Elon was long ago pushed out of OpenAI. But this is not important for the exceptional influence he had on the course of multiple industries. That he funded/cofounded OpenAI in the first place is crazy. Most industry leaders have one career, a few gifted talents hit multiple homeruns (Jobs with Apple, NextStep and Pixar, then Apple again), but Musk makes it seem like he plays a videogame for which he has cheat codes.
For the same reason all his endeavors can now crash and burn and it wouldn’t matter:
Tesla kickstarted the electric car revolution, but it is not on their shoulders to finish it. That Elon memed other car companies kicking & screaming into a future where e-cars are not anymore a mere novelty, but instead seen as inevitable, and we now have the technology and infrastructure in place (superchargers and more and more battery factories) to transition away from fossil fuels, this is the real legacy.
Similar SpaceX could be run into the ground and Elon still would have changed with it the space industry forever. Here is a quote from a recent Washington Post article (which complains that SpaceX is too successful):
SpaceX’s success in doing so has also opened the door for other commercial space companies. Without SpaceX, “I don’t think Rocket Lab would exist, to be honest with you, because they blazed the path that said space can be commercial and space is investable,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO.
You tried to argue that Blue Origin (or others) could leapfrog SpaceX, but in the (unlikely) case this happens this would not discredit Musk, instead this would be a triumph as his competitors would either not exist or wouldn’t be as good as without him.
On a technological level SpaceX did absolutely bonker things: Landing rockets? Landing rockets on a drone ship far away in the ocean? Using Methan as propellant? Using cheap steel? Proofing that the failed Soviet N1 concept is viable with modern tech (many inexpensive small engines instead of few big expensive engines), eliminating landing legs and instead trying to catch Starship?
Other rocket companies, Europe and China will have to copy them.
Thunderf00t is a pompous simpleton, don't believe his click bait.
It doesn't matter how much fuel a rocket uses, or if the rocket uses more fuel to be reusable, because fuel cost are negligible in the grand scheme of things.
The propellant cost of a Falcon 9 is around $300.000 for liquid oxygen and $200.000 for rocket grade kerosine (you also need to buy expensive Helium to pressurize tanks, there is a statement of Musk that this costs as much as oxygen).
https://spaceimpulse.com/2023/06/13/how-much-does-rocket-fuel-cost/
So propellant cost is well under a million dollars. Even the Space Shuttle only used a few millions (but the Shuttle project cost billions every year).
Fuel is nothing. SpaceX sells a launch for $67 million.
Sure, there is the cost for ground infrastructure, but this is a fixed cost and is proportional cheaper the more launches SpaceX does. We don't know the cost for refurbishment, but not throwing the engines away alone must be a big win. The last time the company took investor money was in January 2023 (750 million). Their cost of business/revenue is now guessed as over a dozen billions. This is not possible if they are not cashflow positive. I am unsure if they are profitable altogether because they invest so much in Starship, they are building another launch tower in Texas and two other Starship towers in Florida, but this is just building the machine which builds the thing.
I thought a bit more about it:
It is very easy to prove Elon Musk wrong, because almost everything he says or hypes up will not happen. Like his plan to build a prototype of Starship and have it 6 month later orbital, ugh, that was not only optimistic, that was hopelessly naive! Same es full driving I guess.
And he always makes the same mistake in taking zero buffer into account for problems or "unknown unknowns". He also primarily focuses on engineering challenges: is something against the laws of physics? No? Then it is possible and can be done super quick … or not, because he missed that there is a slow bureaucracy which has to approve it and permits have to be done and environmental reviews have to be studied etc etc. Musk has a big blind spot for politics and social stuff. If he were more clever, if he were a true evil genius, he would forge relationships and network with the (leftist) political elite. He would rub shoulders and finance AOC. He would charm and disarm his political opponents. Instead he shitposts on twitter when Biden didn't invite Tesla to the electric vehicle summit.
I personally don't believe I will see a Mars city in my lifetime (though hope dies last) and I think his Mars presentations should be seen psychologically as Elons "happy place". His castle in the sky which he can build in his imagination unimpeded by real life constraints. But in real life there will be astronomical hurdles, from the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever seen, to needing the US President being on board, to the UN not outlawing Mars colonization, to avoiding a veto by China, and what about public opinion and anti-billionaire sentiment etc etc.
