More on Personal Growth
Leah
3 years ago
The Burnout Recovery Secrets Nobody Is Talking About
What works and what’s just more toxic positivity
Just keep at it; you’ll get it.
I closed the Zoom call and immediately dropped my head. Open tabs included material on inspiration, burnout, and recovery.
I searched everywhere for ways to avoid burnout.
It wasn't that I needed to keep going, change my routine, employ 8D audio playlists, or come up with fresh ideas. I had several ideas and a schedule. I knew what to do.
I wasn't interested. I kept reading, changing my self-care and mental health routines, and writing even though it was tiring.
Since burnout became a psychiatric illness in 2019, thousands have shared their experiences. It's spreading rapidly among writers.
What is the actual key to recovering from burnout?
Every A-list burnout story emphasizes prevention. Other lists provide repackaged self-care tips. More discuss mental health.
It's like the mid-2000s, when pink quotes about bubble baths saturated social media.
The self-care mania cost us all. Self-care is crucial, but utilizing it to address everything didn't work then or now.
How can you recover from burnout?
Time
Are extended breaks actually good for you? Most people need a break every 62 days or so to avoid burnout.
Real-life burnout victims all took breaks. Perhaps not a long hiatus, but breaks nonetheless.
Burnout is slow and gradual. It takes little bits of your motivation and passion at a time. Sometimes it’s so slow that you barely notice or blame it on other things like stress and poor sleep.
Burnout doesn't come overnight; neither will recovery.
I don’t care what anyone else says the cure for burnout is. It has to be time because time is what gave us all burnout in the first place.
The woman
2 years ago
The best lesson from Sundar Pichai is that success and stress don't mix.
His regular regimen teaches stress management.
In 1995, an Indian graduate visited the US. He obtained a scholarship to Stanford after graduating from IIT with a silver medal. First flight. His ticket cost a year's income. His head was full.
Pichai Sundararajan is his full name. He became Google's CEO and a world leader. Mr. Pichai transformed technology and inspired millions to dream big.
This article reveals his daily schedule.
Mornings
While many of us dread Mondays, Mr. Pichai uses the day to contemplate.
A typical Indian morning. He awakens between 6:30 and 7 a.m. He avoids working out in the mornings.
Mr. Pichai oversees the internet, but he reads a real newspaper every morning.
Pichai mentioned that he usually enjoys a quiet breakfast during which he reads the news to get a good sense of what’s happening in the world. Pichai often has an omelet for breakfast and reads while doing so. The native of Chennai, India, continues to enjoy his daily cup of tea, which he describes as being “very English.”
Pichai starts his day. BuzzFeed's Mat Honan called the CEO Banana Republic dad.
Overthinking in the morning is a bad idea. It's crucial to clear our brains and give ourselves time in the morning before we hit traffic.
Mr. Pichai's morning ritual shows how to stay calm. Wharton Business School found that those who start the day calmly tend to stay that way. It's worth doing regularly.
And he didn't forget his roots.
Afternoons
He has a busy work schedule, as you can imagine. Running one of the world's largest firm takes time, energy, and effort. He prioritizes his work. Monitoring corporate performance and guaranteeing worker efficiency.
Sundar Pichai spends 7-8 hours a day to improve Google. He's noted for changing the company's culture. He wants to boost employee job satisfaction and performance.
His work won him recognition within the company.
Pichai received a 96% approval rating from Glassdoor users in 2017.
Mr. Pichai stresses work satisfaction. Each day is a new canvas for him to find ways to enrich people's job and personal lives.
His work offers countless lessons. According to several profiles and press sources, the Google CEO is a savvy negotiator. Mr. Pichai's success came from his strong personality, work ethic, discipline, simplicity, and hard labor.
Evenings
His evenings are spent with family after a busy day. Sundar Pichai's professional and personal lives are balanced. Sundar Pichai is a night owl who re-energizes about 9 p.m.
However, he claims to be most productive after 10 p.m., and he thinks doing a lot of work at that time is really useful. But he ensures he sleeps for around 7–8 hours every day. He enjoys long walks with his dog and enjoys watching NSDR on YouTube. It helps him in relaxing and sleep better.
