domain:streamable.com
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Colonization is very very expensive and the kind of groups that would take that deal are not very popular.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration.
This is your brain on relentless negative partisanship. "The enemy is agreeing with me!?! It must be a trap!!!"
Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties? Many issues aren't black and white, where one party supports 0 and the other party supports infinity. If both sides support some finite number, with one side's number simply being less than the other side's, then there's no contradiction if the status quo's number is far higher than what both would prefer, that both sides would agree to bring it down. For a more pessimistic take, it's possible that the side supporting a higher amount realizes that the status quo is too high and is thus costing them politically. In other words, they might prefer the status quo if they could have it for free, but they judge that the ongoing cost isn't worthwhile. That's what was going on back in February with the compromise deal. It's how the Democrats got to supporting much more stringent immigration restrictions without supporting any sort of amnesty, which had been a feature of basically every immigration compromise prior.
The resurrected bill could be another attempt by Democrats to defray the costs, or it could simply be grandstanding if they know Republicans will shoot it down again. Then they can say they tried to crack down on the border multiple times but Republicans (Trump) wouldn't let them.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
The brilliant innovation was in Azure and especially Office 365, in leveraging their dominance in Office desktop application software to provide a superior and indispensable cloud-based service even as desktops starting becoming less relevant. This made them well-positioned to tax not just computer industry growth, but some fraction of all economic growth, basically the new IBM.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
How many people absolutely need to low latencies
It's not about need, it's about want, and even when it is about need HughesNet can't meet the need and paying $100 a month for Starlink sounds a hell of a lot better than your suggestion of... buying a different house in a less rural location?
I don't know how things are in the US
Clearly. Look up population density for the US compared to most European countries and you'll understand, maybe. You also might understand (one of the many reasons) why public transit in the US is so much more difficult.
durdenhobbes
1hr ago
Early pioneers would become historical legends, for one.
FeepingCreature
1hr ago
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
I could be very wrong about this, but as I understand it, Falcon Heavy is designed for high-mass launches. F9 launches are usually volume limited; being able to put more Starlink sats in orbit won't help you if you physically cannot fit more of them in the fairing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Definitely a chicken and the egg problem. Winners are gonna win, and they often do winner stuff (i.e. McKinsey, Harvard MBA) even when they don't necessarily need it.
A lot of my dyspeptic feedback here is derived from a deep hatred for the PMC types who come out of these kind of backgrounds. It's not that everyone from McKinsey is bad. In fact, I'd say that most aren't. But there is an often over-represented few who collect all the merit badges (Ivy education, McKinsey, maybe a stint in government) and sort of skip-level-up to real positions of influence ... to totally shit the bed when it matters. My current poster child for this is one Tony Blinken.
I don't care if a bunch of McKinsey dudes get together, raise capital, and then set that cash on fire trying to do Uber for Cats or whatever. I do care when they somehow get hired at an already growing company (or an established one) and then try to continue to coast on buzzwords and handshakeful-ness while failing to lead and make decisions. They'll probably end up failing upwards to do it all again. This is the true curse of the PMC. They are parasites who often face little to no consequences while those they "manage" can experience real career setback and failure.
Private Equity types have, at least, a very cut and dry success rubric. They often are also more transparent with who they are and what they're trying to do. PE as a career is much more results oriented and its hard to coast by with just the right merit badges.
Somewhere at McKinsey, however, the person who was flying high on the DEI accounts for the past several years is now "strategically pivoting" to a role as an "expert" in AI ... or AI ethics / alignment / effective altru-shitism. And that is a $500k / yr parasite.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
True, and I think that's because some his unique set of skills include ruthless business sense something that nerds are generally lousy at and/or lack experience with.
roystgnr
1hr ago
There's at least a half dozen Chinese companies (plus their government) working on reusable orbital rocket boosters, hopefully to be operational within the next couple years for some, but AFAIK none of them are beyond hop tests yet.
MollieTheMare
1hr ago
If people want to use the prevalence of top level female chess players as evidence for something, it probably is worth being somewhat familiar with the literature around it though.
Very roughly, the most common arguments around the the gap follow this 2008 paper, looking at the German federation. There they argue that participation fully explains the gap at the top level, though they don't really argue if the participation rate itself caused by self selection on ability, preference, social pressure, etc. There is a 2010 rebuttal arguing (probably correctly) that modeling Elo with a normal is flawed.
There was a brief resurgence of this genre when The Queen's Gambit miniseries was released, of which the chessbase article is frequently refereed to. Curiously India appears to be the exception, as subsequent analysis on multiple federations reveals.
From these I conclude that:
- The Polgars are truely exceptional
- Part of the top level performance gap is caused by participation rate, which itself is not really explained. My speculative view is that women are more attracted and/or a funneled towards pursuits that are higher EV (In dollars, utilitons, social good, etc.). As the old Morphy quote goes "The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
- Probably there remains some residual gap, though smaller in magnitude than the apparent gap, between the top female and male players. I will equivocate, and not even speculate on the reason for this.
