Blueberry
1yr ago
Biden congratulated Trump and invited him to the White House:
This happened hours before Kamala Harris concession speech. Which is starting right now in this second:
Blueberry
1yr ago
Yes. And Elon only has experience with high margin companies, or at least potentially high margins, and for which people want desperately to work with and are ok to burnout for, eg because they are a cool entry on the CV and stepping stone for a better job down the line, but I have less confidence he could turn around a boring company in a boring established industry, were people just want to have save job and retire in 20 years. And I am very sceptical he could reform a government bureaucracy.
Blueberry
1yr ago
What is the criticism of Silver? A few weeks/month ago when he said Trump was leading the liberals on X accused him of being a Thiel shill. But somehow the right also dislikes him?
What I got from reading the occasional tweet by him was complaining about "herding" and the polls showing the election as really close, but this is suspicious and probably means the polls are garbage.
Edit: Oh I see a bit of pushback which is discussed downthread.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Apparently Florida posts almost real-time data about who voted.
Why is Florida so efficient at counting votes? What do they actually do differently?
Blueberry
1yr ago
People often have a glowup after high school, Nate Silver had to wait until midlife crisis! He looks so much better with a beard and losing the dorky nerd style!
Blueberry
1yr ago
never come down
Regardless of politics I think this song was pure meme magic. The band (Brave Shores) hated that their song was taken and how hard it slapped.
But who would have thought that in 2024 Pets lives matter?
Blueberry
1yr ago
Today I learned that the Constitution does not explicitly require the speaker to be an incumbent member of the House of Representatives, although every speaker thus far has been.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Btw: Many countries ban polling before an election:
Blueberry
1yr ago
I wouldn’t put Tucker in that bin. He said he bought after the demon attack a bible to read it (very slowly in a year) but that he is not coming from a tradition of faith and dislikes pastors.
Blueberry
1yr ago
giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations.
Living in a European country with state financing of political parties, it is utterly alien to me to donate to political campaigns. I know it happens, but I would never do it (aren't you psychologically locked-in after donating to Trump/Harris?) and the amount of effort and time American politicians have to raise funds seem gross.
I looked up how UK does it and they actually harshly restrict political expenses:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/election-spending-regulated-uk
Each party can spend £54,010 for each constituency that they contest. A party that chooses to contest all 632 seats in Great Britain at the election will therefore be able to spend just over £34m.
A small proportion of spending at elections is conducted by third parties – groups like charities and trade unions that do not stand candidates of their own, but campaign for particular outcomes. … Several spending limits are then applied to registered campaigns.
If the UK (or Canada or Australia or whichever country) is better governed is debatable, at least theoretical raising funds could also be a useful signal in a democracy, but I wonder how an election cycle in the US would look like if Democrats/Republicans (and GreenParty/Libertarian) could only spend $100 Million each?
Blueberry
1yr ago
To be fair, the Mobile Launcher 2 tower is indeed mobile
That is … why? Couldn’t they have built a mobile transport, maybe with a simplified support pillar so the rocket can’t topple over, and then at the flame trench a launch tower as a static structure? That would have simplified the requirements for both.
are not a fledgling industry that needs a financial boost
SpaceX was much smaller 4 years ago in 2020. The year before they “only” had 13 launches, instead of the 100 launches per year now, and actually it was a struggle for them to finance Starlink and Starship at the same time and maybe this money would have accelerated both.
I am not arguing for subsidies, but we/they got a bit lucky that it still worked out ok.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Landing legs are heavy and any mass you lift up lowers payload. You also prevent damage from the engines (which are much more powerful than the Falcon 9 Merlin engine) blasting the surface and reflecting heat/shockwaves back to the ship.
https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942
He [Elon Musk] was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship’s booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
“Why don’t we try to use the tower to catch it?” he asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth. It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. “If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can’t launch the next rocket for a long time,” Bill Riley says. “But we agreed to study different ways to do it.”
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. “We have this tower, so why not try to use it?” After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. “Harlow, you’re on board with this plan,” he said. “So why don’t you be in charge of it?”
Blueberry
1yr ago
You are joking and the amount was zero, right? Because I think before Musk there was no monetization?
Blueberry
1yr ago
At least in 2016 they also had bots/provocateurs masquerading as legitimate users. And Russia just wanted to fan the flames, they played both sides from “gay rights to gun rights”.
WSJ 2017: Facebook Users Were Unwitting Targets of Russia-Backed Scheme
https://archive.ph/rZJBo
“Blacktivist,” an account that supported causes in the black community and used hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, frequently posted videos of police allegedly shooting unarmed black men.
The issues they targeted spanned the U.S. political and social spectrum, including religion, race, immigration, gun rights and gay rights. Facebook said the accounts were created by Russian entities to exploit tensions among Americans and interfere with U.S. elections.
NYT 2017: Purged Facebook Page Tied to the Kremlin Spread Anti-Immigrant Bile
https://archive.ph/kuS2E
Blueberry
1yr ago
a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.