His regular routine teaches us what? Work wisely, not hard, discipline, vision, etc. His stress management is key. Leading one of the world's largest firm with 85,000 employees is scary.
The pressure to achieve may ruin a day. Overworked employees are more likely to make mistakes or be angry with coworkers, according to the Family Work Institute. They can't handle daily problems, making the house more stressful than the office.
Walking your dog, having fun with friends, and having hobbies are as vital as your office.
Sad NoCoiner
3 years ago
Two Key Money Principles You Should Understand But Were Never Taught
Prudence is advised. Be debt-free. Be frugal. Spend less.
This advice sounds nice, but it rarely works.
Most people never learn these two money rules. Both approaches will impact how you see personal finance.
It may safeguard you from inflation or the inability to preserve money.
Let’s dive in.
#1: Making long-term debt your ally
High-interest debt hurts consumers. Many credit cards carry 25% yearly interest (or more), so always pay on time. Otherwise, you’re losing money.
Some low-interest debt is good. Especially when buying an appreciating asset with borrowed money.
Inflation helps you.
If you borrow $800,000 at 3% interest and invest it at 7%, you'll make $32,000 (4%).
As money loses value, fixed payments get cheaper. Your assets' value and cash flow rise.
The never-in-debt crowd doesn't know this. They lose money paying off mortgages and low-interest loans early when they could have bought assets instead.
#2: How To Buy Or Build Assets To Make Inflation Irrelevant
Dozens of studies demonstrate actual wage growth is static; $2.50 in 1964 was equivalent to $22.65 now.
These reports never give solutions unless they're selling gold.
But there is one.
Assets beat inflation.
$100 invested into the S&P 500 would have an inflation-adjusted return of 17,739.30%.
Likewise, you can build assets from nothing. Doing is easy and quick. The returns can boost your income by 10% or more.
The people who obsess over inflation inadvertently make the problem worse for themselves. They wait for The Big Crash to buy assets. Or they moan about debt clocks and spending bills instead of seeking a solution.
Conclusion
Being ultra-prudent is like playing golf with a putter to avoid hitting the ball into the water. Sure, you might not slice a drive into the pond. But, you aren’t going to play well either. Or have very much fun.
Money has rules.
Avoiding debt or investment risks will limit your rewards. Long-term, being too cautious hurts your finances.
Disclaimer: This article is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice, always do your own research.
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Max Parasol
3 years ago
Are DAOs the future or just a passing fad?
How do you DAO? Can DAOs scale?
DAO: Decentralized Autonomous. Organization.
“The whole phrase is a misnomer. They're not decentralized, autonomous, or organizations,” says Monsterplay blockchain consultant David Freuden.
As part of the DAO initiative, Freuden coauthored a 51-page report in May 2020. “We need DAOs,” he says. “‘Shareholder first' is a 1980s/90s concept. Profits became the focus, not products.”
His predictions for DAOs have come true nearly two years later. DAOs had over 1.6 million participants by the end of 2021, up from 13,000 at the start of the year. Wyoming, in the US, will recognize DAOs and the Marshall Islands in 2021. Australia may follow that example in 2022.
But what is a DAO?
Members buy (or are rewarded with) governance tokens to vote on how the DAO operates and spends its money. “DeFi spawned DAOs as an investment vehicle. So a DAO is tokenomics,” says Freuden.
DAOs are usually built around a promise or a social cause, but they still want to make money. “If you can't explain why, the DAO will fail,” he says. “A co-op without tokenomics is not a DAO.”
Operating system DAOs, protocol DAOs, investment DAOs, grant DAOs, service DAOs, social DAOs, collector DAOs, and media DAOs are now available.
Freuden liked the idea of people rallying around a good cause. Speculators and builders make up the crypto world, so it needs a DAO for them.
,Speculators and builders, or both, have mismatched expectations, causing endless, but sometimes creative friction.
Organisms that boost output
Launching a DAO with an original product such as a cryptocurrency, an IT protocol or a VC-like investment fund like FlamingoDAO is common. DAOs enable distributed open-source contributions without borders. The goal is vital. Sometimes, after a product is launched, DAOs emerge, leaving the company to eventually transition to a DAO, as Uniswap did.
