How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World's Worst New Warplane - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/5c95d45f86a5 <comment><USER3> I understand the point the article is trying to make, but its not realistic. Having worked with the Navy for a few years I know that the biggest use of airplanes is not air to air combat ( which is what this article is complaining about ) It is air to land bombing. So why are we complaining about making an air force that serves our needs rather then one that might be useful for some other task.

As a note he says this will be the "new mainstay of the air force" however we still have the F-22 as our air superiority fighter which is still believed to be better then anything out there, and indeed in their simulation the only limitation to the F-22 was there were too few of them. So this isn't really about America losing air superiority its about a few analysts not taking into account the entire mission of the three branches of the military. Maybe this plane doesn't stack up well against the F-16 or F-22, but It sure beats the Harrier and the F-18.

<comment><USER4> In addition to being a crappy fighter the F-35 is also a crappy bomber and close air support aircraft. Not that it's a surprise that a plane designated fighter (or 'strike' or 'fighter/attack') isn't good at these things.

We've virtually abandoned A and B line planes because the testosterone blinded fighter mafia in the airforce would rather have fun toys than useful equipment, and the navy is right there with them because heavy planes can't take off from aircraft carriers. It doesn't help that the one bomber the air force begrudgingly agreed to acquire is an obscenely expensive hanger queen, designed for nuclear bombing runs deep into the Soviet Union.

If the army wasn't barred from operating fixed wing aircraft by the pernicious Key West agreement, maybe they would operate as a voice of reason.

We should be working on a replacement for the AC-130 (1968), the A-10 (1977), and B-52 (1955!). To the extent we actually need more air superiority fighters they can bring back the F-22 line.

<comment><USER5> There is money going toward the development of a replacement for the B-52, although the exact form it will take is still up in the air/under wraps. Suffice to say that the "Next Generation Bomber" project currently has funding.

Two observations along these lines, however:

* The B-52 originally was the US Air Force's all-purpose bomber when it rolled out in the 50s. It was a conventional heavy bomber, a strategic nuclear bomber, and a cruise missile platform all in one. Over time, however, the USAF's bombing roles have become split; the B-1 now takes on the role of a conventional bomber, while the B-2 is used for deep-penetration strikes and standoffs.

* One big hurdle in the development of a B-52 replacement is the limitations on the number of strategic bombers allowed under the New Start treaty. The US cannot easily develop new nuclear-capable bombers under this treaty, and thus must keep a chunk of the B-52 fleet around to maintain the nuclear capability.

<comment><USER4> The nuclear triad always seemed a bit circular to me. We have three main means of delivering nuclear weapons, so it must be a good idea to have three different means of delivering nuclear weapons. I don't see it. With geographic diversity and at least one delivery system that is mobile and easy to hide we should be more than capable of asserting a second strike capability.

What's really needed from a modern bomber is a high munition capacity, a large combat radius, and long loiter times. Cheap to build and operate would be great too. Super stealth as well as high speeds and maneuverability are simply expensive distractions.

For the rare situation where we need to deliver something like a conventional bunker buster deep inside of territory that we don't wish to first completely destroy the AA cababilities of first -- i.e. an Osirak type mission -- we still have 20 of those $2 billion B-2s.

<comment><USER6> The nuclear triad is designed so that technical advances can't obsolete any one leg of the triad. Currently, ICBMs are vulnerable, and are out of favor due to the accuracy of SLBMs and ICBMs in a first strike role. So we put our emphasis on SSBNs and stealth bombers. Now what do we do if an opponent manages to work out an effective means of tracking our boomers on patrol? Perhaps some odd trail of bioluminescence kicked up by the sub's wake underwater; who knows. Then we're down to one leg. B2s. We only have 19-20, and they can only fly so many missions, plus their bases a vulnerable to ICBMs and SLBMs as well...

<comment><USER4> Could the exact same arguments be made about a nuclear dyad or quad? What makes three so special?

<comment><USER6> Well, I think the designers of SIOP were fond of tripods. ;)

Two legs is obviously less secure than three, and we don't have a fourth because we haven't developed a fourth technology for delivering nuclear weapons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The USAF intends to replace the A-10 with this turkey, and it's an awful idea.

A-10: holds 1350 rounds of 30mm ammo. F-35: holds 180 rounds of smaller 25mm ammo internally, plus 220 rounds externally

A-10: 1.8 hour loiter time. F-35: Not listed, but as a high subsonic (stall speed) fighter, it's going to be shorter

A-10: Has titanium armor protecting the pilot & critical systems. F-35: Already overweight, no chance of any armor.

A-10: Can be field repaired. F-35: Because of stealth requirements, only the simplest of damage can be repaired in the field.

And then there's the price...

[Edit: Added stall speed qualification]

<comment><USER8> Agreed...compromised designs will be compromised designs. The A-10 was made to work with the grunts in the mud. The F-35...

Of note, I think it was Pierre Sprey's (quoted in this article) baby.

<comment><USER6> Sprey was part of the fighter mafia pushing the LWF concept. I don't think he had any role in the A-10.

<comment><USER7> If you haven't read it yet, Robert Coram's book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" is good. He pissed off a lot of people, but he was right. Which is criminal behavior in the Pentagon.

Speaking of which, watch "The Pentagon Wars" sometime. Has Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammer in it. It's all about the M-2 Bradley. "What it needs is a turret on it!" Col. Burton sacrificed his career to make the Bradley less of a danger to the troops it was designed to protect.

<comment><USER9> He was right? His lightweight fighter isn't so light and has been more utilized in an air-to-ground role than as a fighter.

If he'd been right, the F-16 wouldn't have all those hardpoints or a radar (he believed air combat would be managed by ground controllers). You can say the F-16 evolved, but it sure as hell didn't evolve as he thought it should.

The AF and Navy/USMC need a plane for dropping bombs. They keep hacking fighters to do that. But they're more right than Boyd was.

<comment><USER7> Compared to the F-111, the F-16 is very light (well, almost everything is lighter than an F-111...). He fought against the F-16 being certified in the nuclear role and lost.

I hadn't heard he was opposed to a radar in the F-16 -- depending on ground control doesn't make sense for an offensive unit. He probably didn't anticipate how lightweight modern electronics have become.

<comment><USER6> Yes, he wanted the F-16 to be purely a daylight fighter, with simple avionics and a fast turnaround time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "It could be that China doesn't know how to build a working lift fan and that's why they left it off, Aboulafia said. But for a country that has unveiled two different radar-evading stealth warplane prototypes in just the last two years, that seems unlikely. It's more plausible that China could build a lift fan-equipped plane and has chosen not to."

The major difference is in posture. The US military wants to be able to project power globally. That means fighting from carriers or allied bases of varying quality half way around the world. The Chinese only care about their borders and regional power projection. VSTOL doesn't gain them anything since they'll never be that distant from their own bases.

This is the same reason why the Chinese haven't put much into carriers, but have a ton of ballistic missile ships.

<comment><USER11> The War Nerd has a great essay on why aircraft carriers are obsolete in modern warfare:

[http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779](http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779)

<comment><USER12> ...from 2002. Since then, the Chinese have kept developing their own carrier capability: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_progra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_programme)

Possibly they are only doing this to fake us out, and I don't disagree with the war nerd's argument that carriers make worryingly good targets...but I wouldn't write off the whole concept just yet.

<comment><USER13> > Possibly they are only doing this to fake us out

No, they are doing it to maintain their regional position with regard to potential conflict areas with regional rivals in the Indian Ocean/South China Sea area, particularly, India.

[http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/world/asia/india-aircraft- carr...](http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/world/asia/india-aircraft- carrier/index.html)

<comment><USER12> I think that too, but you need to read that remark in the context of the post it was replying to (which suggested that such carriers were obsolete and referenced an article suggesting that China would rely on submarines).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Lockheed's F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government employees."

vs.

"The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight."

<comment><USER15> The final section of "Skunk Works" touches on the bureaucratic morasses.

Although the 30 months quote is really misleading: the surface analysis prefiguring the Have Blue concept were started in 1974, XST phase one was started in 1975, the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in 1977.

31 months (not 30) is the time between the full-scale development decision and the first test model, decision to operational capability took 5 years (minus a month, November 1978 to October 1983) and almost 8 if you add the Have Blue studies.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?

<comment><USER15> I'm now home so I can both reply and complete my previous comment.

> Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?

It's more than that, it's Kelly's unwritten 15th rule of management:

> Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the > hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your > heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.

It's in the early page (#2) of the chapter on Sea Shadow.

The bureaucratic morass was from the Air Force and mentioned in the penultimate chapter about the B2:

> When we began testing out stealth fighter, the combined Lockheed and Air > Force personnel involved totaled 240 persons. There are more than two > thousand Air Force auditors, engineers, and official kibitzers crawling all > over that trouble B-2 assembly building in Palmdale. What are they doing? > Compiling one million sheets of paper every day — reports and data that no > one in the bureaucracy has either the time or the interest to read.

> The Air Force now has too many commissioned officers with no real mission to > perform, so they stand around production lines with clipboards in hand, > second-guessing and interfering every step of the way. The Drug Enforcement > Agency has 1,200 enforcement agents out in the field [nb: the book was > published in 1994, the DEA has learned since…] fighting the drug trafficking > problem. The DOD employs 27,000 auditors. That kind of discrepancy shows how > skewed the impulse for oversight has become both at the Pentagon and in the > halls of Congress.