It is probably worth being prepared for the participation rate argument though, since it is the natural rebuttal to references to the composition of top level players as evidence of inherent weakness.
Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
As of today, a state is currently set to only have one of the two major parties candidates for President on the ballot, but it's not the one you might expect.
Ohio law requires that presidential candidates be certified – that is, the state must be notified that presidential candidates have been officially nominated – 90 days before the general election in order to get on the ballot. That is the earliest deadline of any state.
But the Democratic National Convention that will formally nominate Biden won’t open until nearly two weeks after Ohio’s Aug. 7 deadline. The Republican National Convention will wrap up nearly three weeks before the deadline, so Donald Trump won’t have a problem getting on the ballot...
Ohio laws generally take effect 90 days after passage. So a change to the deadline had to pass by May 9, but the Legislature wound up doing nothing.
To be fair, this law has existed since 2010, albeit with a couple past temporary exceptions (probably a compromise number downstream of a 2006 court case over a third-party candidate 120-day deadline; see references to Blackwell and progeny here). and the Ohio legislature (majority Republican) has done nothing less out of explicit desire to screw over democracy and more because the Ohio GOP's House and Senate are fighting each other, and a GOP interest in getting some sort of Red Tribe value out of it (the closest bill, HB114, also bans some foreign contributions to ballot initiatives, for about the reasons you'd expect). DeWine, the (Republican) governor, is pressing pretty hard to find some sort of solution, whether that ends up an emergency legislative fix, hoping the courts can and will step in, or a more dubious executive branch intervention. And it's not like there's any plausible situation where Ohio would be the turning point for the 2024 election.
((There's some theories that Ohio Dems are trying to bolster Sherrod Brown's chances, though I don't think that's very likely or even particularly coherent.))
To be less charitable, nice motive, still excluding a major political party from the ballot. It's not going to be doing any wonders for society, and as we get closer to the election, the available options, whether taken or merely proposed, will only make the mess clearer. The current planned resolution looks to be a 'virtual Democratic National Convention call'](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/28/democratic-party-joe-biden-ohio-ballot-deadline/73879665007/), officially nominating Biden before the actual Chicago disaster convention. Hopefully, that's enough of an excuse for the Ohio legislative special session to also clean things up, but more likely the virtual call gets counted as close enough for Ohio law (less optimistically, it leaves no one able to challenge it). But the whole thing has just been a parade of one group after another absolutely certain that someone else will fix the problem that they're rolling directly into, and 'it wasn't my fault' is an awful epitaph.
Fauci et All Foiling FOIA
One email refers to a “private gmail” supposedly used by Fauci. Morens also referred others to a “secret back channel” for communicating about certain issues. He also frequently directed others to message him on his personal Gmail account to avoid FOIA requests. Morens also noted he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d.” That individual, who he identified as Marg Moore, “also hates FOIAs.”
The emails also reveal Morens made a series of crude comments about women, female coworkers and his drinking habits which indicate he “is not qualified to hold a position of public trust,” the committee wrote. Morens testified to the subcommittee Wednesday that he didn't remember if he used a personal email to conduct government business, but conceded it was "wrong" if he did so.
None of this is particularly surprising, from a cynic's perspective -- government employees fucking with FOIA requirements is a day ending in Y. There's a steelman where certain scientists involved in climate change research were getting spammed with so many duplicative FOIA requests that it edged on harassment, though given neither Morens nor Fauci every worked in environmental stuff that that's leafspring-grade steel.
There's no serious chance of serious punishment, here: Morens was already investigated and found not guilty of anything that the NIH cared about, and if anyone has problems with him lying to Congress, well, there's some fun legal realism questions about whether the law is the statute or the enforcement, but the enforcement still comes from one place.
On the other hand, it does seem enough to have pissed off no small number of partisans aligned to that One Place, if, cynically, more in the sense that Morens et all got caught. HHS is at least moving against EcoHealth Alliance. If you were to ask what one would consider a good sign, well, there's certainly end results that could point to people taking this seriously.
Title VII Religious Freedom in California
Another day, another VanDyke dissent:
In its stubborn insistence on ruling against Chief Hittle, the panel has twisted the record into knots and badly misstated Title VII law. Its decision (1) abdicates its responsibility to read the record in the light most favorable to Hittle at the summary judgment stage; (2) allows employers to escape liability for repeating discriminatory remarks simply by hiding behind those who say them first; and (3) mangles Title VII’s “motivating factor” analysis.
Perhaps most glaringly, its original opinion also incorrectly heightened the showing a plaintiff is required to make to demonstrate disparate treatment. In the panel’s view, Hittle bore the burden of showing that the City’s discriminatory conduct was “motivated by religious hostility,” notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s admonition that such a plaintiff need only show he was “intentionally treat[ed] … worse because of” a protected characteristic, Bostock v. Clayton County.