Doing things together is a DAO. So it's a way to reward a distributed workforce. DAOs are essentially productivity coordination organisms.
“Those who work for the DAO make permissionless contributions and benefit from fragmented employment,” argues Freuden. DAOs are, first and foremost, a new form of cooperation.
DAO? Distributed not decentralized
In decentralized autonomous organizations, words have multiple meanings. DAOs can emphasize one aspect over another. Autonomy is a trade-off for decentralization.
DAOstack CEO Matan Field says a DAO is a distributed governance system. Power is shared. However, there are two ways to understand a DAO's decentralized nature. This clarifies the various DAO definitions.
A decentralized infrastructure allows a DAO to be decentralized. It could be created on a public permissionless blockchain to prevent a takeover.
As opposed to a company run by executives or shareholders, a DAO is distributed. Its leadership does not wield power
Option two is clearly distributed.
But not all of this is “automated.”
Think quorum, not robot.
DAOs can be autonomous in the sense that smart contracts are self-enforcing and self-executing. So every blockchain transaction is a simplified smart contract.
Dao landscape
The DAO landscape is evolving.
Consider how Ethereum's smart contracts work. They are more like self-executing computer code, which Vitalik Buterin calls “persistent scripts”.
However, a DAO is self-enforcing once its members agree on its rules. As such, a DAO is “automated upon approval by the governance committee.” This distinguishes them from traditional organizations whose rules must be interpreted and applied.
Why a DAO? They move fast
A DAO can quickly adapt to local conditions as a governance mechanism. It's a collaborative decision-making tool.
Like UkraineDAO, created in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine by Ukrainian expat Alona Shevchenko, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Trippy Labs, and PleasrDAO. The DAO sought to support Ukrainian charities by selling Ukrainian flag NFTs. With a single mission, a DAO can quickly raise funds for a country accepting crypto where banks are distrusted.
This could be a watershed moment for DAOs.
ConstitutionDAO was another clever use case for DAOs for Freuden. In a failed but “beautiful experiment in a single-purpose DAO,” ConstitutionDAO tried to buy a copy of the US Constitution from a Sotheby's auction. In November 2021, ConstitutionDAO raised $47 million from 19,000 people, but a hedge fund manager outbid them.
Contributions were returned or lost if transactional gas fees were too high. The ConstitutionDAO, as a “beautiful experiment,” proved exceptionally fast at organizing and crowdsourcing funds for a specific purpose.
We may soon be applauding UkraineDAO's geopolitical success in support of the DAO concept.
Some of the best use cases for DAOs today, according to Adam Miller, founder of DAOplatform.io and MIDAO Directory Services, involve DAO structures.
That is, a “flat community is vital.” Prototyping by the crowd is a good example. To succeed, members must be enthusiastic about DAOs as an alternative to starting a company. Because DAOs require some hierarchy, he agrees that "distributed is a better acronym."
Miller sees DAOs as a “new way of organizing people and resources.” He started DAOplatform.io, a DAO tooling advisery that is currently transitioning to a DAO due to the “woeful tech options for running a DAO,” which he says mainly comprises of just “multisig admin keys and a voting system.” So today he's advising on DAO tech stacks.
Miller identifies three key elements.
Tokenization is a common method and tool. Second, governance mechanisms connected to the DAO's treasury. Lastly, community.”
How a DAO works...
They can be more than glorified Discord groups if they have a clear mission. This mission is a mix of financial speculation and utopianism. The spectrum is vast.
The founder of Dash left the cryptocurrency project in 2017. It's the story of a prophet without an heir. So creating a global tokenized evangelical missionary community via a DAO made sense.
Evan Duffield, a “libertarian/anarchist” visionary, forked Bitcoin in January 2014 to make it instant and essentially free. He went away for a while, and DASH became a DAO.
200,000 US retailers, including Walmart and Barnes & Noble, now accept Dash as payment. This payment system works like a gift card.
Arden Goldstein, Dash's head of crypto, DAO, and blockchain marketing, claims Dash is the “first successful DAO.” It was founded in 2016 and disbanded after a hack, an Ethereum hard fork and much controversy. But what are the success metrics?
