The NASA/ESA MSR was of substantially higher quality, mind you. The M2020 rover specifically picked up samples of high scientific value to be returned. The Chinese return mission will only return what it finds from its direct landing site.
Also they’re no where near each other. These Chinese rover cannot get there.
Also also, if China were to create a new mission to collect them, they would see their costs balloon to unsustainable levels as well, as the issue is how the mission is designed. The samples are all over the place and would need a rover specifically designed to collect them and return them to a launcher.
The US Mars sample return project was always half baked in the hopes that doing something would garner funding for the rest of the mission.
Not true - only ten samples were dropped off at a “depot” close to each other. The rest are on-board Perseverance and can be picked up all at once, which was always the primary plan.
Given most financial advisors tend to vend out suboptimal advice and steer customers in favour of products they receive a kickback for, I'm happy to be accepting of an unbiased LLM that's trained on bogleheads.org.
yeah but most of that is 1) covered by bogleheads, and 2) doesn't require serious education or advisors.
take emergency funds -- how likely is it you can lean on friends or fam for money? do your budgeting and then plan for 6-12 months of budget. if you can get a load from the bank of mom and dad then maybe 3 months.
In my case, I am double-taxed (both Japan and US side) on capital gains. Tax treaties reduce, but not eliminate, the extent of double-taxation.
Many US-based brokers do not allow Americans abroad to purchase mutual funds, so VFIAX is not a choice for me.
Maybe I can go with eMAXIS Slim All Country... Oh, but that is a PFIC under IRS rules and I'd be taxed on unrealized capital gains. So I guess no Japan-equivalents of VT for me. That's fine, I guess I'll just buy VT in my US-based brokerage account; but now I'm in a suboptimal spot with respect to monthly contributions, calculating JPY-denominated income tax on dividends, etc.
I even made an implicit assumption when I said "calculating JPY-denominated income tax on dividends". That assumes your tax status is permanent resident. If your tax status is non-permanent resident, then a decent financial advisor will recognize that only the extent of income remitted to Japan gets taxed, so VT distributing at all isn't an issue (until 5 years later). What should you do before the 5 year threshold is hit? etc. etc.
But yes, if you're born in America and plan to stay within the same state for the rest of your life, then a 100% automated setup that simply deposits $1,000/mo into VFIAX is probably fine. (But keep in mind, to most non-Americans, VOO is not really diversified compared to funds like VT).
Otherwise, there is value in consulting someone (or something) that regularly handles taxes and financial planning.
Full agreement. I'm double-taxed in Germany and the US. I don't have a residency in the US (so I cannot vote but still get taxed, nice!) so I'm completely unable to buy VFIAX or any other fund from the US. I cannot but them over an EU brokerage, either, because US ETF and its ilk violate European transparency laws. I can buy EU-domiciled funds, but those are treated as PFIC in the US with prohibitive taxation. I relegated myself to an old-school dividend growth investment scheme and it's financially working out much better than I anticipated but still, I'd like to have a core of a stupid ACWI tracker.
> I relegated myself to an old-school dividend growth investment scheme and it's financially working out much better than I anticipated but still, I'd like to have a core of a stupid ACWI tracker.
roughly same approach in Canada, for the same reasons.
if you look up most of the dividend aristocrat funds they'll give a breakdown of holdings... so duplicate those in roughly the same ratio (to the best you can) and call it a day
Though you don’t directly say it, your comment strongly implies that you can’t buy fractional shares of $VFIAX. (You can, same as $FXAIX, $VTSAX, etc.)
It depends though - I'm not in the US and in my country ETFs get taxed continually whereas mutual funds don't get taxed until you sell.
In general, invest in low-cost index funds is pretty solid advice everywhere. In different countries you might use slightly different instruments due to tax advantages (like the ISA in the UK etc.)
Some people do have complex financial situations. It's not as simple as that.
For example in the UK (and maybe US?) you get tax relief for money you put into your pensions, but there's a limit of £60k/year. Unless you earn a lot (which I do, yeay) when that limit is tapered. Except that you can also use up to 3 years of previously unused allowance. But you have to use this year's first.
Also interest is taxed, but you can put up to £20k/year into an ISA which isn't. And if you still want to avoid some tax you have kids ISA's and even pensions!
Then there are also startup investment schemes that save you some tax. Those seem to be not worth it, but you get the idea - it can be complicated. Especially if you are near one of the many tax/benefit thresholds.
The marginal tax rate in the UK bounces all over the place - it's even technically possible for it to be over 100%!
Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.
The pricing got very complicated, that part is true. On the other hand, service quality didn’t go down. They added many small features which makes things easier, on the other hand.
I use a bunch of additional services they offer. They work well, make me spend less money and save my time (e.g.: send, transcription, advanced sharing controls).
We loved Dropbox and had a family subscription. One of the main reasons we stopped using them (besides it being a US company and Trump threatening declare war to a fellow European NATO ally) was that even though we were paying users, they continuously badgered us with upsells. Using Maestral as a client made things better (at the loss of block-level sync + now unmaintained), but every time I had to log into the web interface I got stupid upsell ads.
I once contacted their customer support about this and their answer was "Oh really? Can you send some examples?" So I sent them screenshots of all the upselling banners, popups, etc. that they showed and I never heard back from them.