BUT all this said:
SpaceX is on the cusp of making Starship working (next test flight 4 is planned in a week). Starship will enable a fuel depot in orbit. An orbital fuel depot will slash costs for the coming lunar base (which also sounds like a pipe dream, but will be built in the 2030s).
You linked to Destin from Smarter every day. There is a small cute twist here. Destin is a smart guy and does his homework, I bet he could recite by heart every size and dimension of the Apollo Eagle lander (especially as his grandfather worked for NASA). And he surely saw the graphics of the Starship HLS lander. If pressed he would have freely confessed that HLS is bigger and that this is nice and enables cool missions etc, but it wouldn't change his criticism much. Because this is factual knowledge. It is memorizing a few numbers and facts. This is not understanding.
Look what happens when Destin for the first time sees the mockup of the SpaceX rocket, feels the space, and imagines that this is really going to the Moon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiZd5yBWvYY&t=2719
NASA 42:25:
"Okay, so this semicircular here is a representative of the human landing system, the lander. etc etc"
Destin 46:25:
"And so when I looked at this ring, I was like, eh, it's a ring. You know, it's just a psychological representation of the diameter of that rocket."
"And then I was like, wait a second. That's a big rocket. And then I got excited. I started thinking about all the engineers designing things to go in there and, like, what it was going to look like in the end."
"And so I thought that was really interesting, and it took my mind to weird places, realizing that this is a lot bigger than what Neil and Buzz went to the moon in. And so this is the first moment that I got really excited."
Seeing is believing.
I would love to be proven wrong.
I don't know about cars or twitter, but SpaceX is killing it.
Starlink turned from a crazy moonshot to: A) being vital for Ukraines defense against Russia and essential for US national security (Starshield)
B) printing money
https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/
Starlink revenue increases from $4.2B in 2023 to $6.8B in 2024 (+63% YoY)
Your link is from 2021, and in the last 3 years SpaceX (despite or because of Elons panic) dealt with Starship not being available yet. It will hopefully decrease the cost (and enable larger satellites), but it is not necessary anymore for Starlink being a business. A Falcon 9 launch is as cheap as $20 million (or less) and boosters are now certified to fly 20 times (and they plan to double that).
The relatively short life time for satellites also won't be a problem, this is more to placate people afraid of Kessler-syndrome. For example Amazon Kuiper plans a life time of 7 years for their satellites. SpaceX can easily match that or go higher (propellant is a low amount of the satellite payload). They are still ramping up though and when it begins to be an issue in 5 years they will have Starship available. And if not, then they will launch triple the amount of Falcon 9. And in any case they will have better satellite version (faster speed, direct smartphone connections), so they have to replace older versions anyway.
Artemis is convoluted, but it is that way to make it "congress proof". NASA is very smart in partnering with other countries. The first non-American on the Moon will be a Japanese and Europe is building the Lunar Gateway, these foreign policy entanglement makes it impossible to cancel the project.
And if Starship and an orbital SpaceX fuel depot work, it can only accelerate future Artemis missions (maybe replace SLS).
If you want to bet against/for SpaceX there is a fun Subreddit:
Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
The alarming decline in Turkey’s birth rate comes against the backdrop of frequent calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who advises families to have at least three children to boost the country’s population, drawing the ire of feminist groups and women’s rights associations. He also advises “Muslim families” not to use birth control or family planning and opposes C-sections as well, angering the same organizations.
Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.
Blueberry
30d ago
even the new “black” national anthem
The what? I’m not American and don’t get the reference?
Blueberry
1mo ago
Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01990-8?fromPaywallRec=false
Global GDP is estimated to be 3.2% lower (lower/upper decile: 1.2–5.4%) at +1.5 °C of global warming, compared to a world with no further climate change beyond recent levels. At +3 °C, global GDP decreases by 10.0% (5.1–14.9%).
The damage of climate change, up to 10% of global GDP, is such an enormous sum that it is always cheaper to instead invest in carbon reduction and reduce climate change.
