It’s worth looking at the Falcon 9 here, where they had some prominent early failures before essentially nailing it and turning them into the most reliable and reused rockets ever (they’ve successfully flown them 246 times in the past 12 years). If they can repeat that with Starship*, then it’s not out of the question…

Fuel costs and the changing nature of passenger flight helped keep supersonic flight dead as well. It used to be that when you were on a plane, you were more or less cut off from the outside world as a passenger - that’s why Concorde still had business travelers, so they could be done with the useless flight time as…

It’s pretty challenging to pull together thousands of tons of space junk, even assuming you can do it without spending tons of propellant in the process. A rotating skyhook also means you need to firmly lash all that stuff together, or it’s going to get accelerated apart at one end of the skyhook.

Yes, just yes. 

That’s a myth. He thought the HSR was dumb as proposed*, and proposed an alternative idea - but didn’t try to kill it.

They probably could have made the engineering work, although I doubt it would be cost-effective to either build or operate. Land rights alone to build it would have been a nightmare on scale, like they are for a lot of train proposals. And passenger rail in general is not a highly profitable business.

The biggest head-scratcher was what executive decided to release it in August instead of October.

I didn’t hate it either - I just thought it was a disappointing movie that made some bad creative choices, but is paced well enough (and has some neat action scenes) that it’s not terrible.

“it’s in the past despite the guns being futuristic!”, language issues

Swift should just plant a forest somewhere to offset her CO2 emissions, then charge her fans to visit and take selfies there. 

It’s pretty dumb. The DCEU comic book movies have been hit or miss at the box office for years now*, and the only real MCU flop that’s hard to explain is Marvels. Ant-Man 3 wasn’t a flop - it was just a box office disappointment that critics hated, and the Ant-Man movies before it weren’t big money-spinners either.

65 was weirdly disappointing, even though I didn’t really go into it with expectations other than “Adam Driver fights dinosaurs”. The film makes three major creative decisions, and none of them work well.

The only reason this, like multiple other “we do that, just with an app” companies, became so large was because of the prolonged ultra low interest rate environment following the Great Recession.

Honestly surprised we haven’t seen more instances of drunk rich people getting caught skiing naked. 

Another case where they shot themselves in the foot with a commitment to doing a giant truck EV. That thing needs a monster battery, and batteries are hard. 

Uber for Scooters, complete with the inflated valuation due to an endless supply of ultra-low financing and a reliance on independent contractors to do all the expensive stuff. 

It was “Uber for scooters”, complete with (ab)use of independent contractors to do all the hard logistical work that would have made it probably non-viable as a business if it hadn’t gone big during the period of ultra-low interest rates inflating the tech sector. Zero Interest Rate Phenomena (ZIRP).

Have they ever done a Henry Ford or Dodge Brothers movie? Seems like you could get a good period piece film out of either. 

So, are they relocating TSA employees to the airport luggage transportation operations? Are they gonna start have people just standing around doing the same tasks the machines are doing?

In the shake out of this new wave of automated security, how many will lose their jobs?