As far as I understand there is still some time before humanity becomes interplanetary in any meaningful way, maybe even many generations. And what is going on so far these days is mostly about not regressing.
I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit. Partly the excitement comes from being a workaround for humanities reluctance to spend money on space exploration. Believe what you want, but from what I can find this doesn't seem to be a significant part of what would e.g. make humanity interplanetary. At least not yet.
Getting to orbit is hard, for anything big beyond earth orbit, we'll probably need manufacturing or at least some assembly in orbit. That takes a lot of trips from earth to orbit. Making that more efficient means more resources left for the real exploration.
I dunno if I really follow your logic here. It would be nice if nobody cared about money and we all just worked hard to make everything awesome or whatever. But, we (sadly) don't live in that world. So in this world that we do live in, bringing down the cost of getting things/people from the ground to really really high up in the sky can only be viewed as a step towards becoming multiplanetary.
>I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit.
beside everything else, getting retro-rockets work well at hypersonic speeds is a key to landing on Mars (I really loved the de-facto SpaceX propaganda series "Mars". Even better than "Martian" for me. The only slight disappointment is the cop out at the very end).
My great grandmother was reading a pulp magazine about man going to the moon when she was young, her father made a point to check that she understood that such things were impossible if not extremely far off in the future. The only reason I know this story is that she survived to watch the moon landings and told my father, who told me. The moral of the story was always that it's very hard to predict technological growth, in particular, we tend to undershoot with our long term predictions. Personally I tend to be more weary of people that claim something won't happen in my lifetime than people that tell me something will happen.
By that definition, the Apollo program had reusable rockets. (Able to climb back out of a gravity well, leave orbit of a large mass, and return to earth).
Escape velocity of Mars is less than half Earth's or about double the moon's.
In the past we even had space ships, which could start from ground, go to space, do stuff, come back and the could be reused. Having just a rocket isn't that much of an improvement.
That said: All the constraints on making it reusable and safe for humans are also a key factor why Space Shuttle was so expensive. With SpaceX's rockets not all parts need to resist the stress of reentry etc.
> In the past we even had space ships, which could start from ground, go to space, do stuff, come back and the could be reused
The 're-used' aspect of the Shuttle involved massive re-fits which took months for each vehicle. It was like having to send your car back to the manufacturer for a total rebuild (often including engine change) every time you went for a drive. SpaceX is a massive improvement in this respect.
Nitpick: the boosters were reused by parachute splashdown, but it was also really expensive due to (among other things) the corrosiveness of salt water. The External Tank was in fact expended.
Each SRB consisted of 11 cylindrical steel sections. After flight and recovery, these were dismantled, refilled with solid rocket fuel as appropriate, and then reconnected to form a new SRB with all of the O-rings, etc.
So also a complete rebuild, with reuse occurring at the segment level, not of the whole booster assembly.
For all its faults, and it had a few, Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu helped stretch my perspective to be ok with the fact that space travel could be a multigenerational activity even with a quantum leap in technology.
Europe is losing ~globalization and we are fighting over the scraps. Which European country do you think will be overall obviously better in ten years? And not in the sense that "everything gets better", but in the sense of having a high rate of success in converting progress to prosperity. I don't know of any.
From my travels it sounds like (some) Europeans don’t work that much compared to their American or Asian counterparts. Like, French citizens gets way more vacation than anyone I know.
It’s obviously good to live a decent life and spend time with family, but at some point it cuts into your national productivity.
I don't generally think it is that big a concern. You are unlikely to outwork people, especially with something like 20%. Or more specifically there are always people with less to lose than you do. It isn't something that European countries can compete by, and especially not smaller countries. I think greater concerns are systematic defect. But there is no meaning to have a lack of education, apartments or other things that would mean good conditions for being productive. Those are the things you can't afford as a smaller country that wants to be competitive.
The Eastern European countries have been growing consistently for years. If you only look at economics countries like Poland have been doing very well.
You have to remember Western Europe has developed economies. They aren't likely to grow at the rate Asian countries are as those economies have a lot of catching up to do.
Also European countries don't necessarily have the same priorities as the US for example. Most of us prefer decent workers rights and consumer protections over 1/2% on GDP.
