Then I think Costco has done its perfect job and exactly the goal the founder set out to create: Quality goods at affordable prices.

They optimize for those 2 things first. Consequently, everything else becomes a management of chaos (the part that stresses you out and thusly hate).

If they did try to make the experience better, it would cost them someplace. And honestly, you're just at whole foods at that point.

same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".

Currently, Elon is suing Altman because Altman turned it for profit. Oddly, in that Elon is taking the moral road?

This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.

That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?

But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.

For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.

> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.

And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.

Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.

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For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.

Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.

That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:

> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.

I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.

With Challenger, engineers said no-go.

With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.

So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.

No, because if you think about Startrek the endgame is replicators. Well the concept that 100% of basic needs are met.

At some point work becomes unnecessary for a society to function.

Being upfront, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Just some arm chair engineer.

The poster needed 6 parts which is JUST into annoying. My personal thoughts are what they need isn't dispensing but alignment. Thinking deeper I can agree that weight might not the most efficient here.

They're building the aligning and dispensing tool but I argue that's over engineering the problem. If it's aligned it's VERY easy to count 6 via a mark along the track and just push it to the end against your finger and based on the mark you know you have exactly 6.

To me the hardest part to make "just work" is the dispensing, but if you remove that it becomes a much easier problem. There's enough sales volume, you can make a vertical fixture that is a stack of fixed aligning tracks. Your fingers become the dispenser. Sweep and move to the next track.

Just random thoughts.

it's very easy to count <=5 visually, but if your package requires 12 nuts, repeatedly counting up to 12 is so stressful the poster built an entire counting machine.

This is a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is if the end user loses/breaks one. That part very well could be show stopper (Ikea 110630 anyone?). Now the end user is stuck - has to call, you have to ship, do you charge? do you give for free? they have to wait. they're annoyed, you're annoyed.

No one is happy.

The supply chain headaches for giving exact number of tiny parts is terribly expensive, relatively speaking. So you give spares because in the long run it's way cheaper.

This is how pretty much every IKEA, LEGO, etc works with very small, cheap parts.

End users benefit because it's easy to drop/lose/break one.

1. At a young age, you're taught to follow the rules.

2. "Someone's always watching". Lots of CCTV. Community reports.

3. Plenty of police who have the ability and time to investigate even the most petty things.

Trust in the system starts with 1 but is really carried day to day by 3.

I don't think it's possible.

> It's not zero knowledge for me then. Also - if there is ANY possibility to track anyone. And/or centrally mark someone "nonverified" then it makes more problems than solves.

> Even if I trust my govt (no way), even if it'd be fully ZK with no way to track anyone… still govt would have a way to just block some individual "because".

Is this even actually possible? If you want any sort of identity verification you HAVE to trust someone, whether age or full ID. Literally impossible.

Zero trust systems in society don't work. If you don't care "who" then yes, zero trust is just fine... but then what's the point of "age verification"?