Wow, people can be corrupt in any system, shocking. So if they’re always going to be corrupt then it’s not blameshifting to talk about how the current system is allowing that corruption to flourish. The problem with unregulated Capitalism is that it concentrates fantastic wealth and power in the hands of a few unaccountable individuals and corporations. That’s not an error or a goof, that’s the entire design of the system. It allows the superwealthy and corporations to buy off the government at an industrial scale with no need to even be subtle about it.

I’m sorry, but capitalism will never love you, and white knighting it won’t make you rich. Stagnating wages while corporations report record profits, wealth concentrations that make feudal nobility look like a teenager with a piggy bank, a government solely concerned with keeping the rich rich and making them richer. This is unregulated capitalism working as intended.

We used to keep this shit in check, stopping mergers, breaking up monopolies, the super wealthy used to have a 90% tax bracket, etc. Problem is that around the time of the civil rights movement those in power, actual power, realized that they could use social issues to keep the people divided and rabidly tribalistic about their political parties while they robbed us blind. It worked. It’s not red vs blue, it’s green versus not, and you ain’t on the green side.

Problem is that once capitalists accumulate enough wealth it's just easier to buy the government.

They did exactly that, about 40 years ago.

Don't do that, don't give me hope.

MacDonald Douglas/Boeing’s original blended wing body BWB from the late 90’s early 00’s was toyed with but passengers hated it. Most of your passengers wind up in the middle of the plane, far from any windows. You’ve also got issues with trying to get everyone off the plane in an emergency. The FAA has some pretty stringent rules about how long you’ve got to do that. You could, in theory, turn the center of the plane into a giant cryo tank and seat people on the sides near the windows but… well you’re building a huge aircraft and then spending most of the volume on a giant thermos instead of things that make you money.

I’m about to be really dismissive but a huge part of being wealthy is getting very lucky with timing. You only know who Mark Cuban is because he sold off broadcast.com to Yahoo right before the dot com bubble burst. If he’d held out even a few more months he’d be managing a Wendy’s right now. Once you have a stupid amount of money it is incredibly difficult to not grow that pile of money because wealth compounds. Our society loves the Just World fallacy and if you’re rich that must mean you’re super smart or talented or deserve it in some way. How we’ve seen that’s clearly not the case. Elon Musk is currently imploding Twitter, Kevin O’Leary is Kevin O’Leary, in a lot of cases some terrible people got lucky and want to act like it was all their genius. Truth is they’re as stupid and greedy as anyone else.

It's not that you can't make a hydrogen powered aircraft, you can. The problem is that barring the government just straight up banning conventionally powered jets they won't be able to compete. It is just a physical fact that hydrogen’s energy density is awful and working with it is painful. Any aircraft running on hydrogen will either carry less cargo (people or stuff) or have significantly shorter range or some combo of both.

Greed. That's it, it's greed. Sequia, Kevin, all of them were just horny for money. SBF wasn't a great conman, amazing fraudster, or brilliant guru. When asked for time to look over financials their response was "Fuck off," they didn't let sequoia have seats on the board. They basically said take it or leave it and they were all so horny for money they took it, and Sam took them.

The underlying problem was more fraud than Ponzi. Basically people were putting money and coins into theirbFTX accounts. The money was just supposed to stay there. It didn't. SBF gave it to Alameda to gamble. Which is uh, SUPER illegal.

When the market went south they lost it all. Turns out most of what they had left was FTT tokens, their own token they just magic'd out of thin air and wash traded to get the value they needed. When people realized some of what was going on there was a run on FTX to withdraw money which required FTX to sell FTT by the truckload. FTT went to zero, and now FTX has nothing.

Don't worry though, Sam and his buddies siphoned millions directly out of FTX's accounts to buy houses and all kinds of things. Also super illegal.

Bitcoin is massively deflationary and that just freezes the money supply in the other direction.

Crypto bros are just gold bugs 2.0.

Because when it comes to its use as a fuel that is hydrogen’s only positive. The negatives include the collapse of global air travel back into the domain of the wealthy alone. Global air travel’s piece of the global warming pie is only about 3% which is not insignificant but it’s also not what’s killing our planet. You know what does have tremendous benefits, minimal if no downsides and even some upsides for consumers, and will have dramatically bigger GHG savings? Electrification of railways and vehicles, improving public transit, and transitioning to nuclear power.

Yeah, a 1,200 liter, 10,000 psi tank catastropic failure, I’m absolutely sure you’re right and that flying tin can will tank that like a boss. I'm sure there's absolutely no test footage of much, much smaller tanks turning the back end of cars into so much confetti.

It’s condescending because you don’t understand the fundamental reasons why aircraft are built the way they are, how hydrogen storage works, or just basic concepts but you speak authoritatively as if you do. Do you know why the tank in the 737’s wing is that shape? Because the slats and flaps and their equipment take up the leading and trailing edges of the wing. The fuel is contained in the long, rectangular structural box that runs down the center of the wing. That’s what I’m talking about, you don’t understand even the basics of how airplanes work. It’s got nothing to do with balance. 

