I'm not surprised - Amazon successfully managed to get the Pentagon to drop a $10 Billion USD contract with Microsoft by "applying lawyers" to the matter [1]! Why not do the same here. When you are at the scale of ambition that Bezos et al. play in then why shouldn't you push your legal execs to deliver the same way you push your engineering execs to deliver...
That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure.
Did DOD give a reason why they went with MS when AWS is being used by most of the world. The only reason was because Trump hates Bezos so Amazon was right to fight back.
How do people justify Hyperloop as a particularly green option when my initial thought would be that it uses a similar amount of energy as a normal train - which we already have as a popular option? Or is the energy cost of maintaining the vacuum & associated processes far less than energy cost of air resistance for a normal train?
My presumption is that the vacuum matter is no trivial undertaking considering the proposals in this article for extremely long tubes all the way across Europe. Not trying to be snarky - I'm not that familiar with the details of Hyperloop and genuinely intrigued by how one would create so much vacuum!
I'd imagine he has an impressively comprehensive team around him ensuring he doesn't need to focus on anything other than his work.
That said, working over 14 hours per day 7 days a week is implausible to me. Maybe in short bursts but I doubt he does that for any stretch of time.
The Elon Musk PR machine & cult of public enthusiasm is a massive business asset. When you're in the business of selling dreams to investors and employees pushing themselves to the limit this type of 'fact' is going to get thrown around.
'Work' can include things like travel and lunches. Both of which can be downtime but are classed as 'work'.
Overall its hard to believe considering he also has Space x and other investments and im suresomeone is streching the truth. But I dont doubt the guy lives and breaths his work.
some executives never stop working, even when not on site they consider time spent solving problems in their head or sitting at their computer/tablet/etc as work.
myself I have been around some six to six executives who even at parties talk shop. hell we used to joke that when one went on vacation it only made his emails longer
In a couple decades people are going to look back at the 1990's/2000's as a savage time - large tracts of the earth desperately poisoning themselves daily and being totally unconcerned by it.
According to the CDC[1] Diabetes incidence in the US has increased from roughly 2.5% to 7% since 1990.
The numbers are:
* 1980 - 2.54%
* 1990 - 2.52%
* 2000 - 4.40%
* 2010 - 6.95%
Unless legislation similar to that applied to cigarettes is introduced this train is going keep speeding further out of control. At least there are now increasing numbers of advocacy groups trying to make progress on the legislative side of things[2].
A big difference is that drinking soda has no effect on the person next to you. Another difference is that drinking soda occasionally likely has as much effect on your overall health as occasionally eating ice cream or a candy bar, which is to say, not that much. Another difference is that sugar and caffeine is much less of an addictive substance than nicotine.
To equate ingesting sugar with inhaling (and exhaling) carcinogens is pretty unhelpful.
Of course, there is more of a sliding scale, where a population en masse ingesting way too much sugar combined with a sedentary lifestyle can be a bigger health crisis than cigarettes, but that has much more to do with culture than the actual fact of the food itself.
The fact that their website fails to clearly explain anything that I would say is particularly new to the world of cryptocurrencies I'd guess the value proposition is the marketing strategy...
The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize.
As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.
And quality blurring may be tricky to implement.
On Google Street View, street name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.
"Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when you know it's the right thing to do.
The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.
That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure.
[1.1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc...
[1.2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/