>Most of us prefer decent workers rights and consumer protections over 1/2% on GDP.
Weird framing considering inviduals don’t care about the GDP. It would probably be better to say that people in the US tend to care about higher incomes vs state entitlements. This is evident in the fact that brining up tax cost per individual is an easy way to kill universal healthcare plans.
I am not so much concerned about growth as such, but about European countries inability to convert progress into prosperity.
This might not be the best example, but take cars. A country like the US would build a interstate highway system, probably subsidize car manufacturing and go on to create a huge factor of progress for decades to come. You have successfully converted technological progress into a meaningful factor for society. While in a less developed country only the rich will have cars and roads will be broken. Of course these days that era is coming to an end.
The same is true for other things that are progressing. Yet, in few to no European countries would you expect that the fundamentals of the information age like education, health care, housing, infrastructure and work environment will get better and more accessible in the next ten years. At least not organically i.e. without a crash.
What you can say in most countries is that education is getting more competitive, health care more complex, housing less accessible, infrastructure more expensive and work environment less comfortable. This is people fighting each other trying to get whatever there is, not somewhere where people are preparing for the future as societies.
So the only conclusion I can make, while it certainly might not be the correct one, is that Europe is losing. Because if Europe was winning we would be investing in the future and getting it better. Unless we are just hopelessly arrogant, which doesn't bode well either.
>Yet, in few to no European countries would you expect that the fundamentals of the information age like education, health care, housing, infrastructure and work environment will get better and more accessible in the next ten years.
I do expect that. Of course there are some problems like an ageing population and the fiscal irresponsibility of some countries, but those problems aren't unique to Europe.
To take your example of the highway system there is huge development going on across Europe.[1]..[8]
Your conclusion is too gloomy, I know it's the standard message spouted by the media but I really don't think it's true.
The example of the highway system was more for its time. Europe did, and has, just as the US built a lot of infrastructure over the years. But it is still lackluster in many places.
Though the real lack of conversion isn't in one specific thing, it is that Europe (and probably much of the world for that matter) can't offer people good opportunities. I hope I am too gloomy. It is just a hard argument to make that in terms of life prospects it wasn't better to be young ten years ago than it is today in many places.
If people believe that someone else won't come and eat their lunch over that I think they are wrong. As I alluded to in another comment, Europe probably lost at least half of the tech industry it could have had if it wasn't for capital going into things like rents.
I people were expecting things to get better they wouldn't essentially hold back growth. We would see new rapid affordable development because not doing that would be losing out. But I don't see countries being concerned about that. They are perfectly happy taking decades building things and going over budget. They let mortgages double or triple, so everyone who came before win at the expense of those coming after. They sell companies with valuable technology are to foreign interests.
So I don't really understand how someone e.g. would end up working less when they have twice the mortgage than their parents and the companies they work for are owned foreign investors who wouldn't mind moving activities abroad at any point.
And to that point almost all major successful companies are vertically integrating today, because with information being accessible there isn't much reason not to control your own activities. Yet, most European countries are doing the opposite. Outsourcing their main activities to complex constellations.
As a European, I feel like the EU, in general, is on the losing side of globalization.
There is not a single European internet company in the top 15. I think part of the reason for this is cultural (aversion to risk), part of it is due to the environment (relatively low salaries for IT, limited access to venture capital) and a part of it is due to bad policies being enacted by the EU - most notably the EU VAT on digital services, the GDPR and now the Copyright directive.
When it comes to digital services, Europe is seen as a place to sell things, not make them. This state of affairs has left Germany and France bitter over the success of American tech giants, particularly as they put ever increasing pressure on local businesses. So the EU reacted in pretty much the only way it knows how - by introducing legislation against said businesses. This had the unintentional consequence of targeting European tech startups as well, making Europe an even worse place to start a new business than it already was. Instead of a single digital market, you have 28 different national markets, each with their own rules and regulation, only ~11 of which are actually interesting due to their size and purchasing power.
At the same time, austerity policies enacted after the 2008 recession have resulted in cuts in the scope and quality of public services. Prices for most goods and services are rather high. The middle and lower classes are particularly hard hit, leaving many to wonder whether globalization is worth it.