He also presciently notes that the way the B2 was done (involving multiple manufacturers in a huge project) would spread and infect all future projects as the number of projects would diminish and the DOD would spread projects around to avoid any contractor dying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some U.S. allies are almost certainly going to bail out of the F-35 program. Spiraling costs, the ideology requiring VSTOL, and some bizarrely secretive aspects of the JSF project are conspiring to kill the F-35 as a viable option for countries like Canada.

A surprising thing is that countries taking part in development are not permitted complete access to program data. The U.S., despite making use of other nations expertise in the development and manufacturing of the F-35,is trying to keep some aspects classified from the nations who are supposed to buy the plane!

Some Canadian pundits have (not seriously) called for the F-35 to be ditched and the Avro Arrow resurrected. The Arrow was developed in the 50's as an interceptor and, other than being _significantly_ faster than the F-35 is probably inferior for Canada's requirements. It was designed in the freakin' 50's! It really is amazing that Canada went from manufacturing other country's WWII propeller plane designs to building prototype's faster than today's state-of-the-art F-35 in just a little over a decade. The fact that the F-35 is significantly slower than a 55 year old jet really shines light on how compromised its design is.

There are many rumors surrounding the cancellation of the Avro Arrow since it was probably superior to any other interceptor of its time, and one that refuses to die is that the U.S. was pressuring Canada to drop the program since Boeing, Lockheed, etc. felt threatened by Avro. Avro was basically destroyed by the cancellation of the Arrow, and guess where Avro engineers wound up!

I mention all this because Canada, despite being a perpetually self-doubting nation, has significant aerospace and weapon expertise. Canada also has some pretty unique design requirements not met by any existing fighters. The budget to build fighters locally may not ultimately exist, but if the Canadian government decides to compromise to cut costs, the F-35 is a horrendous option. It doesn't meet Canadian requirements, isn't on time, is getting more expensive every day, and the U.S. is trying to treat them like turn-key installations rather than selling planes.

Why should the U.S. care? Every nation that bails on the JSF program will raise costs for those that remain. Once one nation leaves, a domino effect will likely ensue. Based on this article, I can't say that's necessarily bad!

<comment><USER18> What's wrong with buying the Saab Gripen instead? Wouldn't Canada have really similar design requirements as Sweden?

<comment> bjelkeman-again Politics generally block these type of deals. I bet Finland also have similar requirements, but they went and purchased F-18 instead than whatever SAAB had to offer.

<comment><USER19> And it was a huge snub to Sweden when Norway went with the F-35 for clearly political reasons (later confirmed by Wikileaks cables). There's probably a lot of Schadenfreude going around now…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am not saying that the JSF is a good plane, or that VSTOL is a good thing. But the claims of the article are all resting on this:

 _" In the scenario, 72 Chinese jets patrolled the Taiwan Strait. Just 26 American warplanes — the survivors of a second missile barrage targeting their airfields — were able to intercept them, including 10 twin-engine F-22 stealth fighters that quickly fired off all their missiles"_

To summarize this scenario:

      () Successful Chinese first strike.

      () 72 Chinese aircraft.

      () Operating at short range

      () With initiative

versus

      () 10 F22

      () 16 F35

      () Operating at long range

      () Without initiative

Fastest with mostest trumps technology - e.g. the US didn't prevent the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Tigers didn't stop the Shermans in 1944 [or less famously in North Africa a year earlier].

In assessing the probability of the scenario, my questions:

      () how many allied drones?

      () where is the Navy?

      () when did the straight of Taiwan stop being
         a nuclear tipping point?

<comment><USER21> A simpler question is why did all the cruise missiles targeting airfields work over Taiwan, but apparently none worked over China? Hidden assumption of cyber warfare or ?

<comment><USER6> China is using SRBMs and MRBMs to target/attack Taiwan and Okinawa. While Aegis and Patriot have some ability to intercept them, they'll be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, for those who really know the battles within the Pentagon about the design and procurement of equipment, it's no surprise. Too much design-by- committee, and mission creep from difference parts of different services who want a piece of the funding pie. When the program is billed as "one plane for all 3 services," you know there's trouble brewing on the horizon.

It's telling that a lot of the quotes from this article comes from former members of the "fighter mafia" that pushed for focused designs from small groups done in "stealth" before the committees with their "mission creep" hit the design process. The F-16 and A-10, as a result, were widely hailed as revolutionary designs for the roles they were meant for (although in hindsight they followed the obvious path for air superiority and close air support aircraft). The F/A-18 was not quite as capable, but was nevertheless able to benefit from the design knowledge gained by these programs.

The managers/designers of the F-16 and A-10 programs include Chuck Spinney and Pierre Sprey, both heavily quoted here. John Boyd was one of the major figures, and is probably one of the most hated men in the Pentagon, but has since passed away.

The F-35 is succeeding brilliantly in its mission, though, which is to funnel taxpayer money to a nice fat cross section of the military-industrial complex.

<comment><USER22> "The F-35 is succeeding brilliantly in its mission, though, which is to funnel taxpayer money to a nice fat cross section of the military-industrial complex."

And in one of its secondary missions, which is to generate hundreds of thousands of votes for many Reps. and Senators, spread across many Congressional districts and states - and both parties.

<comment><USER13> I don't think most of the widely-spread military projects are all that good at _generating_ votes. Rather, I think that the threat of _losing_ votes for "killing jobs in the district" is a good way of keeping members of Congress in line behind the projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having worked on the F16 at one point in my career it kicks the F35 is the ass every day and twice on Sunday. Plus you can buy 20 of them for every F35. It's all about money though, the F16 is too cheap to keep Lockheed in business no matter how much you upgrade it.

<comment><USER24> Can you elaborate a little more on which aspects of the 40 year old F-16 design you think is better than the F-35? After looking on the Wikipedia page[0][1] it looks for me that the F-35 outperforms the F-16 in all aspects:

      |</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>|</comment><comment>-----|</comment><comment>----|
      |                        | F-16      | F-35     |
      |</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>|</comment><comment>-----|</comment><comment>----|
      | Maximum speed          | Mach 1.2  | Mach 1.6 |
      | Combat radius          | 550 km    | 1 080 km |
      | Dry thrust             | 76.3 kN   | 125 kN   |
      | Thrust w. afterburner  | 127 kN    | 191 kN   |
      | First flight           | 1974      | 2006     |
      |</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>|</comment><comment>-----|</comment><comment>----|

0: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon)

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II)

<comment><USER8> You need to add weight, and wing loading area, and what G's the plane is rated at. These are key variables.

The F-16's max speed is far greater than Mach 1.2, I thought, or at least it used to be before they added on weight to the thing.

It's also well known that the designers optimized the F-16's ability to quickly lose/gain kinetic energy, what they call "dump and pump". This is hard to quantify.

Some of the "nextgen" fighter capabilities widely touted are "supercruising" (i.e. supersonic flight without afterburner) and thrust vectoring, i.e. changing directions quickly by nozzling engine thrust off center. Amusing, the original YF-16A prototype could supercruise, and execute a "buttonhook turn" maneuver, without the fancy 21st century engines.

Imagine what the F-22's P&W F119 engine could do in a modernized F-16 airframe....

<comment><USER25> The assumption with the F-35 seems to be that technology (better sensors & automation) will overcome performance & armament disparities. This is not a new assumption in the air superiority game, but I don't think history's been kind to it to this point.

<comment><USER26> You're right, history hasn't been kind. The F-4 going into service with only missiles an no internal cannon is a pretty good example. After all, the new missiles would overcome and air combat maneuvering was a thing of the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You pretty much knew it was having some serious problems when the US Navy started talking about long term F-18 upgrades. They are currently testing conformal tanks (like the F-15 has). It seemed like the F-22 folks were solving their problems while the F-35 has been doing press.

Looking at it from the now, we probably should have built the full F-22 order and scrapped the F-35 for something far cheaper. I still think a successor to the A-10 and an evolved F-18 would have been better paths. Perhaps we also shouldn't award both contracts to the same company.

<comment><USER8> Or at least put some program in place to "upgrade" the 1990's electronics in the F-22, and make it several orders of magnitude cheaper...

<comment><USER26> If they had actually built the full run, it would have been cheaper. I would expect updated electronics over the life of the F-22 just as the F-15 and F-16 have been upgraded. Although they have done some pretty impressive things with those 1990's electronics. Embedded systems are a very different bird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ultimately, this article has one point but makes it about ten times. The point is that the F-35 led to the U.S. losing the 2008 war game. All of the quotes (particularly from Australian military officials) are about the failed 2008 war game.

It might seem like a valid point except that the war game deliberately crippled all the F-22s (the U.S. air superiority fighters) and instead pitched the F-35s (the U.S. jack-of-all trades jets) against Chinese air superiority fighters. It shouldn't be a surprise that a computer doesn't like that fight but it's a contrived and fairly silly situation since it's not really the F-35s job.

<comment><USER28> It's less academic for those of us in Australia, and that's why Australians are mentioned in the article. Australia is replacing its entire air superiority and assault capability with F35s and is contributing billions to the development program. We've already given up our bombers -- we were the last operators of F-111s.

We can't buy F22s. I'm pretty sure we would (and so would the UK, Japan, Saudi Arabia and a number of other close allies), but the US Congress has banned their export.

There is a constant undercurrent pushing for Australia to buy Russian fighters. They're cheap, they don't make design compromises we don't care about and you can _actually get some_ , rather than seeing the delivery date receding like a desert horizon.

