morning Post. Lots of details are proudly shown.

Reusable rockets are one of those things that are obvious once demonstrated. And the pincer that grabs the descending rocket booster is called the "chopstick" by Musk. Given his track record, I wouldn't write Musk off just yet.

And so on.

Joe

It should be clear by now that China's science and technology are at the point of being self-sustaining and self-bootstrapping. It won't be long now before the West is scrambling to duplicate their achievements.

Hainan is, among other things, an unbelievably luxurious resort island. There's nothing like it in the west. And it holds up very well to those monstrous typhoons that pass through with ever-increasing frequency.

So were America and Japan when they too were playing technological catch-up. It's easier and safer to copy something that works that it is to develop your own solutions.

The patent system exists to formalise that once you've caught up.

The current low (actually negative) rate of population growth in China is replicated in every advanced industrial country around the world. Rich countries import immigrants from poor countries to fill the gap. Trump doesn't want the US to do that and it trying to throw out some of those immigrants, much to the disgust of their employers.

OK, thank you, found the link: scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3360069/china-recovers-long-march-10b-reusable-rocket-maiden-launch

Lots of other interesting stuff as well on scmp.com to read!

I dunno, his political maneuvers and many blunders and now his AI stations in space make me wonder if he was just lucky when good engineers made SpaceX work. Are these still there? I did read one has left.

He is just playing the stock market.. trumpist style. I warned before that he was just cashing in because he KNOWS he will fail and Chinese restaurants will be all over Mars before he ever gets there.

A gradual tapering off of population is inevitable and good for the planet. A fertility less than half replacement is a demographic and economic crisis.

Russia has that problem too. Both have huge differentials in birth rate among ethnic groups too. Envision troubles ahead.

It's in our interest to have immigration, but control it.

"China maintains extremely strict immigration and naturalization policies, with one of the lowest foreign-born populations in the world. "

It's obvious that a caucasian person is an outlier in China. You'd have to be a 12-foot Martian to get noticed here.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's not looking like a crisis at the moment. Countries that need them still seem to be able to import immigrant. China's probably an odd case

- their writing system is vile so they've never had a big group of educated people. Computers have more or less solved that problem so a lot more of their population can get recruited into the educated layer.

Envisioning trouble ahead is what rabble-rousers do more or less non-stop.

You never bothered to control who came into the country to do your stoop labour. There were laws but they don't seem to have been enforced.

Trump's current antics are mainly about finding subjects to have attention-getting tantrums about.

The country is huge, and ethnically and linguistically diverse.

You seem to think that a caucasian is the only variant that would stick out in China.

Well, Musk does everything upside down and backwards, and is punished by becoming the world's richest person.

Joe

Without a doubt! And, being artificially constrained, they likely have found more efficient (and effective) solutions to problems that the West approaches by throwing money at them. I.e., their solutions likely scale much better!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Party hacks aren't good at navigating technologies. Or real estate.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

looks like an exercise in over-enthusiastic extrapolation.

More but slightly, less gigantic, factories could be a safer approach.

Musk didn't make his money by being under-ambitious, but development always throw up surprises and you never end up with exactly what you intially had in mind.

Look at Trump's performance in the US. His string of real estate bankruptcies - from 1991 to 2009 - is famous

China does seem to be pretty good at getting things to work.

Yea, and he is making a human settlement on Mars too. I remember in the video that promoted it the astronouts playing with their laptops.

He did not know about the effect of radiation levels on chips and people it seems.

If he did a Moon return he would have advanced since 1968 Just bull talk, low orbit pollution, debris hitting people's land. He is just a trumpist clown. But if Monny is your Godless eeeh beep.

Time will tellsa Sank your ferry much, hope it was not too much sweat giving your feet back.

The next step would be to buy Xlight and build a giant euv source next to the fab. That advances the "X" theme.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Yikes, Trump again. You are obsessed.

Surely not public works, construction, flood control, agriculture, or any sort of freedom.

They are good at burning Australian coal.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

He's a remarkably horrible example of a lot of political defects, and he does advertise his incompetence. If you don't notice this yourself, you've got to be decidedly imperceptive, or maybe reluctant to admit that your initial enthusiasm for the creep was ill-judged.

The Three Gorges Dam hasn't fallen down yet.

India and Africa used to have similar sort of famines but we now do seem to have worked out how to prevent them killing people

They mostly burn their own. The imports from Australia are just 1.6% of their current consumption, and it's only 16% of of what they import.

What Chinese "freedom" might look like is anybody's guess. American freedom seems to involve having the US run by the people that own it. You haven't even got universal health care - your rich don't want to be taxed heavily enough to pay for it.

Of course people who own a business decide how to run it.

The US is mostly run by anybody who produces, but more important is the fact the people here mostly have a choice of boss and a choice of where to live and what to buy.

We do have antitrust law that tries to prevent nonlinearities, monopoly power. It kinda works.

US health care could be better, mostly by doing less.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But the US isn't just a business, and running it as if it were produyces some gross inefficiencies (not to mention injustices).

Except that US bosses to love to off-shore jobs to place where wages are lower. Lots of people have a remarkably restricted choice of low-skill jobs, and the bosses don't like seeing money spent on educating people to do skilled jobs, when they can buy skilled work in cheaper countries.

As a rule of thumb making an article in ten times the volume lets you have the unit price. At the moment the highest volume production lines are all in China

It does much too much for people who have the capacity to pay for it, and not nearly enough for the less well off. Covid-19 killed a relatively high proportion of Americans. Australia (963 per million) and New Zealand (884) did much better - geography helped.