> [...] and a part of it is due to bad policies being enacted by the EU - most notably the EU VAT on digital services, the GDPR and now the Copyright directive.
These rules came into effect the last year or so, the "battle" for the tech industry was fought ten to twenty years ago. US companies all have had a huge advantage "only" being under the (at the time very criticized) DMCA while European companies had to abide by local laws, often in multiple jurisdictions. Large US companies also avoided paying the same taxes European companies had to, amassing large reserves for acquisitions of any successful European companies.
That Europe can't produce technology companies is false, at least to the same extent that applies to the US. They just either got outmaneuvered by large US entities, got acquired or ended up limited in their growth by things like housing. If you look at e.g. Sweden you have MySQL (eventually acquired by Oracle), Skype (eventually acquired by Microsoft), Minecraft (acquired by Microsoft), Spotify (public with many offices). Any of these companies could have been really big domestically, if it wasn't for it being hard to grow and easy to get bought.
These rules, whether you agree with them or not, should have been there 20 years ago so everyone had to play by the same rules.
The VAT directive on digital goods most certainly did not come into effect in the last year or so.
> US companies all have had a huge advantage "only" being under the (at the time very criticized) DMCA while European companies had to abide by local laws, often in multiple jurisdictions.
So we agree that Europe, in general, is a worse startup environment compared to the USA?
Also, I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that large companies like Apple or Microsoft got big because they didn't pay taxes in Europe.
> Any of these companies could have been really big domestically, if it wasn't for it being hard to grow and easy to get bought.
They were big domestically. They were even significant internationally. Just not nearly enough to match US companies.
> Also, I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that large companies like Apple or Microsoft got big because they didn't pay taxes in Europe.
I didn't, that is another story. I am saying that they had an easier time than they should have competing with and acquiring any European competition by effectively having a ~30% advantage and discount.
> They were big domestically. They were even significant internationally. Just not nearly enough to match US companies.
They all except Spotify got acquired before they could potentially become big companies. If you want to have large companies with thousands of employees in Europe they have to survive as domestic companies. Spotify had potential to become one, but at that point the Stockholm housing market was already in a bubble. https://www.ft.com/content/bdf04bc2-6a0f-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea0...
Essentially competitiveness. Countries that are, or at least aspires to be, competitive would be restricting foreign companies and invest in infrastructure. While Europe is doing the opposite. We are selling our companies and restricting the building of infrastructure.
And while you can point to specific examples, like startups, that are successful in Europe it is mostly an illustration of how much we are leaving on the table.
While I do agree that land is different, sometimes I think the problem is that people see it as such. When housing markets rise people get rich, just like they do with e.g. stocks. The lack of affordability is a factor of inequality, and especially inequality in opportunities. That is why moving to a smaller cities isn't a solution for most people, because the problem is with opportunities which are appearing in cities and disappearing most everywhere else.
Stock, in principle, is an investment in an enterprise that creates wealth. Like building cars or growing wheat.
Buying and selling houses merely moves wealth around (typically from younger generations to older). It creates nothing, incentivizes nothing and looses more and more to mortgage holders. It can indeed make people rich but only to the degree someone else gets poorer.
The trend is for an ever growing number of single family homes to become rentals owned by investors. As prices rise further and further above middle class ability to afford, this trend will increase. You can make far more money buying a house and renting it than buying it and sitting in it. So in the long term owner-residents are never going to be able to compete for homes with large investor in an unregulated market.
What annoys me about this sentiment is that I was never a hipster, or posh, or greedy. I got priced out from anything decent all the same, while my hipster friends got rich. People aren't flocking to cities because they are entitled, though some might be, but because there are no good alternatives in most countries.
At least in big cities it is almost never that people don't want to build more, but that:
1. Property owner do not want to see their quite significant loans, or investments, decrease in value.
2. Renters do not want to get priced out of the city, having to leave a good job and move their kids away from their friends.
In addition to that while seemingly intuitive in practice building doesn't seem to decrease costs. Presumably because:
3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible.
Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building. If just building more worked there would be good examples and the far majority isn't.
3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible.
Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other.
Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building
Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now.