And more to the point: our neighbours are buying them. In a confrontation, they'd win. Which rather defeats the point of buying billions of dollars of _air superiority_ hardware, don't you think?

Edit: Funnily enough, Lockheed has advertising spread throughout Canberra, our national capital. I mean _everywhere_. Especially in the airport, it's like a giant Lockheed showroom. I get the sense that they are feeling spooked.

<comment><USER29> This is stupid because you don't even know why the engagement was lost. It wasn't because the f-35 was outmatched but because they ran out of missiles in the fight which meant they could not defend their tankers and so they ran out of fuel. Numbers matter, you can't expect to send up an f-35 with a limited amount of missiles against a force much larger than yours because thats exactly what is going to happen. You will eventually run out of missiles.

On the other hand, you can buy cheaper fighters and more of them, but are your cheaper fighters better than the other teams cheaper fighters. I don't know, one thing I do know is Australia is not going to ever have an air force comparable to China in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> $1 trillion; this is why the US has no health care. Does anyone realistically believe you will go to war with China or Russia anymore?

It's time to stop the charade of war, and help your own citizens instead.

<comment><USER31> _Does anyone realistically believe you will go to war with China or Russia anymore?_

Historically there have been military conflicts between superpowers. So I'd say its incumbent on those claiming we won't have wars to explain what's changed and why we won't have anymore major military conflicts.

<comment><USER30> Globalization, trade, and the nuclear deterrent.

<comment><USER32> The nuclear deterrent is the only valid point, and that's a shaky one.

<comment><USER31> _The nuclear deterrent is the only valid point, and that 's a shaky one._

I agree with this.

WRT global trade, I couldn't find the source, but I vaguely remember an article that pointed out that global trade made up a similar percentage of economic activity prior to WWI and was offered as a reason why there wouldn't be another global war.

The other factor to consider is the consequence if you're wrong. You want to take the chance of another Hitler or Stalin coming to power and not being able to stop them?

<comment><USER33> > You want to take the chance of another Hitler or Stalin coming to power and > not being able to stop them?

That presumes some foreknowledge about where that will happen. No part of the world is immune from a Hitler or Stalin coming to power, so for all you know he'll inherit those toys.

<comment><USER31> that's a strong rebuttal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nobody mentioned the Osprey yet? The F-35 might suck, but at least its not an Osprey. The wikipedia article fails in being a bit too neutral PoV. Only people who are being paid to say the Osprey is great, or ordered by their CO to say its great, say its great, everyone else says it sucks. Except maybe our enemies, because using the Osprey has proven to be a reasonably effective way to kill american military personnel and waste enormous amounts of money.

I think this is one fail in the article. Yes the F-35 kinda sucks when it's given other planes jobs, compared to how well planes designed to do one specific job do at that one specific task. How about comparing it to something even worse? Then it still sucks, but its not quite the worst case, even if its still the most expensive of the bad situations.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think this article glosses over the general "fossilization" of aerospace/defence corporations in the USA, and Lock/Mart in particular.

Before merging, Lockheed and Martin both had the reputation of being really hidebound. From experience, Martin was exceptionally married to processes and procedures and tradition.

If you look at other things that LockMart has (like the Littoral Combat Ship, [http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/01/littoral-combat- ship...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/01/littoral-combat-ship/)) you can see that LockMart has general engineering problems.

General engineering troubles seems to plague LockMart.

<comment><USER35> I worked for them very briefly a few years ago, as part of a complex (but apparently normal for government stuff) scheme to have me do contract programming work for NIH. After experiencing their internal procedures and management, I don't see how this company can make a _sandwich_ , let alone a fighter jet.

My experience started off with a two-hour meeting discussing retirement benefits and health insurance, when I was a temporary part-time employee who got neither, and went downhill from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My prediction of how this will end up playing out: We'll waste money on the JSF, but thankfully won't ever put it into a real combat threat. The Defense Dept will pretend everything was a grand success while moving to UCAV's with haste. I think it's clear Navy decision makers came to this view long ago. They tried to pull out of the JSF program but Robert Gates smacked them back in line. Meanwhile they're pushing the X-47 development program as fast as they can.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm surprised at the criticism the harrier gets in the article. They're popular in the UK and appeared to perform pretty well in the Falklands, for instance.

<comment><USER37> It is a UK developed plane and did do well in the Falklands-- a testament to the skill of British pilots as much as anything. In the U.S., one third of our Harrier fleet has crashed, here's the article cited in the parent:

[http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6722](http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6722)

<comment><USER36> So why are they killing US Marines and not British RAF?

<comment><USER38> There has been plenty of British Harriers crashing too:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harrier_Jump_Jet_family...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harrier_Jump_Jet_family_losses)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Indeed, why not make 5 different planes for different purposes instead of one that does everything...

I mean, it's not like they're also building an aircraft carrier that can launch ballistic missiles, cruise at 50 knots, go up rivers and also submerge... or are they :-)?

<comment><USER40> Don't give them any ideas...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> John Boyd fought for years to build single-purpose fighters, but the idea of one, all-purpose warplane is just too seductive. (See John Boyd's biography by Robert Coram)

<comment><USER42> It's the Windows 8||Ubuntu Unity of warplanes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> _...currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies..._

Am I the only one shocked that a country spend this much to make a weapon? Is there any decency left?

<comment><USER44> Over the 50 year projected life cycle of the F-35.

<comment><USER45> So 20 Instagrams a year?

<comment><USER46> Or supposedly most of the cost to end world hunger [http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world- hunger/](http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/)

<comment><USER47> World hunger isn't a simple resourcing problem, otherwise it already _would_ be solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't started switching to air-to-air drones yet. They seem to be using them for everything else these days.

<comment><USER6> You won't see A2A drones for at least another decade. In a non-contested environment, dropping Hellfire missiles is easy from a slow moving drone like a Predator. But this won't occur against a peer enemy. It's too easy to shoot them down.

As to A2A, there are far too many obstacles for this happening soon.

Plus, there's the whole notion that in a conflict against a peer opponent, that we'll somehow be able to manage the command and control of drones; that the opponent won't be able to disrupt our satcoms and other control channels. This notion is a bit naive. There will be a place for a man in the cockpit for quite a while.

<comment><USER48> Those are great points. I hadn't considered the ability to jam signals at all. That seems like a pretty huge challenge to overcome actually.

<comment><USER42> You could plug some serious AI into the drone so it can engage without a connection back to home base. Video game AI is getting pretty good. Just pray it doesn't go all Rise of the Machines on us...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> One of the biggest factors is pilot training. To put things in perspective, there are instances where US pilots in 4th gen aircraft have gotten simulated missile locks and gunsight pippers on Su-30MKIs and F-22s -- which even have thrust vectoring! You have to have the right equipment, but even great equipment in the hands of bad/inexperienced pilots will result in poor outcomes.

I've read that some think the F-35 is problematic in this regard as well. It will be more expensive to maintain pilot training in these planes, and this will result in less US pilot training.

EDIT: Also, the F-35 seems to be putting all of its eggs in the "stealth basket." It can't loiter like an A-10 for ground support. It can't turn with the F-15, F-16, or F-18 for the air superiority role. It's all about getting in undetected, and firing high-tech missiles. If something goes wrong with that, the pilots are stuck with a less dependable and less capable aircraft.

<comment><USER29> I am not sure where you are getting that it will be more expensive to maintain pilot training in the f-35 from but from everything I have read it is expected to cost less to maintain training as the simulators for the f-35 are so much more advanced than any other simulators that a large portion of training will be moved from live flight to the simulator.

<comment><USER49> I am specifically talking about live pilot training. Simulators are not a substitute for actual operations. Reducing actual operations time is going to reduce operational experience, period. Simulators are not a 1-1 substitute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why are we still building manned fighter planes?

<comment><USER21> Read about the early years of the F-4 and its gun pod. The wikipedia article is fairly good, although short.

Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.

The F-4 lesson was "everyone knew" that ever more expensive and technologically advanced munitions were the way to go, so no gun pod just drop missiles. (missiles are essentially somewhat dumb short range drones, although there's a lot of overlap in the categories...) Turned out to be a near disaster and they ended up bolting a human operated gun to the F-4. People actually died because of this design mistake. The USAF is in no hurry to kill a bunch more people with the same conceptual mistake.

I am certain that the same scenario is about to play out with drones. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not with the USAF as the victims, but "in a decade or so" the same disaster will happen again. It is, after all, the same situation, so expecting a different outcome would be insanity.

<comment><USER40> _People actually died..._

Presumably most of these were F-4 pilots? I thought one of the most salient points of a drone is that it doesn't have a pilot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This article is very biased. The F-35 is being compared to a clean (no external stores) F-16, not a F-16 with same combat radius and weapons as internally carried on the F-35.

The F-35 also has significantly better avionics than the F-16C Block 50.

For a more balanced opinion go to [http://www.f-16.net](http://www.f-16.net)

</comment><comment><USER52> It's my opinion that the JSF will be quickly replaced - <USER2> domestically, but definitely globally - by air superiority drones and bombing drones. The very rapid pace of development and much lower cost guarantees that outcome. It'll happen in the next decade. If the US doesn't invest in order to lead that charge, we'll be embarrassed by other countries that will. Even if there's an argument to be made in favor of pilots in planes, countries will rapidly turn to drone technology because it's cheaper.

It appears likely to take another decade to get the JSF program where it should already be. By that time it'll be a trivial matter to swarm these planes out of the sky with drones that cost 5% to 10% as much per plane. Even a limited country such as Iran is going to be able to take down the F-35 by throwing multiple drones at it.

