You are entitled to your view but I think it is a little unempathetic to be unable or unwilling to put yourself in the shoes of entrepreneurs when the topic is how attractive a place is for them. Of course, all things being equal, a business wants to pay as little for labor as possible.
Speaking as a German, wrt pay I think this topic is not quite so simple. Germany doesn't have particularly high wages and one of the reasons for that is that labor costs are so high. How can that be? Simple: all labor protection that we have is, at end, simply a cost. Yes, we have payed sick leave. Very civilized. But German employees call out sick, on average, 11 days a years. That's almost two weeks pay for no labor. In a global, competitive labor market that cost isn't coming out of the profits of the company. It's coming out of our wages. And so it is with all the other "goodies" that we get.
Btw, our cohesion isn't really what it used to be either.
> You are entitled to your view but I think it is a little unempathetic to be unable or unwilling to put yourself in the shoes of entrepreneurs when the topic is how attractive a place is for them. Of course, all things being equal, a business wants to pay as little for labor as possible.
"Can someone think of the poor entrepreneurs? They just want to exploit workers freely, but the mean government keeps getting in the way. Why would they create rules that protect the people? This is so unfair"
Yeah, thanks for this run of the mill communist bullshit that doesn't have anything to do with what I said. "Oh yeah, pay for work is EXPLOITATION guys, guys, guys, the only ETHICAL way is for daddy government to force people to work at gun point".
There was no conceivable version of a road system where that behavior would ever be okay. However, it's not only conceivable but, apparently standard practice in systems programming, to "Try and Fail" instead of "Only Proceed if allowed".
So, if we want a tortured metaphor what JVM is doing is like trying to pass a turnstile to see if the pass is still valid so that on the happy path it saves the extra check. Now Apple decided that instead of just showing a red X and letting you buy a new pass, in the future you get shot in the back of the head if you try with an invalid pass.
One unstated rule is that you have to use all pieces. Number three can already be solved with two pieces and that also doesn't count. I strongly dislike this kind of puzzle.
The presentation is nice but the content of the puzzle put me off. I think if you suggest a physical puzzle by presenting it as a rolling ball then you should honor correct physical intuition such that a ball isn't going to turn left by itself as it does in puzzle three. I'm interested in testing my wit, and I am fine with losing, but I am not interested in just finding the correct way to clap like a seal for the puzzle designer.
> such that a ball isn't going to turn left by itself as it does in puzzle three.
I'm willing to deal with some trial and error with stuff like that, as long as it's predictable and cause-and-effect is consistent. What I'm not willing to deal with is what I'm seeing in puzzle seven. I have a crossroads with a U-turn to the north and a curve to the south. The ball enters the crossroads from the east and goes south. If I remove the northern U-turn (which the ball hadn't visited and was therefore useless), the ball now goes north (and into the void) instead of south to safety.
Then you have the obnoxiously loud music that can't be turned off separately from the sound effects (so you either have annoying music or no audio feedback at all), a condescending "keep trying" popup that treats every test as a failed attempt, slow animations that make for an annoyingly slow feedback loop on trying new things...
It's a really cool concept, fun presentation, but execution is all sorts of terrible. You could easily run a game design masterclass centered on fixing this thing.
Just assume that there is no goal other than closing all the paths. A tile that connects to empty space means you're wrong. A tile that connects to another tile means you're right. Any and all other "rules" will be changed as necessary to ensure that, if a solution is pretty, it's also correct.
I scratched my head for a while trying to find a configuration where the ball traversed that Y piece intuitively (entered the curve from the west, was reversed, and then exited the straight to the north) before giving up and trying the same "impossible" solution.
Maybe it's a tie-in to their presentation - perhaps they have a new model like Sora which has a poor understanding of physics. (This would explain why the ball starts flat and ends going uphill as well.)
Start, curve west to south, "Y" piece, curve north to east, curve west to north, reverse, back through the last two curves and the "Y" piece (unintuitively the ball will take the left to the finish).