This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right?
What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices.
Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.
Sweden probably has a slightly undeserved reputation in this area. These days mainly the financing is socialized, which is still something. The services themselves are privatized. So the quality can vary wildly depending on location and provider. Or even almost randomly. It is more similar to a capitalist system in that regard. I think maybe Norway or Finland might be better examples of countries offering egalitarian service today.
To be fair I think it is worse these days than it could be. Over the last 50 years or so Sweden developed a form of egalitarian individualism, which has made social interaction a bit peculiar. But today there is rising inequality which has turned some of that individualism into egoism. At the same time there are a lot of people moving in or out of cities, breaking up friend groups and leaving small towns to their faith. Swedes do quite well socially when it comes to things like non profit clubs. Now everyone is trying to be "international" which most Swedes aren't good at as they are far too concerned about what other people think.
Most developers will be making more than €3000 a month after taxes. The problem is usually housing and living costs. Both ranging from €500 to €1500 each, that is €1000 to €3000 total. If you are at the lower end you of course end up fairly cash wealth, at the other not so much. At the same time these days you would still, despite being in one of the more lucrative professions, struggle to acquire a central apartment, or a holiday home, which is largely only accessible to those who are already asset wealthy. Especially not without significant debt.
If you can find your way it isn't bad, but I wouldn't put Sweden above places Switzerland or The Netherlands these day in terms of a good deal. Which I would have five to ten years ago.
Thank you for the insight, but I think you may be intending to reply to someone else :) My experience has fit none of the things you describe (in fact most of the factors you list are quite far off of my own experience in terms of debt, apartment location, and salary), but that's not to say that they're not true for someone else. There definitely is a rental problem in Stockholm right now.
I didn't say you were far off in general, I said everything you said happens to not be applicable to my experience (or that of most of my team members), and your comment seemed to be providing information about living in Sweden to someone who already lives in Sweden, which is why I figured you intended to reply to someone else.
You said that the other respondents standard might be different. I am saying that this is the range. What would be the approximate numbers (salary and central apartment), at your company for someone getting hired today, say with a couple of years out of school?
It is significantly harder to attain a high quality of life at decent cost in Stockholm these days. Especially since the housing market is high, but stalling, and there is a recession looming. Sweden pushing itself as a good home for startups seem to largely correlate with becoming a worse place to live in, and therefor to a large extent be posturing. There have also been more obviously successful startups in the past then there are now. Moving to Stockholm could still be the right move for some people, but I would advice looking at the situation carefully beforehand.
>Sweden pushing itself as a good home for startups seem to largely correlate with becoming a worse place to live in, and therefor to a large extent be posturing.
This isn't, implicitly, true. For Stockholm, sure. What about a city like Växjö? Or Motala? There are very decent areas to live in Sweden, close to booming tech start-ups, and aren't suffering the same plights that the capital is seeing.
Admittedly, the points-system is a bit of a pain-in-the-ass and they seemed to have a plan for it, when it first started, for newcomers to the country; however, that plan doesn't work-out so well in the terms of today.
To point: Sweden, in general, doesn't suffer from all of the plights seen in Stockholm. If Stockholm is your goto, then by all means, you should be aware of them; but a larger portion of Sweden doesn't see the same problems (yet).
> For Stockholm, sure. What about a city like Växjö? Or Motala? There are very decent areas to live in Sweden, close to booming tech start-ups, and aren't suffering the same plights that the capital is seeing.
Yeah... Motala is really relevant in the context of conversation about "Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm" (~3 hours by car).
Most of these places would also just have a hard time "scaling" if they did managed to get people or business there. One successful or a couple of smaller startups might need at least a hundred people a year. So there really needs to be something special going on for that to work out.
Those places are far more average with for example small city centers and limited transportation. As such there are far more competition, and therefor places to consider, before selecting one of those options. Especially since you might end up living outside one of those cities. Smaller isn't necessarily easier either. Most of Sweden has a rental shortage and a pricey housing market. It is a systematic issue of abandoning the rental market in favor of 100+ year mortgages.
But if anyone know of a city in Sweden with accessible good living conditions and decent opportunities I would of course be happy to hear about it.
