Help I'm Losing My Writing Ability - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone; I don't know if this question is in the right place or not, but I think that most of you would have probably experienced this at one point or another in your life, so do offer some wisdom and advice. However, if the content here is unsuitable, please remove it.
Anyways, here's the current situation that I'm facing:
* I was able to write very well since young (ever since I begin learning English), and my writing ability was well above the average. My style of writing was considered original and unique to me.
* I was able to compose essays and stories very fluidly and improvise plots and arguments in an ad hoc manner. However, this ability has recently deteriorated, and I find myself cracking my head open even for simple arguments and story-lines.
* When I wrote in the past, my pen moved almost as fast as the sentence forming in my head. My pen just had a mind of it's own, and I could enter a 'flow' basically 100% all the time. Suddenly everything has become very conscious and artificial. Now, I have to pause and think even about the minutest details, such as sentence structure, words to use, alphabets in the words, etc.
* My vocabulary was wide and far-ranging, and I often utilized five to six different words, all synonyms, to re-iterate the same point in an argument. Now, however, my vocabulary has suddenly dropped to one or two simple words. The words used to come naturally, now I have to try to think of it, and most often I cannot.
* I used to create very original metaphors and figurative language which my peers and teachers often thought as brilliant and ingenious. I somehow cannot think of anything, AT ALL, now.
* I could sensitively appreciate Literature in the past, and often wrote critical essays after reading a novel or story. Also, I leisurely authored essays and short-stories in my free time; now, I find no motivation and lack the necessary 'spark' even if I wanted to. The habit has all of a sudden become very foreign and alien to me.
* I'm very distressed with the problem. I can't even list down all the symptoms that I have. I can't describe this psychological torment. It's like whenever I write now I feel it's a chore, whereas in the past it came all natural and flowingly. Thesauruses have become more common and regular in the past few months.
The problem has been a recent one, persisting for the past two months already. Here's some other background information for diagnosis: I'm currently 16, and am studying for a national exams at the end of the year. Most of my subjects are very logical and scientific – Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Elementary and Higher Maths – with a few humanities, like English Literature and Geography.
A large portion of the education is memory work, except maybe for Literature (and Mathematics, to an extent). My native tongue has been and still is English. The education system in my country is very competitive and quite stressful at times.
I'm very agitated by this problem and I want to get to the root of it, which is why I need your help. I want to know how it began and how I should overcome it. I don't know if it's caused by stress, depression or maybe just some other ordinary problem.
I'd like to express my gratitude and thanks to whoever offering their help. Writing has always been my passion and a spirited endeavor for me, and I really don't want to see it just disappear overnight. I've been feeling really down these few weeks because of this.
Thanks. :) <comment><USER2> Chill out. You're only 16. You're not "losing" anything other than immaturity. You just have writer's block, and your writing probably isn't as good as you're describing it in the first place, so don't get too hung up about it.

And before you get defensive, let me tell you, if you pursue writing professionally, you'll learn this on your own pretty quickly. A critic or a professor will knock you on your ass and show you flaws in your work you'd never even considered. I don't care how much of a prodigy you are, you have a lot to learn.

The way you treat writer's block is through attrition. Just keep writing. No professional writer in the universe ever made it on talent alone, and the secret they all have is that they just write, a lot, every day, whether they feel like it or whether they think it's any good or not.

Also, this: "My vocabulary was wide and far-ranging, and I often utilized five to six different words, all synonyms, to re-iterate the same point in an argument..." is a feature, not a bug. Learning to articulate big ideas with simple words is one of the hardest, but most important, lessons to learn as a writer.

TL;DR there's nothing wrong with you and every writer experiences this. Keep calm and carry on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi,

I'm a professional writer and much much older than you.

Writing, sometimes, is hard. The more you aspire to excellence, the harder it can become if you let it. And you should aspire. You're never good enough.

Here are a few things that may help from my experience.