Crypto success is measured differently, says Goldstein. To achieve common goals, people must participate or be motivated in a healthy DAO. People are motivated to complete tasks in a successful DAO. And, crucially, when tasks get completed.
“Yes or no, 1 or 0, voting is not a new idea. The challenge is getting people to continue to participate and keep building a community.” A DAO motivates volunteers: Nothing keeps people from building. The DAO “philosophy is old news. You need skin in the game to play.”
MasterNodes must stake 1000 Dash. Those members are rewarded with DASH for marketing (and other tasks). It uses an outsourced team to onboard new users globally.
Joining a DAO is part of the fun of meeting crazy or “very active” people on Discord. No one gets fired (usually). If your work is noticed, you may be offered a full-time job.
DAO community members worldwide are rewarded for brand building. Dash is also a great product for developing countries with high inflation and undemocratic governments. The countries with the most Dash DAO members are Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, India, China, France, Italy, and the Philippines.
Grassroots activism makes this DAO work. A DAO is local. Venezuelans can't access Dash.org, so DAO members help them use a VPN. DAO members are investors, fervent evangelicals, and local product experts.
Every month, proposals and grant applications are voted on via the Dash platform. However, the DAO may decide not to fund you. For example, the DAO once hired a PR firm, but the community complained about the lack of press coverage. This raises a great question: How are real-world contractual obligations met by a DAO?
Does the DASH DAO work?
“I see the DAO defund projects I thought were valuable,” Goldstein says. Despite working full-time, I must submit a funding proposal. “Much faster than other companies I've worked on,” he says.
Dash DAO is a headless beast. Ryan Taylor is the CEO of the company overseeing the DASH Core Group project.
The issue is that “we don't know who has the most tokens [...] because we don't know who our customers are.” As a result, “the loudest voices usually don't have the most MasterNodes and aren't the most invested.”
Goldstein, the only female in the DAO, says she worked hard. “I was proud of the DAO when I made the logo pink for a day and got great support from the men.” This has yet to entice a major influx of female DAO members.
Many obstacles stand in the way of utopian dreams.
Governance problems remain
And what about major token holders behaving badly?
In early February, a heated crypto Twitter debate raged on about inclusion, diversity, and cancel culture in relation to decentralized projects. In this case, the question was how a DAO addresses alleged inappropriate behavior.
In a corporation, misconduct can result in termination. In a DAO, founders usually hold a large number of tokens and the keys to the blockchain (multisignature) or otherwise.
Brantly Millegan, the director of operations of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), made disparaging remarks about the LGBTQ community and other controversial topics. The screenshotted comments were made in 2016 and brought to the ENS board's attention in early 2022.
His contract with ENS has expired. But what of his large DAO governance token holdings?
Members of the DAO proposed a motion to remove Millegan from the DAO. His “delegated” votes net 370,000. He was and is the DAO's largest delegate.
What if he had refused to accept the DAO's decision?
Freuden says the answer is not so simple.
“Can a DAO kick someone out who built the project?”
The original mission “should be dissolved” if it no longer exists. “Does a DAO fail and return the money? They must r eturn the money with interest if the marriage fails.”
Before an IPO, VCs might try to remove a problematic CEO.
While DAOs use treasury as a governance mechanism, it is usually controlled (at least initially) by the original project creators. Or, in the case of Uniswap, the venture capital firm a16z has so much voting power that it has delegated it to student-run blockchain organizations.
So, can DAOs really work at scale? How to evolve voting paradigms beyond token holdings?
The whale token holder issue has some solutions. Multiple tokens, such as a utility token on top of a governance token, and quadratic voting for whales, are now common. Other safeguards include multisignature blockchain keys and decision time locks that allow for any automated decision to be made. The structure of each DAO will depend on the assets at stake.
In reality, voter turnout is often a bigger issue.
Is DAO governance scalable?
Many DAOs have low participation. Due to a lack of understanding of technology, apathy, or busy lives. “The bigger the DAO, the fewer voters who vote,” says Freuden.
Freuden's report cites British anthropologist Dunbar's Law, who argued that people can only maintain about 150 relationships.