</comment><comment><USER53> If the VSTOL capabilities are only required to launch the aircraft in a really narrow set of circumstances (ie. from a ship with a helipad rather than a landing strip) why don't they have a detachable booster model? I'm imagining something that sits on top of the aircraft and provides the vertical thrust during take-off then detaches as the plane blasts off horizontally, leaving the booster free to lower itself onto the next plane for take-off and so on until the fleet has been dispatched and it can land itself on the platform. Instead of the capability to land, all you'd need is to build the planes so they could be ditched in the sea close by and this thing could go pick them up.

In other words just have a detachable VSTOL module instead of having to integrate it into the plane.

<comment><USER13> That's not a detachable VSTOL module, its a detachable vertical/short take off module plus a much more expensive and complicated airframe designed to be regularly handle water landings without complications.

Of course, even if "ditch it in a convenient large body of water" was a suitable substitute for vertical/short landing capability for carrier-based aviation, it wouldn't provide the same benefits for, e.g., improvised land- based airfields.

So, this would be less capable -- and probably more expensive -- than just building a VSTOL aircraft to start with.

<comment><USER53> _plus a much more expensive and complicated airframe designed to be regularly handle water landings without complications._

Even if you could slow the thing down enough to deploy a parachute ... if the results of building VSTOL into the plane are so disastrous then surely it's worth exploring other options to be able to deploy fighters from boats without needing an carrier with a full airstrip on it.

 _it wouldn 't provide the same benefits for, e.g., improvised land-based airfields._

Right, so from what I read just now (about the harrier at least) it doesn't have those advantages anyway because the vertical thrust ruins the landscape and kicks up dirt which clogs the engines ... perhaps that's fixed by the thruster fan of the F-35?

But the point is that the main reason they wanted this capability is so they didn't need carrier support to have their own aircraft, not so they could land in random spots on land, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Modern fighter aircraft need to: a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons.

Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite.

Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.

(This comment is copy+pasted from demallien's comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6213619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6213619) )

</comment><comment><USER55> It's tradition. Some of the biggest turds in fighter-plane history have come out of big, bloated "one-size-fits-all" development programs (like the F-111). And interestingly a lot of the most capable and long-lived combat aircraft have come about through rogue programs and fly offs trying to remedy the problems of being saddled with planes that just didn't work well. The F-16, A-10, F-14, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> >even older Russian and Chinese jets that can fly faster and farther and maneuver better

Dogfighting is obsolete as homing missiles fly faster, farther, and are more maneuverable than the plane carrying them. Air superiority belongs to the plane with the more sophisticated radar and stealth that is flying at a higher altitude. Flying faster also aids intercepting incoming aircraft or escaping interception attempts.

</comment><comment><USER57> Come on, planes are only part of the equation. Weapons, radar, air-to-air refueling, C4I, logistics, aircraft carriers...they will all make a big difference.

The idea that a war is going to come down to a single F-35 vs a Sukhoi without any other support factors is a bit fanciful.

The F-35 is looking a bit expensive for what you get though.

</comment><comment><USER58> > The jack-of-all-trades JSF has become the master of none.

I feel like I've read this same article about the Shuttle and one of the Army vehicles, maybe the M2 Bradley.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder whether the article is applying a lot of thought to an issue that won't really matter very much in a decade or so.

Fighters, as a delivery/sensor platform need to be manoeuvrable to not get hit. It's economics - people are expensive to train, sensors are expensive, and so you need an expensive system that you can reuse to ensure a good ROI.

Couple this with the increasing effectiveness of ground based missile defences and it's questionable whether you can plausibly hope to penetrate an airspace defended with a next generation, automated, system anyway. Whether investing that sort of money in the aircraft is going to give you something survivable. I don't believe it's ever been tried against a current gen system, and I'm aware that operating in areas with previous-generation air-defence systems has been incredibly risky already.

However. -chews her lip- If you _don 't_ have a lot of money sunk into your delivery platform - and if your sensors are out of harms way - then the survivability of the remaining components of the system, the bit that just has to get your missile, or whatever, into the area becomes a non-issue.

To an extent the original cruise missiles were the answer to just that question with respect to the Soviet Union: How do you penetrate a well defended airspace without losing an unacceptably high investment?

Consequently, I wonder whether air dominance, in the mid to long term, is going to be increasingly determined by the quality of your missiles. By extremely long range missile systems interacting with very powerful, networked, sensors (that might be, for example, based on drones far beyond the active area.)

Under that sort of interpretation, you won't have a fighter. At its logical extreme, you'll have a cruise missile that can go to the operational area in a reasonable timeframe and has a very fast second or third stage to do the final closing with the target. You can make your cruise missile go faster than any fighter could, because the airframe is a throw away, and because you don't have to hold any fuel back to get back to base, and because it will be vastly lighter, and because you don't have to worry about any squishy human riding in it.

That seems, to me, like the logical extension of the see first shoot first doctrine that the F-22 and 35 were based upon, the logical extension of drones as a low-cost delivery method, and the logical extension of the need to penetrate increasingly well defended airspaces.

If that is how things go, the quality of the aircraft you have becomes largely irrelevant. They'd never get close enough to the action to need great performance.

</comment><comment><USER60> Well, the days of manned warplanes are fast running out anyway. UCAVs are the future, baby.

</comment><comment><USER61> 200 million USD per strike fighter vs. under 17 million per Reaper.

No wonder we are broke.

<comment><USER62> A Reaper has no air to air capability whatsoever and a tiny payload. You're comparing apples and oranges.

<comment><USER61> Because there has been so much air-to-air combat in the past 40 years?

<comment><USER62> Which means nothing in terms of the future. With cheap guided weapons air superiority is more critical than it's ever been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> so... how about that well funded school system we enjoy here in the US?

</comment><comment><USER42> I read this and think "man, these guys are going to be great at running healthcare"

</comment><comment><USER64> _America's newest stealth warplane and the planned mainstay of the future Air Force and the air arms of the Navy and Marine Corps, was no match for Chinese warplanes_

I'm sure that's in lots of papers in China today.</comment>


Google just deleted my personal account out of the blue - <AUTHOR> Recently Dennis Cooper had his blog and associated account deleted by Google without much recourse or reason provided:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757
Coincidently, I just received two emails from Google telling me my entire account is suspended and about to be deleted as well. I can appeal but without knowing the reason, it's pretty hard to argue anything except, I didn't do anything wrong!
I've uploaded a picture album of the suspension/appeal emails here:
http://imgur.com/a/ARrLP
I wonder if other HNers are also getting suspension/deletion out of the blue, if so definitely let us know. I use my account mainly for email, I have absolutely no porn in my email, and pretty much just email family and get tech related subscriptions, social related notifications. It's all super tame, so I'm at a loss. I really hate to say it, but Dennis Cooper might have been right, I feel like the rug has been pulled from under me. "Only when they come for you, do you realize haste was a virtue."
Is Google on a (possibly automated) account deletion spree? <comment><USER2> Dennis Cooper was apparently publishing stories with content including pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia. I'm not sure you and he are in the same boat. Also, 2 (that you know of) out of more than 1 billion users is far from a suspension spree, especially when 1 of those 2 people was publishing something that would be embarrassing to Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually Google Site/Blog posts do not stay up for long if they are reported. It seems really uncharacteristic for Google to delete his blog out of the blue instead of after a history of post flagging/deletion and constant battling with allowed content. Was there a history of constant skirting of allowed content and a leadup to the deletion? From what I've read about the incident, there was none. Which leads me to believe that this all might be a mishap by an automatic heuristic-checking script. You bring up a good point though, Google has many many users, over a billion - so we do have to consider all these angles and collect more information about recent suspensions/deletions before we decide if there's' a cover-up of negligence. Based on the timing though, I can't shake an uncanny feeling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Possibly so: happened to me few days ago. Account suspended for apparent (unspecified) terms of service violation. Followed the link provided to appeal- said I have no idea why they've suspended me. Account reinstated without explanation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is getting pretty bizarre. Just a small bit of anecdotal evidence so far but I'm wondering if Google made a mistake with many of these suspensions including Dennis Coopers' but they are missing a backup of Coopers' so they are just opting to say nothing, to avoid self-implication. It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out.

<comment><USER4> missing a backup? i don't think google ever really deletes anything from their servers... even if you request deletion, they will still keep your data

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And now you understand that you are not google's customer. You are their product, and they only tolerate you for as long as they can sell your attention to their advertisers for a profit.

Next time, host it yourself, on hardware you own, and you won't receive a letter telling you that all your material is about to be deleted.

</comment><comment><USER6> Happened to me. I posted about it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008)

It's a relatively new personal account I created to be "clean" of google tracking. The night before I had been in a youtube chat of a donald trump rally and may or may not have been "spamming" posting memes too quickly. Could be that.

I had the account reinstated quickly after sending them an email like wtf?

</comment><comment><USER7> Try contacting the people at "online censorship"[0] they might be able to help.

[0] : [https://onlinecensorship.org/](https://onlinecensorship.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but the account doesn't mean much to me. I'm just concerned about the big picture.

<comment><USER7> Sure. I agree that the attitude and the support of Google (Facebook, and Twitter as well) is becoming problematic.

I'm leaving the link here incase someone needs it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one reason I recently bought a larger backup drive.