And no, it couldn’t be used for cargo. Aside from the structural problems of opening that up enough to pack it full of bags which are just horrifying. Do you know how cold that space would be? I doubt passengers would be ok with having their bags frozen solid. Never mind the bag handling issues as you’ve gotta individually Jenga the bags into the wing every time you load it versus chucking it in the hold.

There is a reason about the only place hydrogen is regularly used as a fuel is rockets, and even that’s not universal. Could you build a hydrogen powered aircraft? Sure, but you’ll also see the cost of air travel increase dramatically. Like it or not, baring governments just outlawing conventional jets entirely in favor of hydrogen ones, no ones gonna buy them. 

First off, they’re loading those hydrogen tanks into the area the Dash 8 uses for cargo and it looks like a couple rows of seats to boot. They’re gonna lose even more seats because people aren’t going to be ok with a “no luggage” rule on their flight. Second, the normal range of a Dash 8 is two to nearly three times that. I know the three things airlines are always willing to give up on are cargo volume, passenger count, and range. Also, one conspicuous detail I didn’t see in the article is anyone asking the FAA if they’re ok with this idea and I just can’t help but think they might have a little tiny problem loading up six tanks into the back of a passenger plane, the failure of any of which will literally blow the aircraft in half.

It’s only strange if you have no clue how modern jetliners function, are built, or how hydrogen storage works. Fuel is stored in the wing because fuel is a liquid and can fill odd shapes that are inefficient for anything else. Wings are necessary for aircraft and by their construction have a lot of odd unusable space for cargo. They’re easy to use for fuel storage. Storing fuel in the wing structure is popular because it’s effectively weightless, you had to build the structure regardless. The work to turn them into fuel tanks is pretty trivial and largely what you’d have to do for a single purpose tank. Second, it frees up the fuselage for passengers and cargo, the stuff that makes money. Fuel storage in the fuselage is taking up space that you now can’t sell to make money. And no, there isn’t enough room in the wings for cylinder storage, at least not useful storage. The structure of the wings, the part that holds the fuel is made up of various box girders which are rectangular. The only pressure tanks you could fit in them would be many long, thin, incredibly wasteful tanks that add a lot of points of failure for not a lot of fuel storage.

Cryogenic hydrogen is just an ungodly pain in the ass to work with which is why every non-rocket utilization of hydrogen as a fuel uses pressurized gaseous hydrogen instead. First off the energy usage to create the hydrogen, then chilling it to just a few degrees above absolute zero, then trying to maintain it is just ridiculous.

As far as aircraft, the problem becomes insulation and boil off. The wings of a conventional commercial aircraft aren’t thick enough to store any significant amount of cryogenic hydrogen once you factor in insulation. Never mind trying to keep it chilled in what amounts to a giant radiator. That leaves the body of the aircraft which is, you know, where you put the people and the cargo. You’re losing a lot of your money making space filling it with fuel tank. Never mind the operational problems of cryogenic hydrogen, even the best tanks boil off hydrogen constantly, in flight, everywhere. Rockets can get away with it because they can constantly top off the tanks while they wait to launch then only operate for minutes. An airliner has to operate for hours, and might even be waiting to take off for hours. I’m just imagining a cryogenic airliner stuck on the tarmac in Dubai waiting to take off.

Just… ok… so, no. Rocket fuel tanks do not operate at anything like gaseous hydrogen tank pressures. Every rocket that uses hydrogen fuel is cryogenic, and they are all designed with pressure relief valves specifically so that as the hydrogen boils off the pressure is released. None of them are designed to operate at any significant pressure. Even then, while the actual structural component of the tank is thin, it’s covered in a lot of insulation to prevent the hydrogen from boiling off. Also rockets are designed to be loaded in a single direction, longitudinally and aircraft… aren’t.

Cryogenic hydrogen is just an ungodly pain in the ass to work with which is why every non-rocket utilization of hydrogen as a fuel uses pressurized gaseous hydrogen instead. 

>Carbon fibre, kevlar and other materiels are good for the job and weigh less than convential plane fuel tanks.

No, they don’t, because conventional plane fuel tanks are the structure of the wing. Never mind that they aren’t the right shape. Super high pressure storage containers are spheres or cylinders for a reason. Aircraft fuel tanks are long flat rectangles, just about the worst shape to make a pressure vessel out of.

Bingo, getting an engine to run on hydrogen isn’t astounding. The problem is how awful hydrogen is for storage. You’ve got basically two options, absurdly high pressure storage tanks, like 10,000 psi+, or cryogenically. Neither will work with existing aircraft. Commercial aircraft store most of their fuel in the wing structure. You cannot reinforce those structures enough for 10,000 psi storage of gaseous hydrogen, and I know the FAA wouldn’t approve of it. Similarly those structures cannot be retrofitted with adequate insulation to store cryogenic fuels, never mind cryogenic containers which will handle the flex of an aircraft wing without snapping. Which leaves filling up the cargo area with tanks, either high pressure or cryo, which both loses all your cargo space and is inefficient weight wise. And I’m pretty sure if you showed the FAA the plans to turn the entire cargo space of a 737 into a 10,000 psi storage tank they’d retroactively pull the airworthiness certificate of every plane you’ve ever built just on general principle. I’m not even sure if you went full cryo that you could get enough hydrogen onboard an airplane to do much more than short range domestic flights.