1) Relax and enjoy it. 2) Separate the creative process from the editing process. That is, on first-draft just let it flow. Write anything and everything that comes to mind. Don't worry about vocabulary, spelling, grammar, political correctness, offending your dog. Just get it out. Put on your editor's hat only after you've sputtered out. Then go back, rewrite, and edit. Fine writing is REWRITING. Sometimes many passes; many drafts. 3) Keep a notebook. When your mind tickles you with a phrase about anything, write it down. Your subconscious mind is your best friend. But it's shy, easily offended. Censor yourself and it'll shut down. Invite it in and it'll serve you with ideas, images, and language of startling beauty and relevance. It'll also deceive you into believing that something it delivers is better than it is. But you can deal with this during the editing/rewriting phase. 4) Give yourself permission to write. And to publish. Keep in mind that you can't please everyone with your writing. No matter how fine a writer you are, some readers will reject you for uncounted reasons. Your goal as a writer is to minimize the number of readers who do so. 5) Writing is simply another way of talking. You talk naturally. If you relax, you'll learn to write naturally. To write well you do need to learn and absorb the basics of spelling, grammar, logic, formatting conventions, etc., etc. These technicalities should be internalized like muscle memory. But don't worry about that crap while writing the first draft. Just get it out.

Hope this helps.

LRP

</comment><comment><USER4> You sound like a very self aware individual (hard not to be if writing is your passion).

But...I think you have to remember you're 16. Nothing you do is ever set in stone, regardless of age and everyone goes through changes. Teens go through changes that are a more volatile.

Try reframing it in your head. Personally, it seems like you're just "not into" writing right now. There's nothing wrong with that. There could be a deeper root cause, but I doubt you'll truly find it.

Keep writing (I guess you'll have to) and things may clear themselves up. Self awareness isn't always a great thing ;)

<comment><USER5> Yes, absolutely right. All bets are off during puberty. You're undergoing _massive_ physiological changes, caused by hormonal changes the likes of which you'll never see again (until menopause, if you're female). I had a lot of this trouble as a teenager; it often seemed like I simply had no retention, and I consistently forgot skills (mainly math) that I had thought to be committed to reflexive memory.

My bet is that this stuff will be sorted once your body settles down. And maybe well before then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had the same thing happen to me. I realized it was because I stopped reading regularly. Before, I would used to read at least 1-2 novels (100-200 pages per book) a day. And during that time period, I had an awesome vocabulary and I could basically spell anything without having to look it up. But now I get mixed up on whether certain words have double letters or not. Now that I've stopped reading regularly due to time constraints, my writing and spelling ability has basically died.

</comment><comment><USER7> Could be stress/tiredness from studying for your exams? What you say sounds quite drastic though... like the result of a head injury.

On the other hand, your current state of having to struggle for every sentence is more in line with the vast majority of peoples' normal experience when it comes to writing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh and by the way I don't want to come off as being thought as a patronizing 'genius' or anything.

I don't consider myself to be super-smart or have some prodigal intelligence, and my school isn't MENSA. I'm in an average high school.

It's just that I feel my creative potential has been stifled. Thanks for understanding.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you ever had the experience (usually while walking and wearing headphones) of being aware of your breathing? And suddenly breathing is tricky? You don't know if you're breathing loudly or to deeply?

All your life you've been breathing and never noticed it, and then you notice it, and how weird it is.

Do you think this may be what you're experiencing? Just increased awareness?

As an over-cautious footnote: This will probably not happen, but if you start to notice "odd" things; (people who can put thoughts in your head, or hearing voices, or whatnot) please seek psychiatric assistance. Early intervention is important. But, like I say, this is almost certainly not relevant!

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know if it is related or not, but I find my ability to use pens and pencils has greatly diminished since I started to use the keyboard. My handwriting was never great but over the years it has dropped to a level that is best described as illegible.

I can type about as fast as I think, a speed that would be unattainable using a regular writing instrument based on re-creating memorized shapes using fine motor control. Maybe the slow-down that comes with using a 'real' pen or pencil for writing would give you the right frame of mind to unlock your inspiration.

The short version: try writing in longhand, see if that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind advice!