"As the DAO grows in size, the individual loses influence because they perceive their voting power as being diminished or insignificant. The Ringelmann Effect and Dunbar's Rule show that as a group grows in size, members become lazier, disenfranchised, and detached.
Freuden says a DAO requires “understanding human relationships.” He believes DAOs work best as investment funds rooted in Cryptoland and small in scale. In just three weeks, SyndicateDAO enabled the creation of 450 new investment group DAOs.
Due to SEC regulations, FlamingoDAO, a famous NFT curation investment DAO, could only have 100 investors. The “LAO” is a member-directed venture capital fund and a US LLC. To comply with US securities law, they only allow 100 members with a 120ETH minimum staking contribution.
But how did FlamingoDAO make investment decisions? How often did all 70 members vote? Art and NFTs are highly speculative.
So, investment DAOs are thought to work well in a small petri dish environment. This is due to a crypto-native club's pooled capital (maximum 7% per member) and crowdsourced knowledge.
While scalability is a concern, each DAO will operate differently depending on the goal, technology stage, and personalities. Meetups and hackathons are common ways for techies to collaborate on a cause or test an idea. But somebody still organizes the hack.
Holographic consensus voting
But clever people are working on creative solutions to every problem.
Miller of DAOplatform.io cites DXdao as a successful DAO. Decentralized product and service creator DXdao runs the DAO entirely on-chain. “You earn voting rights by contributing to the community.”
DXdao, a DAOstack fork, uses holographic consensus, a voting algorithm invented by DAOstack founder Matan Field. The system lets a random or semi-random subset make group-wide decisions.
By acting as a gatekeeper for voters, DXdao's Luke Keenan explains that “a small predictions market economy emerges around the likely outcome of a proposal as tokens are staked on it.” Also, proposals that have been financially boosted have fewer requirements to be successful, increasing system efficiency.” DXdao “makes decisions by removing voting power as an economic incentive.”
Field explains that holographic consensus “does not require a quorum to render a vote valid.”
“Rather, it provides a parallel process. It is a game played (for profit) by ‘predictors' who make predictions about whether or not a vote will be approved by the voters. The voting process is valid even when the voting quorum is low if enough stake is placed on the outcome of the vote.
“In other words, a quorum is not a scalable DAO governance strategy,” Field says.
You don't need big votes on everything. If only 5% vote, fine. To move significant value or make significant changes, you need a longer voting period (say 30 days) and a higher quorum,” says Miller.
Clearly, DAOs are maturing. The emphasis is on tools like Orca and processes that delegate power to smaller sub-DAOs, committees, and working groups.
Miller also claims that “studies in psychology show that rewarding people too much for volunteering disincentivizes them.” So, rather than giving out tokens for every activity, you may want to offer symbolic rewards like POAPs or contributor levels.
“Free lunches are less rewarding. Random rewards can boost motivation.”
Culture and motivation
DAOs (and Web3 in general) can give early adopters a sense of ownership. In theory, they encourage early participation and bootstrapping before network effects.
"A double-edged sword," says Goldstein. In the developing world, they may not be fully scalable.
“There must always be a leader,” she says. “People won't volunteer if they don't want to.”
DAO members sometimes feel entitled. “They are not the boss, but they think they should be able to see my calendar or get a daily report,” Goldstein gripes. Say, “I own three MasterNodes and need to know X, Y, and Z.”
In most decentralized projects, strong community leaders are crucial to influencing culture.
Freuden says “the DAO's community builder is the cryptoland influencer.” They must “disseminate the DAO's culture, cause, and rally the troops” in English, not tech.
They must keep members happy.
So the community builder is vital. Building a community around a coin that promises riches is simple, but keeping DAO members motivated is difficult.
It's a human job. But tools like SourceCred or coordinate that measure contributions and allocate tokens are heavily marketed. Large growth funds/community funds/grant programs are common among DAOs.
The Future?
Onboarding, committed volunteers, and an iconic community builder may be all DAOs need.
It takes a DAO just one day to bring together a passionate (and sometimes obsessive) community. For organizations with a common goal, managing stakeholder expectations is critical.
A DAO's core values are community and cause, not scalable governance. “DAOs will work at scale like gaming communities, but we will have sub-DAOs everywhere like committees,” says Freuden.