There’s nothing wrong with it. That’s part of the fun of games – feeling smart and accomplished.
But it’s pretty clear and obvious (to a reasonable person) how the game works and you seem to want to just brag about how you’re clearly a better thinker and smarter than the game designer.
It's not clear at all and you can read comments here to find that out.
I don't know the game designer especially but what I actually think is that the system (ie org+people) that produced this puzzle is much smarter than I am. I just don't think the puzzle design is appealing and I gave an impersonal argument to that effect. You have a duty on this side to take comments in good faith. If I give you a factual argument about why I dislike a puzzle you don't just get to accuse me that it's really about intellectual girth.
a) for launch you want your rocket to be slender and tall. For a stable landing you want your vehicle to be broad and flat.
b) The engine is at the bottom (moon-wards), by definition. The fuel is above the engine. As you land, the fuel tank depletes significantly which shifts the center of mass towards the top of the vehicle which makes it less stable.
c) The lunar (mun-ar?) surface is really uneven and gravity is low. What you want to land is a steamroller but what you actually have is a springy, ultra-light, top-heavy contraption that's more likely to bounce off of then to flatten moon rocks.
> As you land, the fuel tank depletes significantly which shifts the center of mass towards the top of the vehicle
Genuinely asking because I think I might learn something: wouldn't a depleting fuel tank above the engines shift the center of mass toward the bottom of the vehicle?
Generally, a good spacecraft has the least amount of mass possible on fuel/engines as compared to payload (the useful part of a mission) which is why center of mass either migrates upward or stays mostly neutral.
I don't think this is right. My understanding is that the engine is typically the one of the heaviest dry parts of the vehicle and the fuel (at launch) the heaviest individual part overall. Especially nowadays since the electronics and sensors are tiny and antennae are lightweight.
This is especially the case with things like landers and geostationary satellites, where you want as much fuel as you can afford for station keeping, to keep the satellite operable for as long as possible.
Half of Nova-C's mass was fuel (~900kg), payload was 100kg. Starship's payload is ~100t, dry mass is ~150-200t but fuel mass is ~1200t.
It makes sense that the engines would be heavy and they are heavy on the launch vehicle. I am not sure how the ratios come out there but I'd still expect the fuel to, by far, take up most of the mass. Then engines for maneuvering in space and to land on the moon don't have to be very big. I looked up the figures for Apollo and found out the following:
"The Apollo's "lunar module descent engine" weighs a mere 180 KG vs the approx. 4200 KG of the rest of the craft (dry mass). Just the fuel for the descent is then roughly 8000 KG."
WRT b: surely using fuel that is above the engine will bring the centre of mass down, because the engine's mass is still there with less fuel mass above it?
Unless the rest of the vehicle's mass (all the other equipment, and crew if it is a manned mission) has more mass than the engine & landing apparatus of course, which I think (caveat: no deep thinking involved here) is likely for manned missions but less so for others? I'm assuming the mission mass is above the fuel (having the fuel on top would presumably be less safe/reliable/practical/other).
I could easily be wrong and I am very open to learning as what I wrote is just my intuition developed from playing KSP.
The Apollo's "lunar module descent engine" weighs a mere 180 KG vs the approx. 4200 KG of the rest of the craft (dry mass). Just the fuel for the descent is then roughly 8000 KG.
Obviously, landing on the moon is possible but I do think that the inherent requirement to have engine(s) and fuel tanks below the payload makes landing in a vacuum a bit of a challenge.
I'm fairly certain that the effect of point b is just a version of the pendulum rocket fallacy. There is actually no change in stability of a rocket in flight related to if the engines are on top or on the bottom because the tidal forces exerted by gravity are too negligible in that specific case and otherwise gravity is acting equally on the entire body.