I'll give longhand a try :) It seems like a good idea.

Unfortunately, I've tried typing before. To give you an example, the question that I've just written took me about an hour to think and type through, while in the past something of that same length would have taken maybe about half an hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Advice you asked for:

Stop tweeting, blogging and emailing. Stop posting two-liner responses to difficult topic discussions.

Interact with people. Find a forum that thinks deeply, trades ideas and inspirations and fosters creativity. A writing group, a Mensa chapter, heck a ToastMasters club.

Even Hacker News is shallow by comparison with real human discourse. Here we get frequent thought-pieces but not a lot of literature, and certainly extremenly curtailed interaction compared with even a minute of real dialog with real people.

</comment><comment><USER11> Once on HN I read a blog post that said great writing only comes from facing ones deepest fears. It is really a brilliant way to sum it all up. Any other kind of writing is just dull.

It is only you who knows what it is that you fear the most. Everybody knows his own fears. Most people cannot face them. So if you want your ability back face the fear that is holding you back, challenge it, fight it, beat it and then write it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Could it just be that your taste has become more refined? Watch this interview with Ira Glass: [http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work- disa...](http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work-disappoints- you)

</comment><comment><USER13> I would look at Henry Miller's 11 commandments of writing. Online here [http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/01/henry- millers-11-commandm...](http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/01/henry- millers-11-commandments.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Are you having any health issues?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the concern, I don't think I suffer from any health issues. Are there any notable health problems that you know of which have such psychological effects?

<comment><USER15> I am not a doctor but... Cognitive issues could be stress/burnout related. Environment can also play a big part in cognitive issues. Mold illness causes cognitive/psychological issues and patients often describe the feeling as a "brain-fog". There is a relatively simple online test for mold issues found here <http://www.survivingmold.com/diagnosis>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like there's an ego issue here. Not ego as in "I'm so great, look at me" but ego as a self identity that wasn't there before.

You're writing through a filter now (a personality you've constructed) whereas before you were writing in a selfless zen state.

So relax. Stop thinking so much and start training your mind through meditation. Read the teachings of Buddha. You will be alright. In fact, you'll be better than alright. This is just a bump in the road.

<comment><USER16> Btw, never take compliments like "brilliant" and "ingenious" too seriously. These words get bandied about much too often, and it's hardly ever appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't contest that, and thanks for your advice.

But could you elaborate more on what you mean by a 'filter' as opposed to a 'selfless zen state'?

<comment><USER16> Filter being your conscious mind.

Sometimes when I read or write, it's with a voice I haven't heard before. It doesn't sound authentic to me. That's my mind being loud, and it acts as a dirty filter that inhibits pure words from flowing freely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: P2P Marketplace for renting stuff - <AUTHOR> http://rentzar.co/

<comment><USER2> Some honest feedback, FWIW...

What's your plan to get users? A large part of the success from other asset- sharing services is due to the fact that they initially chose a vertical (Airbnb: apartments, Getaround/RelayRides: cars) and made a small number of people in that vertical incredibly happy. Generalizing to "all things" has the advantage of making your target audience/market bigger, but also seriously risks making the average experience worse for a couple of reasons: (1) you're constrained to keeping the interface generic enough for "all things", and (2) by not targeting a vertical, demand/supply becomes much less targeted, meaning you need a large user base for the marketplace to be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback we really appreciated your input, well keep everything you mention on hand to solve those issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You have a chicken-and-egg problem.

Also, each renter now must do fulfillment themselves. If I'm renting my bike for $5/day, it's a huge pain if the person that is renting from me is twenty minutes late to pick up and return it.

What I want to see is someone who focuses on have all the household essentials for rent, and does fulfillment themselves. I think electric drills are typically used for 5 minutes total by most owners. Could I please rent hardware and one-off supplies from one place? Pretty please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks bravura for the feedback we really appreciated your input, thats great to see what type of listing you will get the most benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rentzar.com where you can find next to near free stuff! Seriously, what's to keep people from just paying for one day only to never return?

