pjscott

A contract represents a set of (quantity, month) tuples, where quantity is an integer greater than zero; that number of yellow onions will be delivered in the corresponding month to the current holder of the contract. The mass of each onion is unspecified, as is the mean and variance of the underlying onion-mass distribution from which they are drawn.

> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping

The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become the boringly reliable workhorse of space launch, and the rocket cores are very similar in design. I'd bet on a successful launch, and probably on a successful landing of the side boosters.

(Do we really need to politicize launch vehicles, of all things?)

They're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency because of intuition drawn from satellites in geosynchronous orbit – but those are about 50x farther away from earth and have correspondingly longer ping times.

From Google's spokesperson, quoted in the article: "This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected."

Google wants a lot of compute sooner rather than later, and they're willing to pay a premium for speedy delivery of that compute. SpaceX has the capacity already built and ready to go. Hence the high price.

Even then, the numbers don't even remotely work out. Consider this "Elon Bezos" person; the combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is about $1.3 trillion or so, and the "Top 0.1%" category in the Fed's data has a net worth of about $25 trillion. This is not a small difference.

You're right, of course, but "those in government" aren't a single entity. There's always an incentive for one corrupt part of government to take more than their fair share of the loot, and then for the next part to take more, and so on... until their combined cut is over the revenue-maximizing percentage, and they make less than they could have if they had coordinated better.

(I want to call this "the tragedy of the commons," but that phrase doesn't sound quite dark enough.)

The wording was a bit unclear. The previous paragraph mentions wanting something cheaper than "those pesky XORs and multiplications". The multiplication is the expensive part; the (very cheap) XORs are just mildly annoying because you have to think about what they're doing.

> I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory.

That's not obvious to me. I checked the manuals for sort(1) in GNU and FreeBSD, and neither of them buffer everything in memory by default. Instead they read chunks to an in-memory buffer, sort each chunk, and (if there are multiple chunks) use the filesystem as temporary storage for an external mergesort.

This sorting program was originally developed with memory-starved computers in mind, and the legacy shows.

If money ever starts looking particularly illusory, try thinking in terms of the underlying resources that markets allocate.

That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The web of collaboration between all these far-flung people who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most of our material stuff.

... And in a conventional market system, the core of how those people coordinate their efforts is money. The price that each person is willing to buy something for or sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about it relative to other things. And markets are one popular way of aggregating that information, helping guide society's cooperative efforts in the direction of what people care about.

There are various allocation systems that don't involve money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to discourage freeloading, for example, can be found all over the place in pre-modern history because it worked – as long as your community was small enough that you can realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to scale up operations research toward the level of nations, since suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures were both instructive.)

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Coordination problems are hugely underrated in political discourse. So when I hear people say things like "The economic system is the ideology holding us back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this person thought about a what a viable alternative would look like?

"I dislike the current system" is only the first and most trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink here.]"