</comment><comment><USER9> My guess is, your account got automatically flagged for whatever reason.</comment>


Newly Released Surveillance Orders Show That Spying Powers Are Misused - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/newly-released-surveillance-orders-show-even-individualized-court-oversight-spying <comment><USER2> What I not understand (I am not a US person): Why is the FBI involved in foreign surveillance? My (possibly naive) understanding is that the FBI is a law enforcement agency. Here in Germany we have (for good reasons) a strict separation of the two.

<comment><USER3> The FBI doesn't have any good reason to be involved in foreign surveillance.

The agency currently seems to have no accountability, and to do whatever it wants (see: Nunes memo).

<comment><USER2> That's what I understand. But why could they go to the FISC? This means to me, they can do foreign surveillance _legally_. The German equivalent, the BKA, could of course do foreign surveillance as well. However they can't get an official approval to do so (that's task of the BND). It'd be outright illegal.</comment></comment></comment>


5 startups to watch from Y Combinator's Summer 2011 class - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/08/23/5-startups-to-watch-y-combinator-summer-2011-class/

<comment><USER2> Hadn't seen Vidyard before. That's a brilliant business model. Lots of people don't want all sorts of stuff crapping up their content. Plus, it's a perfect example of flying underneath Google. Google is not going to give up advertising any time soon. If Vidyard get big enough, Google can always buy them out and re-brand them as YouTube "premium" or slide them into their google apps for enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Three of the five, by my debatable assessment, use technology to have a direct impact on human lives. Really impressed to see YC going after "stuff that matters".</comment>


Why so many who doubt climate change here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html

<comment><USER2> About 1/2 of this article is about the reporter discovering people with his last name living nearby, and trying to contact them.

The rest of this rambling tale shows Oklahomans as either backwards disbelievers that cling to their beliefs in the face of evidence, or jaded cynics who see politicians and environmentalists saying one thing and doing another.

At one point the reporter found a high schooler, who believed in climate change but didn't want to feel responsible. And that seems to be the thesis of the article - that a lot of climate change deniers aren't denying climate change, they're denying that their little body and little car could possibly impact this great-big planet Earth, and so something else must be going on.</comment>


Prices for dried coffee husks are outstripping those for beans - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/coffee-waste-is-now-fetching-a-480-premium-over-coffee-itself <comment><USER2> It's just a momentary trend. The vast amount of coffee waste in coffee producing countries is used for fertilizer. The title should be: In a few select farms that produce _cascara_ , it fetches a 480% premium over coffee.

Honestly, it's high price and "premium" perception only exist because so few farms are producing it. The tiny premium bottles of cascara you see would be replaced by gallon jugs for $2-3 if more farms started making it.

<comment><USER3> Just because it's a momentary trend now doesn't mean it's going to stop being a trend. If it proves successful, the farms using it for fertilizer will jump into the market to try to capitalize, which will bring the price down, but still bring in more income than just the coffee beans (and certainly more than feed)

<comment><USER2> My point is that it's not economically feasible at scale. There are mountains and mountains[0][1][2] of organic coffee pulp, the price would plummet once more farms produce it. The pulp isn't waste either, it's 100% reused as fertilizer.

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/0a306pb.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0a306pb.jpg)

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/Duar7Uu.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Duar7Uu.jpg)

[2]: [http://www.elfaroestate.com/img/large/coffeemill16.jpg](http://www.elfaroestate.com/img/large/coffeemill16.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Where's the infeasibility exactly? Currently it's used as fertilizer. As long as they can sell it for higher than the price of new fertilizer, they will be making profit. So really the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it, or how can companies _convince_ people they need to pay more for it?

Arabica coffee is currently 2.962 USD per kilogram, and we pay double that for a cup of coffee using about 8 grams. We're paying 125x more for a cuppa than the cost of the beans. So it's certainly possible someone could come up with a way to make some small profit off the pulp. (Incidentally, tea is 0.0288 USD/kg, but obviously it weighs a lot less and we drink a lot less of it)

<comment><USER4> Is that a wholesale price for tea?

As someone trying to drink more tea I find the retail price for Lipton loose tea is about $21 USD per kilogram and other brands are considerably more expensive.

<comment><USER5> >As someone trying to drink more tea I find the retail price for Lipton loose tea is about $21 USD per kilogram and other brands are considerably more expensive.

I advice against Lipton: it's overpriced because it's a familiar brand even to people who aren't tea enthusiasts. I'd recommend going to tea stores where loose leaf tea is sold by the pound.

For packaged black tea, I can highly recommend the following two: at about $9/pound, they are an excellent bang for the buck for high quality loose leaf OPA (many grades[3] above Lipton teabags):

-Ahmad OPA [1]

-Zarrin OPA [2]

As a note, $21/kilo really not that much once you convert it to cups of tea. With green teas especially, since one can brew them several times. So the Lipton you're talking about isn't expensive _per se_ , just for the grade you get (dust in teabags, FBOP loose).

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Ahmad-Ceylon-OPA-Tea- Carton/dp/B00110...](https://www.amazon.com/Ahmad-Ceylon-OPA-Tea- Carton/dp/B0011010XY)

[2] [https://persianbasket.com/zarrin-pure-ceylon-special- opa](https://persianbasket.com/zarrin-pure-ceylon-special-opa)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_leaf_grading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_leaf_grading)

<comment><USER6> Any advice on how to chose loose leaves tea, especially green tea? I'm scared to be taken advantage of going to one of those fancy tea shop; they seem tailored for people who prefer pretty over quality, when I just want basic green tea, not laced with cadmium, and not 20% twigs and dust.

Brands maybe irrelevant, as I'm not in North America.

<comment><USER7> The bigger, the better and usually higher quality. You will see that after the leaves open, under hot water. Oolng teas usually have the biggest leaves - they are normally rolled into balls and also quite expensive. If you want something cheaper (under 5 euros/100 g) but still very good, try Gunpowder (also rolled) or Chun Mee. These have a strong taste characteristic to pan oxidized Chinese tea. If you don't like the strong taste, then you're either infusing it too much (infuse for two minutes or less) or should try some of the Yunnan varieties, specifically Mao Feng.

[https://worldoftea.org/is-chinese-tea-safe-to- drink/](https://worldoftea.org/is-chinese-tea-safe-to-drink/)

If you don't like pan oxidized Chinese tea at all, try Formosa (Taiwan), Korean or Japanese steam oxidized tea: Sencha, Bancha. Speaking of twigs, there's also a variety of Japanese twig tea which actually tastes very good - it's called Kukicha. Theese tend to have a milder taste.

[https://japanesegreenteashops.com/pages/japanese-tea- types](https://japanesegreenteashops.com/pages/japanese-tea-types)

If you're located anywhere in the EU, I used to buy from Teegschwendner before a Demmers franchise was establised in my country.

<comment><USER8> I can second the idea of trying to get kukicha for a milder taste. I tried it a while ago and have been buying it since then because I rather enjoyed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Thanks to demand from these chains, the coffee husk now often fetches a > higher price than the bean itself does. Batlle says she gets $7 for a pound > of cascara, while the average price for coffee hovers around $1.20, the > lowest in about two years, because of an oversupply of arabica beans.

So my takeaway is that it's a factor of being new trendy thing right now, _and_ coffee beans themselves are cheaper than normal from oversupply. I imagine the price and especially the premium ratio will balance out.

With that said, I certainly hope the trend of continuing to use the husks continues. Coffee is a wonderful, precious fruit and I'm all for using more of it. Most people don't even realize that coffee "beans" are the seeds of the coffee fruit itself, which is more like a cherry. The vast majority of the fruit is usually discarded and rinsed off the seeds, except on some varietals where some of the pulp is allowed to remain on the seeds before being roasted to give them more of a fruity/citrusy flavor.

<comment><USER10> Farmers are screwed because they produce a commodity, and because there is a couple year lag between supply and demand (you can't count on a bumper crop the first time you try).

The advice I see given out time and again to small farmers is to stay boutique. Try to grow something that not everybody else is. The volumes are low but the prices are higher. However this is always in the context of satisfying a _local_ market. With the exchange rates who knows. And niche produce and vegetables don't tend to have the shelf life of beans and grains, so you can't ship them as far.

<comment><USER11> This is precisely why futures markets exist- to hedge this risk for farmers. They're definitely not screwed here though I agree for more elastic, longer lag products this could be a problem.

<comment><USER12> Can the farmers actually afford to gamble on the markets. I'd imagine it was third parties up the chain that were able to afford to hedge their profiting from the farmers labour.

<comment><USER13> If you have a genuine product and want to secure a steady price for it, that's _hedging_ not _gambling_.

If I want $2/kg for my beans, I can sell futures and "lock in" that price. If it falls to $1/kg, I'm still able to sell at $2/kg. (Conversely, if it rises to $4/kg, I still only get $2/kg.)

On the buyer/user side, Starbucks/Dunkin could buy futures so they also locked in a known price for the future. Whether the spot (instant market) price is $1 or $4 per kg, they may have locked in buying at $2/kg, essentially the opposite use case as the farmer/producer. (Southwest famously did this for jet fuel during the prior oil runup.)

Similarly, you can hedge weather and natural disasters if so inclined.

<comment><USER10> But that was my point. _I don 't actually have the product until the end of the year._

<comment><USER11> Right. You buy a future that says "I will provide 30,000 units of soybeans in St. Louis in September, at 300/unit" or whatever. You were planning on growing 325 or something, and you hedged the majority of your crop. Somebody buys your futures contract.

Then, demand for soybeans tanks. Price drops. Doesn't matter. Somebody has already paid you for that opportunity and locked in their price.

