> If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was.
And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of money into some venture, only to give up on it after the first failure is something we should all be angry about. If its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.
I agree, but this also means "investing in smaller chunks." We're stacking missions up to be so complicated that they're really expensive and the first try really has to succeed. We need to figure out how to get smaller chunks so that individual ones can fail.
Yes. A lot of the innovation in space recently has been about making space missions cheaper. NASA and JPL still do these huge multi-billion-dollar headliner missions, but the democratization of space is an underrepresented story in the public view of space. It's still hard to get far from orbit cheaply, though.
Yup. Actually, I'm advisor for a high school team that was selected by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative to put a satellite in LEO, mostly to do space technology development and demonstration. The growth of rideshare and dedicated small satellite launch missions has been impressive to watch in the past couple of decades.
Getting out of LEO has a lot of challenges; the delta V is expensive, but also survivability away from Earth's thermal radiation and magnetic field gets harder. This has a compounding effect where costs and scope run away; if you need to buy expensive launch, rad-hard hardware and do exotic things for power and heating, you want to amortize the fixed portions of these over more science...
> my second issue with Kagi: privacy-wise, I simply don’t believe that a service that requires login and thus naturally associates all your activity with your identity is better than a service which can be used without a login.
I don't get this argument. Do you want to be protected from the services you use, or do you want a partnership based on trust? With aligned incentives, trust is easier. Without trust, not logging in won't save your privacy. Just pay the nice people money for the very nice service they provide, and let them build trust with you.
If you want gold-plated, there's Hilti, but you're paying a lot extra for a marginal increase in reliability. Milwaukee, Bosch, Makita, and DeWalt are all in the same range, ie contractor/prosumer (and all mostly are manufactured in China). Ryobi is slightly lower but generally fine, ie consumer / price sensitive. Below that is Harbor Freight / no-name electric drill you'd find in am Amazon Basics "essential tools" kit.
Seconded, though I've found the HF Hercules wired line pretty comparable to Dewalt.
But there's a fair amount of inter-model variety within those four/five brands. My 12v Dewalt impact punches above its weight/price and I have two Bosch 18v drills, similar in form factor but one is frankly inferior quality.
And Mafell can be better than festool. Though different manufacturers tend to have different advantages.
Hilti makes some very large tools that if needed Festool does not have alternative. I have also seen a comparably priced Hilti drill/driver give up where a Makita kept going.
WOW I've never heard of festool and hilti but simple googling has turned up amazing stores of their customer service. Unfortunately it looks like they don't overlap completely in the types of tools Ryobi offers.
I really like Ryobi's 18V and 40V 'ecosystem'. Every time I am browsing Home Depot or their website, I come across new items that are compatible with these two ecosystems.
Just recently I saw everything from 18V Ryobi Glue Gun to a Portable Power washer that can suck water from a bucket (eliminating the need for a hose) to even a portable soldering iron! Hell they even got a boombox ha ha!
For the 40V I saw cool things such as a portable power generator, lawn mowers, wet dry vac and even a portable refrigerator.
Its really cool that there are like a bazillion things that your existing batteries can plug into.
Tools are weird like text editors where people get religious about some brands over others. But if your hustle is fencing the most reputable and easy-to-move tools, you would probably want to acquire the standard ones you see in Home Depot and Lowe's, such as Dewalt, Milwaukee, Craftsman, etc. Reputation-wise they're all about the same. Personally I like Makita.
I would say Festool is a brilliant system, but different manufacturers can make better tools for certain jobs. Mafell’s jigsaw is excellent, Metabo for grinders etc, Hilti SDS plus and Max.
Festool domino system I hear is probably the best, but that is rather specialized.
I spent hours researching the various pro-sumer level brands when upgrading my tool collection this winter. And settled on Milwaukee. Because red. Ok fine, their track saw played a part. But mostly red.
And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of money into some venture, only to give up on it after the first failure is something we should all be angry about. If its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.