So-called holographic consensuses “can handle, in principle, increasing rates of proposals by turning this tension between scale and resilience into an economical cost,” Field writes. Scalability is not guaranteed.
The DAO's key innovation is the fragmented workplace. “Voting is a subset of engagement,” says Freuden. DAO should allow for permissionless participation and engagement. DAOs allow for remote work.”
In 20 years, DAOs may be the AI-powered self-organizing concept. That seems far away now. But a new breed of productivity coordination organisms is maturing.
rekt
3 years ago
LCX is the latest CEX to have suffered a private key exploit.
The attack began around 10:30 PM +UTC on January 8th.
Peckshield spotted it first, then an official announcement came shortly after.
We’ve said it before; if established companies holding millions of dollars of users’ funds can’t manage their own hot wallet security, what purpose do they serve?
The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of centralised finance grows smaller by the day.
The official incident report states that 7.94M USD were stolen in total, and that deposits and withdrawals to the platform have been paused.
LCX hot wallet: 0x4631018f63d5e31680fb53c11c9e1b11f1503e6f
Hacker’s wallet: 0x165402279f2c081c54b00f0e08812f3fd4560a05
Stolen funds:
- 162.68 ETH (502,671 USD)
- 3,437,783.23 USDC (3,437,783 USD)
- 761,236.94 EURe (864,840 USD)
- 101,249.71 SAND Token (485,995 USD)
- 1,847.65 LINK (48,557 USD)
- 17,251,192.30 LCX Token (2,466,558 USD)
- 669.00 QNT (115,609 USD)
- 4,819.74 ENJ (10,890 USD)
- 4.76 MKR (9,885 USD)
**~$1M worth of $LCX remains in the address, along with 611k EURe which has been frozen by Monerium.
The rest, a total of 1891 ETH (~$6M) was sent to Tornado Cash.**
Why can’t they keep private keys private?
Is it really that difficult for a traditional corporate structure to maintain good practice?
CeFi hacks leave us with little to say - we can only go on what the team chooses to tell us.
Next time, they can write this article themselves.
See below for a template.
Tomas Pueyo
2 years ago
Soon, a Starship Will Transform Humanity
SpaceX's Starship.
Launched last week.
Four minutes in:
SpaceX will succeed. When it does, its massiveness will matter.
Its payload will revolutionize space economics.
Civilization will shift.
We don't yet understand how this will affect space and Earth culture. Grab it.
The Cost of Space Transportation Has Decreased Exponentially
Space launches have increased dramatically in recent years.
We mostly send items to LEO, the green area below:
SpaceX's reusable rockets can send these things to LEO. Each may launch dozens of payloads into space.
With all these launches, we're sending more than simply things to space. Volume and mass. Since the 1980s, launching a kilogram of payload to LEO has become cheaper:
One kilogram in a large rocket cost over $75,000 in the 1980s. Carrying one astronaut cost nearly $5M! Falcon Heavy's $1,500/kg price is 50 times lower. SpaceX's larger, reusable rockets are amazing.
SpaceX's Starship rocket will continue. It can carry over 100 tons to LEO, 50% more than the current Falcon heavy. Thousands of launches per year. Elon Musk predicts Falcon Heavy's $1,500/kg cost will plummet to $100 in 23 years.
In context:
People underestimate this.
2. The Benefits of Affordable Transportation
Compare Earth's transportation costs:
It's no surprise that the US and Northern Europe are the wealthiest and have the most navigable interior waterways.
So what? since sea transportation is cheaper than land. Inland waterways are even better than sea transportation since weather is less of an issue, currents can be controlled, and rivers serve two banks instead of one for coastal transportation.
In France, because population density follows river systems, rivers are valuable. Cheap transportation brought people and money to rivers, especially their confluences.
How come? Why were humans surrounding rivers?
Imagine selling meat for $10 per kilogram. Transporting one kg one kilometer costs $1. Your margin decreases $1 each kilometer. You can only ship 10 kilometers. For example, you can only trade with four cities:
If instead, your cost of transportation is half, what happens? It costs you $0.5 per km. You now have higher margins with each city you traded with. More importantly, you can reach 20-km markets.