If soybean demand skyrockets, you miss out on the profits since you already sold, but you locked in your expected profits for the year - congrats!

If your crops all die, there's insurance for that but you could also be somewhat creative about call options on September soybeans to make sure you could buy back in at a decent price to still deliver your goods. Anyway, these markets exist specifically to help smooth out price insecurities on commodities for goods producers.

<comment><USER12> >on commodities for goods producers. //

Can you demonstrate that's true in general for producers of commodities in the third world? I don't doubt it's true for middlemen, or companies relying on producers.

If you can, could you also show what proportion of profits are diverted to hedging vs the proportion lost to reduction of risk exposure for a multinational in, let's say, coffee/chocolate or some other comestible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> evan-arm If you want to try cascara straight up yourself as a tea, Sweet Maria's[0] sells it:

[https://www.sweetmarias.com/colombia-finca-la-vega- cascara-t...](https://www.sweetmarias.com/colombia-finca-la-vega-cascara- tea.html)

Shipping might be a little high if you're buying just that, but they do will- call pickup in Oakland too.

It's good - it has a light fruit flavor, and has a bit of coffee tastes without being bitter.

0: Sweet Maria's is a great shop and resource for green coffee and roasting. If you drink even a moderate amount of coffee, roasting your own is pretty easy and pays for itself in a few months. If it sounds up your alley, skip the air popper and get a real roaster, though.

</comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago a friend of mine started importing this stuff. He got a sample of a syrup made, and then started selling it. It was a slow start because he was just one guy and had other interests, but then I remember when he told me that Starbucks was starting to make a seasonal cascara drink.

Seeing this just reminded me how often it is that opportunities for little startup's are missed because the founder was unable to commit fully at the time.

Plug for him, here is where he was selling it: [http://www.inspiredcoffee.com/](http://www.inspiredcoffee.com/)

<comment><USER14> And if you live in Michigan, his syrup is used in this Bloom kombucha sold at Meijer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone other than Starbucks sell it? I'd like to try it but am skeptical of Yet Another fad.

OT: "low-fat cappuccino whose foam and syrup have been spiked with an extract made from a blend of sugar and ground-up dried coffee husk" \-- low-fat + loads of sugar is an oxymoron. The sugar industry is killing us all.

<comment><USER16> Fat is fat, sugar is a carb. They are different macro nutrients, so I don't know why you think low fat and high sugar is an oxymoron.

<comment><USER17> It's true but probably misleading to the people who the advertisement line is directed to. Of course, that's definitely the intention. It seems odd that anyone would want to have a low-fat diet voluntarily.

<comment><USER18> Lots of diets are odd. Plus it's just a coffee beverage, not soylent; it's not supposed to be your whole diet.

Personally, I prefer the taste of low-fat milk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought this was going to be referring to coffee grounds: they make a great compostable or soil amendment, and somewhat acidic so can be used to balance soil pH for crops like blueberries.

Soil amendments tend to be pretty cheap, by weight, though...

</comment><comment><USER20> Chocolate husk tea is also a tasty switch up. You can have it hot without milk or sugar and it won't be bitter. It has a nice flavor and a little of the theobromine kick.

One example: [http://tisano.com/](http://tisano.com/)

<comment><USER21> I experimented once with trying to brew a drink by running hot water through ground cacao beans. It produced a red liquid that looked kind of like tea, and had a very pronounced unsweetened chocolate flavor. The main difficulty was that cacao beans have much more fat (I guess) in them than coffee beans, so tend to clog up your filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I first heard about cascara last year and wanted to try some. However I live in the UK and it was withdrawn from sale due to some confusion around "Novel Foods". The EU defines this as "food that has not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to 1997".

There was for a while a bit of confusion with independent coffee shops if they could sell it and make drinks with etc. -

[https://unitedbaristas.com/blog/insights/2017/03/the- cascara...](https://unitedbaristas.com/blog/insights/2017/03/the-cascara- raids/)

I think it's been resolved, but I can't find much online about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well that's one way of saying farmers don't get paid much for coffee beans.

</comment><comment><USER24> i've heard that coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in production today. do these coffee husks, or cherries, have significant amounts of pesticide residue?

<comment><USER2> Cascara is produced from coffee that isn't sprayed.

<comment><USER10> Aha. There's your price premium.

There's a market for pesticide free cherries but not the same market for pesticide free beans. So you divide your crop into two piles and one sells into a channel where your extra labor isn't a differentiator.

Were we quoted the price for organic coffee beans or conventional?

<comment><USER25> Conventional.

For comparison, fair trade ranges from $1.40 to $1.90 (organic on the higher end). Direct trade starts at $2 or so at the low end, averages around $3.50 or so and can approach double digits for top-end specialty coffee.

Afaik the quality of the cascara is even more sensible to farming and processing conditions that the bean, so I'd expect a large part of the cascara production to come from higher-end farms anyway.

<comment><USER26> What are the units those prices are for? The green beans I buy are in the range of $7-14US per Kg.

<comment><USER25> USD per lb of green beans in bulk. According to one finva I visited at some point.

On some quick research, apparently on the extreme high end, lots can go for as high as $600 per lb.

[https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/07/26/record-coffee- earns-6...](https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/07/26/record-coffee- earns-601-per-pound-at-best-of-panama-auction/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems similar to how slaughterhouses make more money off the rendered fat and other "byproducts" than the meat.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you're measuring both on a per-pound level, kinda makes sense. One coffee bean produces a lot more bean than husk.

</comment><comment><USER29> Off topic but I went to a coffee farm in Antigua and it was EXTREMELY interesting. I recommend it for all coffee lovers.

<comment><USER30> what was most surprising about your visit?

<comment><USER29> That the process basically hasn't changed since the farm opened in the 1800s.

<comment><USER31> If you like that sort of thing with a legacy/history in the process, then you'll also enjoy touring old wineries and distilleries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a side note, coffee chaff makes excellent mulch. It gets wet and then forms a thick mat that keeps the water i.

</comment><comment><USER33> i remember stumptown selling cascara a full 6 years ago. it was crazy expensive then too. i think this article is framing the thing wrong by overemphasing starbucks

<comment><USER34> Eh, the quote says it all; they're great at taking something and introducing it to the masses.

Funny thing is, I've seen cascara drinks advertised by Starbucks but didn't know what it was until now. I think they call it a cascara cold foam something or other so I thought 'cascara' was just a branding term for something to do with the foam or milk; I had no idea it was actually a 'thing'.

I don't frequent small coffee merchants in person (drinking Stumptown Cold Brew on tap at work as I type this!) but I've been to enough Storyville/Ladro/Stumptown type places and never seen it either.

<comment><USER35> What's funny about how SB is going about this is as another flavor syrup to add to lattés. That way, the flavor is about as masked as any hazlenut cream they dump into a frappuchino. It's too bad, because cafes that sell exclusively cascara-based drinks can actually churn out some really decent stuff, but SB's "cascara foam" is more like a fancy way to brand some flavored sugar.

IMO, where the debate really gets interesting is how cascara might shift the balance of direct trade relationships: because so many farmers rely heavily on cooperatives to purchase high-volume dry milling equipment, farmers almost always act cooperatively with their coop. However, because cascara is something that individual farmers can make without expensive machinery, it might start to fracture the thousands of coffee coops that make up lots of the source-level industry.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Digicert is turning into Symantec - <AUTHOR> It was an open secret, linked from Microsoft MSDN page on code signing [1] - if you are to enter Digicert site through https://www.digicert.com/friends/sysdev link, you'd get a 50% discounted offer on all certificates including EV code signing certs. Coupled with Digicert's US-based no-nonsense support it made buying an EV cert from them an absolute no-brainer. Recommended them more times than I can remember.
Then they "absorbed" Symantec.
First, the quality of the support took a nose dive. Live chat that used to be almost instantaneously available started showing queues of 10-15 minutes. Earlier this year the support started deflecting all sales-related questions to "your sales representative, who will get in touch with you shortly." What useв to be a 30 second chat to get the renewal price matched against the last year now turned into some painful bullshit that ended up with sales rep claiming no discounts were available, but he'd be willing to make a massive one-time exception of 5% off.
But the /sysdev link still worked, the hope that these Symantec influences will blow over was still there.
No more. The link now redirects to $600/yr pricing. Support is slow and useless, there are now industry-standard obnoxious sales reps, where none is needed, and so Digicert is all but Symantec now. What a shame I say.
Just FYI.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/dashboard/get-a-code-signing-certificate <comment><USER3> Around 2013-2017, I got a lot of certs issued through DigiCert, and their support team was awesome. The wildcard certs were _expensive_ , but their support team issued a bunch of 'custom duplicate' certs that I would have thought was pushing the boundaries of what we paid for and never batted an eye. They were also willing to do take the time to issue certs through non- default intermediaries, even when it wasn't immediately available. Other CAs I worked with had very little flexibility at all, anything off the script was not ever going to happen.

If their service has changed, that's a real shame :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Code signing is a strong arm tactic and the ones who run the industry are a huge mafia game. Hate every aspect of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Code signing as a tech and as an idea is perfectly fine.

It is a solution to a _massive_ problem with average, technically unsophisticated users downloading and running all sort of junk without thinking twice, including things that impersonate legit software and generally do shady stuff like dropping random kernel modules.

The business scaffolding around it is just wrong, I agree with that. It should be handled by non-profits or state-run organizations. You register a company, you get a signing key. Validation and authentication should be done at source, not across an ocean by a 3rd party outsourced support calling a phone number published in 4th party business directory. This is as ass-backwards as it gets.