Sure, I think this is a healthy perspective. But Russia, and China, trying to sow discord is an argument some make:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/russia-and-china-target-us-protests-on-social-media-294315
While these official social media accounts have not posted doctored images or false information, they have sowed divisive content — a strategy that Russia previously used during the 2017 Catalan referendum in Spain and the 2019 European Parliament election, according to previous analyses of social media activity by POLITICO. The goal, according to disinformation experts, is to foment distrust on both sides of the political spectrum rather than publishing easily identifiable fake social media posts.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612221082052
RT and Sputnik primarily produced negative coverage of the BLM movement, painting protestors as violent, or discussed the hypocrisy of racial justice in America. In contrast, newer media properties like In The NOW, Soapbox, and Redfish supported the BLM movement with clickbait-style videos highlighting racism in America.
Yes, the normal stupidity of bureaucracy.
But Secretary Buttigieg reacted to Elon Musk!
https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1842271678274928964
No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.
Musk reacted first aggressively, but after the call conciliatory:
Thanks for the call. Hopefully, we can resolve this soon
Maybe he overreacted? Let’s see what he posts tomorrow.
But I think “legitimate” could be a key word here. It is an emergency, business as usual shouldn’t apply, and they shouldn’t restrict the airspace in any way. It is not like aircraft/helicopters pilots are blind, they are not crashing into each other easily.
Edit:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842352252922843403
Problem has been resolved. Kudos to @SecretaryPete
Blueberry
1yr ago
Yes and no. I didn’t read the Musk biography by Isaacson, but I read last weekend the new book “Reentry” by Eric Berger about SpaceX from 2010 - 2022. There is also a prequel “Liftoff” about SpaceX early times. I can both recommend glowingly. He truly did build SpaceX from the ground up. He did know nothing about rockets so he learned everything he could and even Russian rocketry manuals! Since Twitter he became more absent though (which Berger counts as a big negative), first because he focuses so much on the business of the new company but also because he is addicted to tweets.
Anyway this is of lesser importance. Aquota point was that garbage in produces garbage out, and I think Musk is victim to that on X. Snarky soundbite discussions (or mastodon or thread) are rotting the brain of everyone not counterbalancing it with more deeper longform material.
I don’t know him, maybe I am unfair to him and he does have deep discussions with very important people in the Bay Area we could never even dream about reaching. He could just phone Nobel prize tier economists to invite them to dinner! Hire policy experts. Or ask any Senator about their opinions. But instead he shitposts when he is bored.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Here is the Cato institute proofing with many studies that Hispanics turned to the Dems because the local GOP was more and more anti-immigration. That pushed minorities away:
https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-blue
Hispanic voters were alienated from the GOP and welcomed by the Democratic Party during the fights over Proposition 187, Wilson’s reelection, and during a series of other propositions proposed in the mid-1990s. One way this shift occurred was by galvanizing Hispanic naturalization in response to the perceived GOP threat.
Here is Mother Jones saying that demography is destiny and the whites deserved it:
It’s that simple. Prop 187 probably cemented Hispanic support for Democrats, but that was about it. It was demographics and redistricting that really made the difference.
If you believe in the demographic theory of presidential elections, the same thing will happen nationally when the non-white vote reaches about 50 percent. Unfortunately, that’s still a decade or two away.
Blueberry
1yr ago
are there any heuristics
Look where past floods / natural disasters (blizzards, forrest fires, earthquakes) were?
There are services like this:
https://www.augurisk.com/risk/state/north-carolina/buncombe-county/37021
Good bet would be that insurances have the best models and risk assessments.
Yes, if there is no challenge one can master it often is just a hedonistic treadmill.
There were a few posts last month on Reddit about American Beauty, the 25 year old Oscar movie with Kevin Spacey, and how weird not only the movie but the past time now feels. Together with Office Space and Fight Club artists struggled to find something to rebel against. Cold War was won, war against terror didn’t start yet, economy was great, racism solved, the environment ostensibly protected, peak oil unknown, feminism a joke, and gayness widely accepted by enlightened centrism. So the only way was to attack the mundane boringness of a secure middle class existence.
This is Lester Burnham‘s House in which he lived in 1999 with a wife and daughter and got deeply unhappy:
https://filmoblivion.com/2019/01/15/american-beauty-1999/
Sept 2024 the U.S. housing deficit has increased according to Zillow to 4.5 million.
The TFR data shows what we (sadly) expect:
Total Fertility Rates, by Maternal Educational Attainment and Race and Hispanic Origin: United States, 2019
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105234/cdc_105234_DS1.pdf
Non diploma women have high TFR of 2.7
high school diploma have 2.05
Then it sinks further with lowest the bachelor degree holders having 1.2 TFR
And then a little bump up again for master degree 1.4 and doctorate degree 1.5 (still brutally below replacement)
I saw the argument that TFR is artificially a bit worse than in real life, because TFR is not catching yet that women are moving their child bearing years up. Similar bachelor degrees having lowest TFR does not mean that women with a bachelor are (in the end) worse than master women in family formation (eg because they earn less money), but can also be explained by that students who have a bachelor and also doing their master additionally are avoiding getting pregnant while still in University.
Just hearing this month old banger:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3BrCvZmSnKA
Was there now proof that they were eating the pets of people that live in Ohio?
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