Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.
There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.
This has been the case ever since the US committed to the space shuttle program before the vast majority* of Mottizens was even born. I once read a great series of posts (which a cursory internet search isn't turning up, alas) that criticized the space shuttle program in detail and backed it up with period documentation. It was pretty clear that while there were many who were enthusiastic about a shuttle for the wow! factor, from a simple physical and engineering standpoint it never made sense. Irrespective of the built-in limitations of gravity, space shuttle backers nevertheless pushed, and got, the largest version of the shuttle possible to the Nixon administration, thus wedding NASA to spending the majority of its budget on an ultra-high cost, ultra-low utility space plane. The choice is especially egregious since NASA's budget cuts in the 70s meant that committing to the space shuttle necessarily meant building out expensive new launch capability for the shuttle and abandoning the existing Apollo/Saturn V, which ironically could lift significantly more weight into space than the shuttle ever could. That the US continues to waste billions on launch tech based upon the shuttle's known to be inferior lift capability five decades after its inception and a decade plus after its official retirement, all while SpaceX has already achieved much better results at a fraction of the cost is just... chef's kiss.
You'd think so, but in fact the US has demonstrated that it can and will pursue dodgy technology with only marginally better potential than existing tech, if at all, and do so over and over again. What's especially impressive are the
ridiculously wasteful patronage programs"cost saving" programs that are so bad that we vow never to do them again... until generational memory decays enough to begin a fresh round of graft at the expense of the US taxpayer. Where's William Proxmire when we need him?*ISTR at least one Mottizen claiming to be a Baby Boomer
AI slop detected.
Are we going after ellipses now? Is nothing holy?
It stops being holy if it becomes an LLM-ism. Same with it's not X, it's Y.
The AI is doing us a favor by finding all the vapid, say-something-without-saying-anything phrases in writing and making them feel icky.
You do you, but for me... fuck that noise. I'm not going to change my writing style because LLMs use mannerisms I do, nor because it causes people to falsely think my writing was LLM generated. To me, doing that would be a weakness. IMO it's better to be your own person even if some think less of you for that.
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No way! Why should I change? They're the ones that suck!
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Be careful that you don't trip on the AIphemism treadmill.
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Those hopped-up search engines with extra steps can have my chef's kiss and my em dashes when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
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