<comment><USER5> > Code signing as a tech and as an idea is perfectly fine.

It's a scam. Full stop.

A standard cert is now free. $0. Nada. Zilch.

So what are the power-players doing? They're deprecating the validity of 'those free certs', and pushing EV.

What does EV do? Oh yeah "You paid $X hundred so you MUST be legit". Sure, they might look at the state's business registry and match the business name in the EV. That's automatable work.

But there you have it, piles of money because 'a real business can afford it'. And some assumption that scammers wont.

Cert chains from the root authorities have been a continual scam, until LetsEncrypt showed up. This EV bullshit is no different.

<comment><USER6> >So what are the power-players doing? They're deprecating the validity of 'those free certs', and pushing EV.

> [...]

>Cert chains from the root authorities have been a continual scam, until LetsEncrypt showed up. This EV bullshit is no different.

You seem to be conflating web certificates (for lack of a better term) with code signing certificates. When it comes web certificates, 3 of the 4 major browser vendors are removing EV indications from their UI[1], so I'm not sure where this "push" is from. On the other hand, for code signing certificates, there is a push from MSFT to get EV certificates, since it automatically gains "smartscreen reputation".

[1] [https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates- ar...](https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-really- really-dead/)

>But there you have it, piles of money because 'a real business can afford it'. And some assumption that scammers wont.

Like it or not, when it comes to everyday windows users, code signing has the best ux compared to other forms of validation. Right-click -> properties and it shows who signed it and whether it was tampered with. This is much better than posting a file hash (how do you calculate a hash? what happens if the landing page is compromised?), or GPG (how do you install GPG? how do you build up web of trust? are you going just use whatever key that the download page says to use?)

<comment><USER7> > You seem to be conflating web certificates (for lack of a better term)

Two suggested better terms for future reference:

Certificates in the Web PKI - in one sense "Web PKI" is a misnomer because this PKI is for all TLS on the public Internet which is a lot more than the web, but in another sense it's accurate because in practice all standards development, public oversight, trust store policy setting, and so on takes place because of the Web and not other TLS applications.

PKIX Certificates - by using PKIX, the IETF's dialect of the X.509 standard, certificates actually work and have a clearly defined meaning on IP-based networks. This is a broader idea than the Web PKI, encompassing private IP networks, private CAs issuing for constrained uses, and non-TLS traffic for IP networks.

But your thrust was correct, code signing is a quite different application for X.509 certificates than PKIX, and especially than the Web PKI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's because you're logged in as an existing user. Just use a different email address to get a new certificate and sign up with that to get the discount. Then after you get the cheaper certificate, ask support to merge the accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, I'm not logged in. If I am logged in, the link simply redirects to the dashboard page and that's it.

But that's off the point. Regardless of the workarounds, whatever the goodwill DigiCert has accumulated with the developer community over the years, they are actively squandering it now and they don't seem to care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had the chat queue take over an hour. And yes it used to be instant.

Email went from within 24 hours to multiple days.

Basic tasks like moving a cert between accounts are now 'it doesn't work because of a bug in our software and we have no timeline for it to be fixed'.

</comment><comment><USER10> Until DNSSEC DANE TLSA is implemented in OSes, an interim solution that is easy and costs nothing is to publish binary hashes into a GitHub repository. It's not checked by UAC, but it is free and humans can check the hashes with standard tools if they want formal validation. A code signature is actually little more than third-party validation of a hash of a binary file that can't be easily altered. GitHub is your third-party and a repo contains your binary file hash that can't be easily altered. Other than the "scary" yellow UAC dialog and SmartScreen being temporarily annoying after each version release, problem solved!

DNCSEC DANE TLSA is the real solution though to all public CA woes. TLSA lets you run your own private CA publicly and be trusted without root certificate stores.

<comment><USER11> You can already run your own private CA. What you can't do is get a government to vouch for you, which is effectively what DNSSEC does; it replaces the CA with a tree rooted in country governments.

What discretion the de jure controllers of .COM and .IO have, we don't want them exercising over our code. But, of course, the problem for code signing is that they'll have little discretion at all, and, were operating systems to consider switching to DNSSEC, they might as well just stop doing code signing altogether, since creating a situation where anyone can generate an authority that disables the UAC warning box defeats the whole purpose.

<comment><USER10> The current code signing paradigm was already tenuous but this change to DigiCert is going to cause far fewer packages to get signed as fewer devs acquire and renew the now very costly certs. We need working alternatives. You didn't provide any solutions but decided to downvote anyway.

Code signing has always been about validating the source of a binary and that it hasn't been modified from what the publisher intended. This is done by relying on a third-party validation mechanism. DNSSEC DANE TLSA meets both of those qualifications. So does GitHub. I'd be fine with either or both as options. Microsoft owns GitHub too, so code signing could be done through that medium. Public CAs in a trusted root store allow for offline validation but let's be realistic - most devices and software are online these days and public CAs aren't particularly worthy of anyone's trust. Domain-pinning a private CA in a trust store via TLSA (or GitHub, whichever) would allow for one-time online validation and then permanent offline validation for any given binary thereby allowing device drivers to still load offline.

Microsoft unfortunately still claims that code signing stops malware. Time has effectively proven that to be false as code signing has stopped approximately zero malware infestations. Training personnel to be constantly vigilant through ongoing training modules has proven to be far more effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You don't need EV.

<comment><USER13> You do if you want to get past SmartScreen instantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> But Symantec was bought by Broadcom this year. This sales reps thing is some Broadcom global strategy for Symantec products.

<comment><USER15> DigiCert bought Symantec's TLS/PKI business, to quote wikipedia:

> including brands GeoTrust, RapidSSL, Thawte and VeriSign

<comment><USER7> In particular, and relevant to this rant, to permit the acquisition to take effect DigiCert had to explain to stakeholders (Google, Mozilla and perhaps others) in some detail that this was NOT a reverse takeover, the resulting organisation would NOT be Symantec's CA but now named DigiCert, it still would be DigiCert but now with Symantec's famous brands like Thawte and VeriSign -- thus it would not be infected by poor management processes and inadequate risk controls.

The reason this was important is that Symantec's oversight had been judged lacking -- business as usual was not an option, they were asking big CAs like DigiCert about pricing for basically a white labelling service. The trustworthy CA would run everything for a few years and Symantec would own the brands while internally rebuilding to get trust back. In that discussion with DigiCert apparently just selling Symantec's CA function outright was the more attractive option than whatever eye-watering sum such white labelling would have cost.

<comment><USER15> Is there any evidence that the issue at hand is anything more than just customer service though? I don't see any mention of actual CA issues (ie following proper issuance policies, etc)

And to be fair, when it comes to shit customer service Google would look at Symantec, laugh and say "hold my beer".

<comment><USER7> No, sorry it was unclear, my point was that unlike normal we actually have independent evidence that this was NOT about DigiCert becoming Symantec, because that was a requirement for these stakeholders. So at most this is just "Popular product's customer services made worse due to expansion" a familiar story which rarely signifies much.

And to be honest the parent article's main thrust comes across as "Wah, I had to pay full price" which like, I'm not even getting out my record-breaking world's tiniest violin for that, who cares?

<comment><USER15> Right that makes more sense now! Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait. What. Digicert is now BRCM?

</comment><comment><USER17> I do not think they do anything wrong.

You are trying to be cheap while casting unrealistic expectations and executing cut-throat tactics on their chat and support.

Things do not work that way.

Either you pay a minimum, follow the rules and wait in a queue or you pay the premium to be greeted with quick turnaround and other perks.

<comment><USER18> For years Digicert used to be marginally cheaper than Comodo with a better service.

They got to be _the_ code signing CA by being this exact combo - <USER2> product with good support - and being granted the top link on the high-traffic MSDN page because of that. That's what DigiCert was.

Now they are suddenly 3x more expensive with comparably troublesome support.

What unrealistic expectations and who's being cheap here exactly?

<comment><USER17> Riding the coupon created exclusively for hardware suppliers while bombarding support being a software guy is disrespectful behavior by any means.

Sure, some people do not see it that way, but only until the table is turned.

Edit: I am pretty sure that topic starter has Eastern European or Middle Eastern origin where being as cheap as possible is a prevalent idea. Even when it breaks people around you.

<comment><USER19> What makes you think he/she is Eastern European or Middle Eastern?

What makes you say he was "...bombarding support.."?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Slide Decks from Linux Kernel Tel Aviv Talks - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/kerneltlv/presentations <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

We're a Linux Kernel meetup group based in Tel Aviv, Israel. A new community (a few months old), our aim is to give people the opportunity to discuss their Linux work, listen to talks, recruit, get hired and generally feel like a part of a community that we felt was missing in the Israeli tech landscape.

Please check out our small SlideShare page. We hope the materials our speakers have produced will find wider appeal.</comment>


How to Correctly Tip Your Waiter - <AUTHOR> http://www.financeoholic.com/correct-way-tipping/ <comment><USER2> In the USA, up through the 1970s(?) the correct amount was said to be 10%. Then it was 15% for a while. Now it's 20%. I'd like to see a historical analysis of how that developed.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: tip based on subtotal, not including taxes. Else you just send [edit:extra] money to the IRS.