It also didn't make sense at all. Why, if I'm using Dropbox for family use, would I upgrade to a business plan?
> Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over.
Hey, it's their call to decide the value of their entire user base.
AIUI the problem is the economics are pretty unfavorable for smaller-scale prototypes due to square-cube issues (drag and thus fuel costs is proportional to cross-sectional area, lift and thus cargo capacity is proportional to volume). You'd need a very big airship to get a competitive economic niche between sea and traditional air freight, where you're faster and more flexible than sea transport and cheaper than traditional air freight.
Hmm. Couldn't you put solar panels on top for power (and fly above the clouds) + use some sort of sail when wind is available? It might be really slow, but if you can get the systems to be fully autonomous (no people needed to pilot it) and need very little / no fuel... then couldn't it become a rather cheap way to ship things that aren't urgent?
There is another niche if you make them several miles long and width. Then can use more conventional construction materials like a concrete shell. (We are of course not ready for that)
We should first build the floating cities. Some old ships welded together surrounded by styrofoam in nets with mud on top and Mangroves, lots of Mangroves... Neptune's park.
Aviation is notoriously resistant to change. For both good and bad reasons. Look at how long it's taken to get leaded fuel on the way out for light aircraft operations.
It seems like there should be a solution to this though, either battery-electric or fuel-cell auxiliary thrust for ground operations and taxiing, or utilising tractors more to do the full aircraft ground movement, not just pushing back from the gate.
Unfortunately it's impossible to suggest such changes without getting a horde of aviation nerds thinking of reasons to tell you why something isn't possible, instead of imagining how it _could_ be possible.
So it's exciting to see companies like Heart Aerospace innovating in this area.
Virgin Atlantic trialled this at Heathrow in 2006[0]. It looks like it didn't gain traction because the airport would need to be resigned to support it, and the landing gear might have been damaged by so much towing.
At least in Europe, except for the largest airports, the start slots are well organized enough that the taxi+wait time is just enough to warm up the engines, eliminating the saving.
My kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...
Or just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.
I’ve recently come across a number of websites where the hamburger menu has been eschewed and what is obviously a drop down menu placed at the centre of the page immediately below the page title graphic.
I’m not sure if it’s a particular framework or whatever, I’m just a computer user.
The sites where I’ve seen it have predominantly been for business whose primary activities are not-online.
“Form follows function” is attributed to Louis Sullivan, author of very beautiful buildings. Whatever excuse modernist architects have for inflicting misery upon us laymen, this principle is not one of them.
There are countless cases of a leader/authority summarizing their thought into an aphorism and followers/practitioners completely misinterpreting it with disasterous results. We find this pattern across time and domains from religion to Agile development. If anything, we're biased toward this social anti-pattern and should deeply consider it likely before makeing a conclusion.
If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there.
I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated mess of Un-usability minima we seem to be stuck in.
> If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts
I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed.
Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.
Beauty has a function in improving the emotional state of people observing it. Ignoring this function in favor of all other functions can result in getting trapped in a suboptimal local maximum, where a more beautiful design could sacrifice only slightly in other domains and have a greater overall utility.
Is that a serious question? Many people would consider Potala palace, the Milan Duomo, Neuschwanstein, etc more beautiful than anything designed by Zaha Hadid and Gehry. Myself included, even as someone who likes their work. Limiting ourselves only to the category of modern event centers, I'd still put the Harbin Grand Theater ahead of it.
The article literally talks about polling people. The disparity between lay people and architects is the point of the piece.
Architectural taste doesn't align with the taste of everyone else. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?
> Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?
In many fields (architecture, art, cooking all come to mind) there seems to be an outright resistance to doing things that people actually enjoy. My hypothesis is that practitioners in those fields have spent so much time studying them, they have become bored of the "normal" stuff which people actually enjoy. In an effort to satisfy themselves, they optimize for novelty, either not knowing or not caring that doing so is making their work something which can only really be appreciated by people as desperate for novelty and steeped in the field as they are.
With food at least it isn't so bad, because there are a ton of not pretentious restaurants you can go to enjoy. Nobody can force you to go to the pretentious restaurants run by chefs bored of normal food. But with architecture, a building is something everyone in that city is forced to experience, whether they like it or not. It would be nice if architects were therefore more mindful that they should try to appeal to a broad range of tastes, not just architecture nerds who are bored of what came before.
No one will care if you build 1000th replica of a nice building. It's just not interesting to anyone and actually becomes boring very fast. People may live in it but no one will come from afar to visit it because of its beauty. It will become another one in a row of the same.
If you build a striking, exceptional building, it can become a big success (like Gehry's in Bilbao which is a success story for the whole city), so people who commission buildings sometimes select for that.
And also there is a sizable group of people who actually enjoy interesting buildings, like people who enjoy haute couture or haute cuisine etc., so it's not like there is no market for that.
There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
It becomes change and following avant garde for the sake of it and a group of people trying to be different in all the same boring ways.
> There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
Is Palladio not taught? Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language)? The classical order of columns?
Brent Hull (for one) has done a whole bunch of stuff with his restoration work on trying to teach people about proper proportion:
that one looks too Calatrava-ish (specifically Oceanografic), I'd prefer the Dongdaemun Design Plaza if we are talking Zaha Hadid - especially once you see it in person.
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