Of course all the same arguments and attitudes from before apply here: If one doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus in climate change why should one believe the financial modeling and projected costs of extreme weather events are correct?
Regarding the comparison and how to deal with uncertainty: I think one main difference is that vaccination was not needed for the survival of civilization. But renewable energy and electrification is needed in any case, sooner or later, because fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even under most optimistic calculations we have only 100-200 years of oil reserves left.
Blueberry
1mo ago
It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
Blueberry
1mo ago
The deniers are just coping or contrarians.
It is very easy:
A) CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
B) Industrialization increased its percentage in the atmosphere.
Preindustrial CO2 rate was under 300 parts per million.
2000 it was 370 ppm
2024 it reached 420 ppm
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
It is skewing to the last decades: half of the emmissions from 1750 to now were emitted in the last 30 years.
The amount of coal and oil we burned and will burn is stunningly large. A hundred times more every year than all vulcanism. HOW could that NOT have an effect?
The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.
Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/
When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.
It was noted by Jensen:
Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.
So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.
Blueberry
1mo ago
India is really interesting. I just looked up a map of rich/poor Indian states, but for example Tamil Nadu, which is shown as quite wealthy, has relatively low Brahmin but high Dalit demographics. I would have expected the reverse.
Blueberry
1mo ago
Yes, because their (now grown up) kids defend Allen & Soon Yi:
Whatever one can sneer at the marriage, it held better than many others. They will stay together until Woody dies.
Even with regard to Ronan Farrow
I bet good money that Allen doesn’t have any biological children. I subscribe to the Frank Sinatra’s theory.
That's a messed-up family dynamic.
True.
Blueberry
2mo ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
Blueberry
2mo ago
Eventually, my boyfriend and I decided we couldn’t carry on like this.
This was the most surprising thing in the text. If she lived there alone, ok, it is like boiling the frog and people can get accustomed to everything. But there has to be some social control going on, so this wasn't only her fault but that of her bf too.
Blueberry
2mo ago
"Moby Dick" is a novel by Herman Melville originally published in 1851 and its full text is protected by copyright law in most jurisdictions
So close by the AI, that it is strange that it misses. Explicitly reminding that this was 170 years ago persuades it to answer correctly.
Blueberry
4mo ago
I even think "cultured meat" will be a dead end and plant based substitution products will win:
https://www-merkur-de.translate.goog/verbraucher/als-vegan-variante-unternehmen-sieht-langfristige-entwicklung-ernaehrung-wurst-klassiker-jetzt-nur-noch-92781805.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
[German] Sausage manufacturer completely eliminates “classics” – and only produces vegan versions
“This shift in the range is not an effect that we are only seeing now in the current Veganuary, but rather a long-term development,” explains CEO Michael Hähnel of the decision. The proportion of the range has been shifting towards plant-based products for years.
Blueberry
4mo ago
sounds more like Wini, Widi, Wicky
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet …
Vici is related to victory. And the hard c=k is manly.
Blueberry
4mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
American Rocketry was very traditional (risk averse) and RP-1 was the save standard propellant everyone had experience with. Here is a paper from 2009, awfully recent, which states that methane was always considered in theory a great propellant, but in praxis no one did serious development work with methane:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576509000630
This changed in 2012 when SpaceX announced that Raptor would be methane-based. This gave other companies permission to research it too. BlueOrigin announced their methane-based BE-4 in 2014 (and actually they and the Chinese beat SpaceX to orbit with their methane-based engines). Bonkers was the wrong word for it, but it was always an exciting almost-sci-fi idea
There is currently an interesting bit about reusability on x. The context is a NYT article how difficult it is to compete with SpaceX.
Dan Piemont from the aerospace startup ABL wrote that he disagrees with the thrust of the article, he welcomes SpaceX success, but their cheap ride sharing on Falcon 9 does indeed make it difficult for his company. He shared as an outlook:
Elon Musk replied:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1796031244846645493
So to circle back, yes, we shouldn't assume that Starship is already a success. (Actually this is a nice example how Elon is not only hype, but also shares freely if something is not working or unexpectedly challenging.)
Edit:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/ars-live-caleb-henry-joins-us-to-discuss-the-profitability-of-starlink/
More options
Context Copy link