I wonder if the US will ever drop tips. Some other countries don't have tips, and they seem to rabidly love that. We have them and seem to rabidly love that as well. I wonder why both are so passionate about it, aside from the "I'm-used-to-it" factor.</comment>


The K-Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.kashflow.com/kteam/

<comment><USER2> Actually one of the more entertaining attempts at Accounting humour I've seen of late. (See: Sage and Boox Harlem shakes, oh the agony)

And this is coming from a competitor btw ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Crunch?

<comment><USER2> I don't pretend to anthropomorphise the entire company, (nor do my words represent the company's), but yes I hail from there.</comment></comment></comment>


A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight - <AUTHOR> http://blog.longnow.org/02019/01/29/the-26000-year-astronomical-monument-hidden-in-plain-sight/ <comment><USER2> Great article but I found this one easier to understand including quotes from the artist about how it works, [https://www.quora.com/At-the-Hoover-Dam-what- is-the-meaning-...](https://www.quora.com/At-the-Hoover-Dam-what-is-the- meaning-of-this-memorial-inlay-with-the-word-Alcyone)

For some reason the author doesn't even mention [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_(star)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_\(star\)) which is written into the map.

What better place to preserve a star map than an indestructible cement dam in the desert.

<comment><USER3> > What better place to preserve a star map than an indestructible cement dam > in the desert.

I'd suggest away from the base of a substantial cliff face might improve your preservation odds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always find articles interesting that are about how the sky would have looked at different points in time. For example, how the current constellations looked 10,000 years ago, or will look in the future. [https://www.wired.com/2015/03/gifs-show-constellations- trans...](https://www.wired.com/2015/03/gifs-show-constellations- transforming-150000-years)

<comment><USER5> Interesting indeed! I suppose this is a sound argument against astrology -- a few thousand years ago you'd be looking at a different sky, how can you have a well-defined set of astrological symbols when their respective skies are changing, albeit slowly.

<comment><USER6> Astrology does take the Earth's precession into account; as the vernal equinox precesses from one zodiac constellation to another every 2150 years, it becomes a different age. You might know the 60's song "Age of Aquarius"; that's what the song is referencing. (I'm not saying there's any validity to astrology, just pointing out an interesting connection.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I appreciate that this monument is in the northern hemisphere and so the discussion of Polaris is entirely appropriate. But still some universal statements are made which are simply false when we remember there is one half of the world that looks to _the other_ celestial centre in the night sky. One example:

> The reason we have historically paid so much attention to this celestial > center, or North Star, is because it is the star that stays put all through > the course of the night. Having this one fixed point in the sky is the > foundation of all celestial navigation.

The Polynesian navigators, who achieved amazing feats of open water navigation, managed to sail deep into the southern hemisphere (as far south as New Zealand) where Polaris is simply not ever visible. But they still practiced celestial navigation without this 'foundation'. [1] The European explorers, who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and through the Strait of Magellan and across the Southern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, also likewise had to do without this 'foundation'.

When you come from the southern hemisphere you notice this casual, unthinking "northern hemispherism" all the time.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigation_by_the_stars)

<comment><USER7> Emphasis on the Northern Hemisphere is not arbitrary. 90% of humans live there.

<comment><USER3> Emphasis is fine. What I am referring to is when people generalise things that are specific or local to the northern hemisphere onto the whole world.

<comment><USER7> At some point these just become exceptions. 10% of people are left-handed, but we don't constantly re-write all instructions for that small minority, and left-handers don't waste time constantly pointing out that right-handers are making overly broad generalizations.

No one reasonably interprets "Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation" to mean "All celestial navigation in all circumstances requires a view of Polaris". For instance, people still do celestial navigation in the Northern Hemisphere when Polaris is obscured by terrain. But no one would use that fact to point out that the author's statement was wrong, and that when you're from a low-latitude mountainous area you notice this "high-latitude/non-mountainous-ism" all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the very first sentence, I appreciate what I _think_ is an intentional use of _five_ digit year formatting.

The Long Now Foundation isn't getting caught with its pants down in an amateur Y10K bug!

"YYYYY" FTW

<comment><USER9> Disappointing that they would go for a 5 digit year, and not use the HE calendar, in which the current year is 12019

<comment><USER10> From Wikipedia:

"The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme"

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar)

To me, it seems a little redundant to add a fixed 10,000 even if t0 is "near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution". So, so me using 02019 is just as arbitrarily as good.

<comment><USER11> The reason for the 10000 years is to make explicit the real magnitud of our history, you would be surprised to learn the number of people that believe it all really started just 2000 years ago.

<comment><USER10> Aboriginal Australians have been documented from 50,000-60,000 [0]

[0] [https://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people- first...](https://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first-arrive- in-australia-100830)

When you begin to look into their stories (dreamtime) and the way they've always lived and more importantly, the way they have passed down information generation to generation, it's utterly remarkable. Yet this 10,000 value would belittle that rich living history imho.

Admittedly 10,000 years ago is roughly the Younger Dryas era, so yes, most history has been lost since before that time, but it _does_ exist nevertheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author mentions "axial precession" repeatedly without explaining it. 2/3 of the way down comes this gem:

> it is worth explaining what exactly axial precession is.

This kind of writing just irritates me.

<comment><USER13> i'm bothered a bit by the fact that in the cartoon animation the earth appears to rotate only two or three times during an entire 25,000+ year axial precession cycle.

<comment><USER14> I didn't know about axial precession and that visualization was what made it clear for me. Literally a picture that is worth hundreds, if not thousands, of words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. I like it.

The monument isn't 26000 years old, but the themes _are_ incredibly old. The astronomical alignments, mysterious guardian sphinxes. This does seem like a 1930s contribution to artsy ideas going back through bronze age Egypt, Mesopotamia and lots of other places.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow. I love the Art Deco style. My absolute favorite aesthetic right now, maybe ever. I haven't found anything I like more to be honest except Classical.

<comment><USER17> I was at the Hoover Dam recently, and I was struck by how Socialist Realist (read: Soviet) much of the original art looks:

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/GTQxcVtVKhgTURsG9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/GTQxcVtVKhgTURsG9)

My favorite structure is probably the improbably Star Wars/Tatooine flavored parking garage though!

<comment><USER18> That's how a lot of stuff from that era looked in the US. The roaring 20s and the bummer-30s had lots of stuff like that. Maybe you just have an incorrect mental 1:1 mapping between stuff popular 100 years ago everywhere and the Soviets?

<comment><USER19> Well, me, too. Apparently the Soviets adopted the blocky, "science is the progress of mankind toward a brighter future for you!" theme from us and used it so well, that I attribute such design elements to the Soviets exclusively.

<comment><USER20> Or maybe it was a global design language, that the Soviets just kept using longer and/or used more because they were building a _lot_ of things during the period of it's heyday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great article - a bit wordy - but great sleuthing. I've been the Hoover dam and it is pretty amazing to behold. Always nice to see that certain people will dig a little deeper and question their surroundings a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER22> I assumed this was some _really old_ , maybe Egyptian or African, site that was finally understood to be an astronomical map or something. I'm stunned that this is some kind of secret American history.

Makes we wish I could see Hoover Dam someday, a thing I have never had any desire to do before. But this is cool.

</comment><comment><USER23> That monument is so wonderfully art déco. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is wonderful. It's a brilliant way to mark the date, beautifully executed.

> The view that you really want to have of the plaza is directly from above. > You would need a crane to get this view of the real thing,

This is what drones were invented for. I'd love to see a picture of the whole clock.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice article. Some people, like Hansen, think outside the box into which many of us have placed ourselves.

<comment><USER26> people that like Hansen's work will probably be interested in James Turrell as well >> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Turrell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Turrell)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It wasn't well described, but do people really not get the idea that it's about astronomy somehow?

I'm was dissapointed that the statues seem to play no role at all, no nifty alignment of shadows seems like a wasted oportunity if you are making an astronomy monument.

<comment><USER28> They have an Ozymandias from _The Watchmen_ aesthetic to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When is Jeff Bezos going to finish the 10k clock?

</comment><comment><USER30> It is a 26k-year monument not a 26k-year-old monument. I clicked guessing that was a typo in the headline and was disappointed to be right.

<comment><USER31> Thanks! We've fixed the headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Title fix: delete "old". (The monument depicts a 26k-year cycle; it isn't 26k years old.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The article's title had 'old' in it at the time I posted, and I didn't notice. Looks like it's been edited since.

Mods: can you edit the title, as I no-longer can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Website could use some like half inch borders or something. That is painful to read and view.

<comment><USER34> Looks fine to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Funny - or sad, actually - how even The Long Now can't be bothered to run a website which will function without third party calls. Bootstrap, Fontawesome, Cloudfront, and Google are not necessarily expected to stay in business for the next 10.000 years.</comment>


Facebook making their own version of apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/07/official-facebook-version-of-scrabble-spells-doubt-for-scrabulous/

<comment><USER2> Actually, this is about EA/Hasbro making a Scrabulous competitor. "Facebook making their own version of apps" is even more misleading than the headline TC used.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the headline is outright false. I think that deserves a flag, since it's something the admins can fix.</comment></comment>


The Flexible Fuel Answer to OPEC | By "Turning Oil into Salt" author - WSJ - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=news&cd=1&ved=0CCIQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052748703806304576243010385191274.html%3Fmod%3Dgooglenews_wsj&ei=UM-cTeWPK4WO0QHg9MCpAg&usg=AFQjCNH0A2HCRtUGoefr08eI1DtaFyHcSw&sig2=wyIpvzwtWnhPKTYJHPV5OQ

<comment> mark-r The link ends up at a paywall. Sorry, can't be bothered.</comment>