<comment><USER5> Reasonable concern. A credit card hold or a cash deposit could solve that. What solutions have been used for other 'sharing economy' startups?

<comment><USER4> If the cash deposit covered the complete value of the item no renter would want to pay such a high cost(the renter would _then_ be vulnerable to theft; same with a credit card), and if the deposit didn't cover the value of the item then a thief would still benefit.

>What solutions have been used for other 'sharing econom[ies]'?

Two things come to mind, rental cars and places like rent-a-center. To rent a car you have to give ID and a credit card, and if the car is stolen the police can and will be contacted. Whereas with rent-a-center they can't call the police, police don't deal well with "small" stolen items. Rent-a-centers employ call centers that harass the person into paying or retuning and calls family and friends to shame the person into paying. If that doesn't work they turn it over to a collections agency who has the power to continue to harass and even ruin someones credit.

I don't see something like this working P2P and in the startup space, it requires too much "infrastructure" if you will, to work and be successful in deterring and overcoming theft, loss and damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This would work well if it were also a storage service...charge for storage, rent to offset costs, send me the difference.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not bad, but you've got a two sided marketplace you need both people with stuff to rent and people who need to rent stuff.

I'd start with a metro area and get ahold of existing rental places and get their inventories listed to break the chicken/egg issue you face.

Rgarcia makes a great point, you should think about focusing on a specific vertical as it will make it easier to get both sides of the market jumpstarted.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dear Would-Be Entrepreneurs Wanting to Use Buzzwords:

It's not peer-to-peer ("P2P") if peers are not communicating _directly_. If they are using your server to communicate, e.g. post ads, then it's NOT peer- to-peer. It's a bulletin board. There is a difference between a) a switchboard, b) a bulletin board and c) a person-to-person telephone call.

Sincerely

End-User Looking for REAL P2P Services Not Fake Ones

</comment><comment><USER8> Great idea, but without venture funding this is a tough operation to scale. With such low barriers to entry for this market, other local markets can easily replicate this model if it is indeed successful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea. I'd use it, if there were things to rent in my area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback we really appreciated your input.</comment></comment>


Sleep like a rock, Wake up like Iron Man.  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10073264-2.html

<comment><USER2> Simple but genius idea - could come in really handy during some random situations: I'm always afraid to rely on wake up calls at the hotel, and I have a nasty habit of forgetting my phone charger while traveling. Besides, anything that makes me feel more super-heroesque is pretty clutch.</comment>


Basecamp handled a security breach yesterday - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/yesterdays-mass-login-attack-on-basecamp-is-another-reminder-to-protect-yourself/ <comment><USER2> That was a good write up. They had also posted an alert on the site yesterday. It's nice to see a place being so proactive about things like this and sharing good advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting that a spike of 30k login attempts in a short time is enough to set off alarm bells. It makes me wonder what kind of attacks fly under the radar in larger systems.</comment>


Blizzard Nukes Popular HTML5 Version of StarCraft Game - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-nukes-popular-html5-version-of-starcraft-game-151010/ <comment><USER2> This is the html5 imitation which was posted here recently.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180209)</comment>


Nick Cave's gift: a skeleton key that unlocks the source of songwriting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/10/nick-cave-skeleton-tree <comment><AUTHOR> The author is another fantastic and accomplished musician, vocalist and song writer: Amanda Fucking Palmer</comment>


Ask HN: How did you choose your specialization? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This is my attempt to avoid far-mode abstract thinking when talking about this, and reflect on the mistakes inherent into how I chose my specialization.

I work in machine learning, especially for "creative" leaning technology companies. I have significant experience in quant finance and education technology as well.

I chose my specialization because mathematics and statistics were my strongest skill areas in my undergrad education. I won some math competitions and had fun in team oriented math modeling competitions.

I debated going to grad school or working right out of college, ultimately choosing to work at a defense research lab. I didn't like it very much so I went for my PhD a little leas than 2 years later.