However, 2x distance 4x surface! You can now trade with sixteen cities instead of four! Metcalfe's law states that a network's value increases with its nodes squared. Since now sixteen cities can connect to yours. Each city now has sixteen connections! They get affluent and can afford more meat.
Rivers lower travel costs, connecting many cities, which can trade more, get wealthy, and buy more.
The right network is worth at least an order of magnitude more than the left! The cheaper the transport, the more trade at a lower cost, the more income generated, the more that wealth can be reinvested in better canals, bridges, and roads, and the wealth grows even more.
Throughout history. Rome was established around cheap Mediterranean transit and preoccupied with cutting overland transportation costs with their famous roadways. Communications restricted their empire.
The Egyptians lived around the Nile, the Vikings around the North Sea, early Japan around the Seto Inland Sea, and China started canals in the 5th century BC.
Transportation costs shaped empires.Starship is lowering new-world transit expenses. What's possible?
3. Change Organizations, Change Companies, Change the World
Starship is a conveyor belt to LEO. A new world of opportunity opens up as transportation prices drop 100x in a decade.
Satellite engineers have spent decades shedding milligrams. Weight influenced every decision: pricing structure, volumes to be sent, material selections, power sources, thermal protection, guiding, navigation, and control software. Weight was everything in the mission. To pack as much science into every millimeter, NASA missions had to be miniaturized. Engineers were indoctrinated against mass.
No way.
Starship is not constrained by any space mission, robotic or crewed.
Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage it has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing. It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger. — Casey Handmer, Starship is still not understood
A Tesla Roadster in space makes more sense.
It went beyond bad PR. It told the industry: Did you care about every microgram? No more. My rockets are big enough to send a Tesla without noticing. Industry watchers should have noticed.
Most didn’t. Artemis is a global mission to send astronauts to the Moon and build a base. Artemis uses disposable Space Launch System rockets. Instead of sending two or three dinky 10-ton crew habitats over the next decade, Starship might deliver 100x as much cargo and create a base for 1,000 astronauts in a year or two. Why not? Because Artemis remains in a pre-Starship paradigm where each kilogram costs a million dollars and we must aggressively descope our objective.
Space agencies can deliver 100x more payload to space for the same budget with 100x lower costs and 100x higher transportation volumes. How can space economy saturate this new supply?
Before Starship, NASA supplied heavy equipment for Moon base construction. After Starship, Caterpillar and Deere may space-qualify their products with little alterations. Instead than waiting decades for NASA engineers to catch up, we could send people to build a space outpost with John Deere equipment in a few years.
History is littered with the wreckage of former industrial titans that underestimated the impact of new technology and overestimated their ability to adapt: Blockbuster, Motorola, Kodak, Nokia, RIM, Xerox, Yahoo, IBM, Atari, Sears, Hitachi, Polaroid, Toshiba, HP, Palm, Sony, PanAm, Sega, Netscape, Compaq, GM… — Casey Handmer, Starship is still not understood
Everyone saw it coming, but senior management failed to realize that adaption would involve moving beyond their established business practice. Others will if they don't.
4. The Starship Possibilities
It's Starlink.
SpaceX invented affordable cargo space and grasped its implications first. How can we use all this inexpensive cargo nobody knows how to use?
Satellite communications seemed like the best way to capitalize on it. They tried. Starlink, designed by SpaceX, provides fast, dependable Internet worldwide. Beaming information down is often cheaper than cable. Already profitable.
Starlink is one use for all this cheap cargo space. Many more. The longer firms ignore the opportunity, the more SpaceX will acquire.
What are these chances?
Satellite imagery is outdated and lacks detail. We can improve greatly. Synthetic aperture radar can take beautiful shots like this:
Have you ever used Google Maps and thought, "I want to see this in more detail"? What if I could view Earth live? What if we could livestream an infrared image of Earth?
We could launch hundreds of satellites with such mind-blowing visual precision of the Earth that we would dramatically improve the accuracy of our meteorological models; our agriculture; where crime is happening; where poachers are operating in the savannah; climate change; and who is moving military personnel where. Is that useful?
What if we could see Earth in real time? That affects businesses? That changes society?