Plus, since the engine is typically one of the heaviest parts , and the lander isn't a two-part design like Apollo, the fuel tanks are mostly empty upon landing, and therefore the center of mass is low due to the engine.
Edit: thanks to commenters for the reference to KSP. I had to ask Wikipedia what it is, and the first sentence is: "Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a space flight simulation video game developed by Mexican studio Squad".
Mexicans forgetting about Latin is even worse than native English speaker doing the same!
It wasn't a mistake. KSP takes place in a solar system that is similar, but not identical to our own, and the planet the the space center is on, Kerbin, has a moon, called Mun.
No, CM shifts toward the bottom, especially while the engine is thrusting and the craft is upright in lunar gravity. The liquid methane and O2 slosh toward the bottom of the tanks in those conditions.
I don't understand the word "we" in your comment. Obviously, some specific people do the actual work of caring for disabled people. Most people don't do that work.
The point of "Zivildienst" which translates to "civil service" as opposed to "Wehrdienst" "military service" was to make conscientious objectors contribute to society in-lieu of serving with a weapon. So, once you came of age you had to do one or the other.
I think within this previous paradigm of a citizen army, as opposed to the volunteer army of professional soldiers we have now, this was a good way to make sure you'd still have recruits while not forcing anyone into the military that really didn't want to be there.
I don't understand your motivation to type this many words in order to make, what amounts to, generic excuses (1) for people that take a huge chunk of your paycheck in order to balance the world on the knives edge of nuclear deterrence and somehow managing to fuck up the one thing that is the whole point of the exercise.
Mind you, I am not even taking a moral stance here, I am just saying that if we have nuclear weapons can we please not lower the bar on competency in their handling.
1) maybe the reasons you give are plausible but they are essentially based on no real information about what happened here
This was a real test. They have done this 192 times. It failed two times. The last two times. So it's not that this is inherently impossible, it's just that they can't do it anymore. I think, given the stakes, it's probably best not to just give them a pass.
Famously, the USN had the reverse problem with torpedoes in WW2: they worked in testing but were extremely unreliable in live situations, and it took a while before HQ believed that the problem was real.
With Trident, either there will be no live usage, or there will be no UK left to do anything about the failure of the second strike weapons.
> Famously, the USN had the reverse problem with torpedoes in WW2: they worked in testing but were extremely unreliable in live situations, and it took a while before HQ believed that the problem was real.
IIRC, this was a problem for Germany as well. It was the magnetic detonators on both sides .. ?
> With Trident, either there will be no live usage, or there will be no UK left to do anything about the failure of the second strike weapons.
.. in the event of trident failures, you mean. The third possibility is that they do work, and there still is no UK, but at least there is less of everyone. So fun to think about /s
well it's very easy for them to say that, right? Because they'll never have to prove this in detail to anyone that could hold them accountable because SECRETS and COMPLICATED TECHNOLOGY.
I am erring on the side of durability because I'm not really into new gimmicks but it's a daunting proposition to buy the "good stuff". A low stakes example is my Miele dishwasher that I bought when I was outraged at my previous Siemens/Bosch one breaking due to a very simple part that just can't be replaced because of the way the machine is (deliberately?) constructed. Just getting to that place can slice your hand open if you are not careful. So this is all just to say: I get it and I am in. BUT. There no reliable way for me to know that that if I pay 4x as much as that I'll get 4x as much durability. For all I know, my Miele could also break in a year and then what?
Speaking as a German, wrt pay I think this topic is not quite so simple. Germany doesn't have particularly high wages and one of the reasons for that is that labor costs are so high. How can that be? Simple: all labor protection that we have is, at end, simply a cost. Yes, we have payed sick leave. Very civilized. But German employees call out sick, on average, 11 days a years. That's almost two weeks pay for no labor. In a global, competitive labor market that cost isn't coming out of the profits of the company. It's coming out of our wages. And so it is with all the other "goodies" that we get.
Btw, our cohesion isn't really what it used to be either.