I bounced around several jobs in the ubiquitous 2 year stints for a while, finding startups to be deplorable with low pay, bad equity deals and poor work/life benefits. I enjoyed quant finance a little but ultimately it was too boring.

I finally started working in ML in ecommerce companies, and have about 12 years experience in 2 large ones, moving from engineer to architect to manager.

I really like product development in this area. There are so many ways machine learning adds tangible value for customers especially when the underlying products involve creative aspects, like merchants selling and marketing crafts, or people designing copy text or imagery. Meanwhile there are also lots of internal use cases like demand forecasting, improvements in help center search experiences, detecting abusive content or fraud, etc.

Nonetheless, it's a real challenge to work on ML professionally. It receives very undue skepticism and fights a huge uphill battle on every project because other stakeholders don't invest a lot of time to understand it. Somehow a string of objective successes never sticks in their mind and every time a new company leader is brought in, it's a whole new game of avoiding their biases and chipping away at unfounded skepticism.

On the engineering side, most of the work is unglamorous data cleaning & pipeline maintenance, constant turf wars with operations and infra teams that don't want the responsibility of dealing with deployment constraints of ML systems that break cookie cutter patterns for other classes of systems.

It's also exceedingly political. I chose statistics and ML in part because at some level it should supersede subjective opinions about any possible domain, bordering on being a root subject of all philosophy and epistemology, and so surely it supersedes politics when real money is on the line in businesses, right?

Alas, not true. Machine learning engineers who display a naive sense of intellectually honest curiosity applied to business decisions will get a rude wake up slap by all sorts of executives and managers who don't give a shit and have ulterior motives.

See [0] for a good take on it that I really wish I understood before choosing ML as my specialty.

I've hired and lost so much great ML engineering talent over the years, and it takes a toll seeing these brilliant people not have their specialty or their comparative advantage respected, to the point that someone who is a world expert on computer vision is off trying to debug some inane kubernetes error, and management can only see "fairness" arguments in favor of this instead of realizing they're flushing this person's salary down the toilet by asking them to do something many other people can do at a direct opportunity cost of them using their specialization for things nobody else can do.

My advice for choosing a specialty is to interview lots and lots of people who have jobs all across the career ladder for that specialty - interns, new grads, mid-level employees, senior employees, managers and directors. Try to get a holistic sense of what they like and dislike and what negative realities you're going to need to live with if you choose it.

[0]: [https://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who- car...](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-cares-about- forecast-accuracy)</comment>


Ouya review: can an indie console take on Sony and Microsoft? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/4/4180242/ouya-review <comment><USER2> "I often had a moment to rue my mistake before anything happened, too, because there's a fair amount of lag between the controller and the console. It wasn't always present, and seemed to have to rhyme or reason to it, but about half the time the game felt perfectly synced and the other half it felt a full beat behind what my thumb was doing."

There's something going on here with the lag. That's three reviews from smart reviewers discussing it.</comment>


Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/uber-freezes-engineering-hires-amid-mounting-losses/?comments=1 <comment><USER2> This isn't bad news. This is exactly the sort of cost cutting and fat trimming a company in Uber's position should be performing. From a tactical standpoint, Uber's IPO acts as a promise to Wall Street that they will continue their existing business while slimming down their books.

From a strategic position, it's not as great. Uber's rivalry with Lyft is a war of attrition: given that the two services are perfect complements, right down to the drivers themselves working both networks simultaneously, growth is entirely a function of platform-level economics. While Uber is wise to cut corporate costs before materially cutting driver commissions or raising consumer prices, it's not exactly a show of strength to be scaling back marketing and engineering, the very departments that Uber needs to continue growing.

That being said, the size of Uber's war chest doesn't make me worry about their ability to continue operating. If I had to prognosticate, though, I'd say this is a sign that Uber is going to be posting some rough results for a couple quarters.

<comment><USER3> Marketing is definitely important for growth.

But the whole point of technology and good engineers is that you can scale up without hiring more people.

I see no reason a solid core of engineers couldn't scale Uber out indefinitely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been at a company that did a hiring/salary freeze. Really hurts moral. We can expect Uber's services to potentially degrade/not improve much for a while.

