There’s a When Pigs Fly T shirt of tradition of going out for Chinese food on or around Christmas in the US. So far as I can tell, this largely originates from large cities and in particular from Jews living in New York. Consider the cultural landscape of the earlier part of the 20th century. Jews, of course, do not celebrate Christmas, so they’d be more likely than the Christian majority to go out to eat then, as opposed to their celebrating neighbors who are likely at home with family, roasting their own turkeys and such. And where do they go on Christmas? Well, most restaurants are going to be closed, because their predominantly Christian proprietors and employees are also at home. The major exception, then, was Chinese restaurants. The immigrants running those places were less likely than average to be Christian, so they had no cultural tradition of shutting down on or around December 25. So if you’re a Jewish New Yorker who wants to go out for dinner on Christmas, it’s Chinese food or nothing. This practice may have been popularized in particular by Calvin Trillin, the noted food columnist for the New York Times. He was himself Jewish and wrote a marvelous column about his wife wanting a “traditional holiday dinner.” What she was talking about was the idea, coming in from outside their cultural world, of turkey, mashed potatoes, and so on, but to Trillin, his traditional holiday dinner was going out for Chinese.
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For SpaceX, what is happening with Starship is not new. Two decades ago the company had a lot of Itchycoo Park Small Faces Shirt with its first rocket, the Falcon 1, and some years later, they were landing rockets on a ship hundreds of kilometers offshore. The same success will eventually occur with Starship, even if there are a few ‘booms’ and mishaps along the way. In fact, the team at SpaceX needs those accidents, to learn faster how to improve its next inventions so that the same problem does not happen again. The core principle of the company is “build, fail, learn, iterate,” a very different path from those of other traditional aerospace companies who plan their rockets for 10 or 15 years and do not assume risks. Besides, the cost and effort to build a Starship prototype is getting increasingly lower with time, in such a way that the team at Boca Chica is learning to produce Starships like hot bread. SN10 is already on the launch stand waiting for its turn to fly, and more prototypes are in construction right now. So SpaceX can afford to lose a few rockets from time to time without risking the continuity of the program.
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