<comment><USER5> Funny how different it is. Smaller companies have a hiring freeze 90% of the time.

<comment><USER6> At companies this size, in tech at least, you always have a constant flow of people joining and leaving. A hiring freeze means your shrinking. Your engineers are slowly evaporating, and you're not replacing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uber needs to head back to luxury, Travis, despite his MANY flaws, always had an eye on this.

Uber needs to focus on it's most profitable cities and promote the subscription service. Target families with kids using highly trusted drivers and extra safety features, expand into medical transport, and "rent a driver" services.

<comment><USER8> I wish there were a real uber black service with professional drivers and better cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Original thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20659191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20659191)

</comment><comment><USER10> This feels like the sort of thing no one should be surprised by.

It seems the basic premise of Uber and Lyft was to gobble up market share at enormous cost while autonomous cars were getting figured out, then switch to full driverless ASAP.

But full driverless keeps being "just a few more years away," and it looks increasingly like that's going to be too long for Uber to avoid running out of money.

<comment><USER11> I still can't figure out how Uber actually manages to lose money still.

They take something like a 20% cut of the fares don't they? How is this insufficient to pay for their platform?

I actually think they should be already be incredibly profitable.

<comment><USER12> Fares don't cover what Uber pays to drivers + all the expenses of being a worldwide company with hundreds of engineers, marketing, leases, etc.

Basically Wallstreet is subsidizing taxis for people at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


Boom XB-1 Baby Boom - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1_Baby_Boom <comment><USER2> What is Boom's economic argument for supersonic passenger flight? Fuel is already #1 cost of airlines and pricing is very competitive, to the point that some airlines would rather cut service than raise prices. It sounds like the conditions that led to the demise of the Concorde have only exacerbated.

<comment><USER3> Having the plane in the air for less time can lead to lesser costs also: you don't need to pay your pilots or flight attendants for as many hours, and can fit more flights in using the same plane per week. If the fuel cost and maintenance costs aren't too much higher, it could be a big win beyond just getting passengers to where they are going faster (like track and carriage utilization for HSR).

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure flight time is not the dominant labor cost. It's docking and going in and out of the airport and pre/post-flight prep.

<comment><USER3> Flight crew is paid for time in the air (well, while the door is closed).

But even then for a long haul, that stuff isn't as significant. Conversely, for a puddle jumper with quick turn around, not as much either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads like an advertisement. Why has it not been flagged by Wikipedia? What is notable at all about a single prototype test aircraft from a unknown start up?

<comment><USER6> On first look, it appears that it's only been edited by aircraft enthusiast Wikipedians with diverse edit histories.

<comment><USER4> Aircraft enthusiasts known as Boom employees? lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are supersonic aircraft for rich people compatible with a world battling radical climate change?

Supersonic passenger jets are likely to burn three to four times as much fuel per business-class passenger as standard passenger jets.

<comment><USER8> Self-flagellation by restricting technological capability is not the solution to climate change. It's not expected that flights on this aircraft will address the mass market. With regards to climate change this will be a drop in the bucket.

Solving global climate change requires rethinking energy generation, ground and sea shipping, transportation, heating, and addressing deforestation. It will not be solved by banning plastic straws, sorting your garbage, or even driving an electric car (though switching to electric cars is a very good step towards electric trucks, and will have a noticeable impact, unlike this niche airliner).

Don't ban niche things just because they contain something that is immoral at scale. EVERYTHING is immoral at scale, including eating food or breathing. We need to address and manage our problems to allow humanity to live, not die by a thousand self-hating cuts. Optimization is always addressed by looking at the 80%, not the 20%.

Maybe once this jet is in the air, if fuel expenditure is at all a concern, we can figure out how to address the efficiency concerns once we have the rest of the problems of aerodynamics and the infrastructure to manufacture this sorted out.

<comment><USER9> Putting a price on carbon is by no means self flagellation and may well ruin the economics of the venture.</comment></comment></comment>