Recognizing at least this last mistake, the panel’s amended opinion retires its former use of the word “hostility,” replacing it with the more accurate (but less specific) “discriminatory animus.” Not only do those changes not fully fix the original opinion’s legal errors, but they also put the panel, which apparently remains as determined as ever to rule against Hittle, in a pickle.
Notwithstanding its many other errors, the original opinion correctly acknowledged that the “gravamen” of the “notice terminating Hittle was the religious nature of the leadership event.” But if attendance at a religious event was the “gravamen” of the firing and Hittle need only show that he was “intentionally treat[ed] … worse because of” religion, Bostock, 590 U.S. at 658, it would seem the panel would have no choice but to reverse its previous decision in favor of the City.
But it won’t.
We've had discussions here about a more expansive framework for discrimination, but this seems the punchline. Title VII has prohibited religious discrimination in hiring and firing of employees for sixty years, and while the exact borders of the doctrine have ebbed and flowed from one jurisdiction to the next, or as courts have pushed at the very edges, trying to bring them to these style of cases has been an expensive shitshow, where even the lucky winners spend decades for minimal defenses. Even defining this class of cases is a mess: I want to say discrimination against the 'majority' (but anti-woman discrimination is clearly covered!), or 'non-subaltern' (but trite agnosticism is protected, he says as a trite agnostic), rather than just Groups Progressives Want To Discriminate Against, and that's kinda the problem.
However, that punchline's also a bit of a repeat: not just that VanDyke is writing his dissent at an en banc appeal that had no chance of victory, or that the original opinion had to be edited to not be hilariously wrong, but that Kennedy went to and was decided by SCOTUS almost a year before the original appeal decision came from the 9th Circuit. The facts in Hittle are different, sure -- Stockton alleges, not very credibly, that they 'really' fired Hittle for endorsing a consulting business and for not disclosing closeness to a union president -- but the courts were (supposedly) not yet deciding facts, but merely the motion for summary judgement.
Instead of motions for summary judgement focusing on questions of law, various balancing tests and excuses can fall into play where judges don't like the plaintiff's perspective. Instead of protecting Hittle against employers that were outraged by his place 'Christian coalition', the law in California now holds that there is a "legitimate concern that the City could violate constitutional prohibitions and face liability if it is seen to engage in favoritism with certain employees because they happen to be members of a particular religion." Sure, that anti-endorsement test had been explicitly rejected contemporaneously to and previously by SCOTUS, but SCOTUS "can't catch 'em all", and increasingly doesn't seem interested in trying.
That failure mode isn't and wasn't inevitable: despite my expectations, Fulton hasn't come back to the courts (yet). But it's a problem that haunts any attempt at legislative or executive branch 'fixes'.
((At a more concrete level, Hittle was fired in October 2011, at a time where he was nearing age 50. The unusual length of the court case here reflects Stockton's bankruptcy rather than overt malfeasance specific to him, but it still means he's in his mid-60s today. Even should, SCOTUS hear this case, overturn it, remand with direct instructions, no further interlocutory appeals or weirdness occur, and the trial occur speedily, he might see a court room on the facts before he self-moots by old age, but probably not before he sees his 70th birthday.))
An Appeal to Heaven
Compare February and to May. Diff, context. Also see here, and here.
The Cloud is Someone Else's (Broken) Computer
Unisuper is an Australian superannuation fund, which is close enough to a psuedo-mandatory version of American retirement funds. AshLael might know the more specific differences. It has 600k members, about one in fifty Australians, with over 125 billion AUD (~88 billion USD) funds under management. It also fell off the internet on May 5th, only restoring full functionality May 20th, allegedly as a result of a 'one-in-a-million' bug in Google Cloud services dropping both the main Unisuper database and all Google Cloud backups.
UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies.
Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.
This is a little weird, and not just for having an actual benefit from multicloud. Google Cloud Platform doesn't have the best reputation, but 'keeping multiple copies of long-standing data' is one of those things cloud providers are supposed to excel at, and having first disclosure come through the client rather than the cloud provider is a decision that Google Cloud didn't have to make. There are even arguments, a la Patio11-style, that part of what a client Unisuper's size is buying from a cloud provider is to have a name to fall on a sword. This has lead to no small number of people reading tea leaves to conclude that the fault 'really' reflected an error by Unisuper (or a separate smaller contractor) making a configuration mistake. Unisuper was migrating from VMWare, which has its own mess, and is exactly the sort of situation you would see greater vulnerability to client developer error. That still wouldn't be great for Google, since most cloud providers at that scale claim a lot of safety checks and emergency backups, but I could understand if they just failed to idiot-proof every service.
Nope :
During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.
We probably won't get a full breakdown until the Aussie regulatory agency finishes an investigation (if then), so there may always be more to the story, and a lot of fun questions about what, if any, data was out-of-date or lost from the backup. But this is pretty damning for Google, as things stand.
On one hand, this probably is a one-in-a-million bug, and readily closed. On the other hand, as anyone with network engineering or statistics or X-Com background can tell you, one-in-a-million means a lot less than the naive expectation, and Google Cloud Platform has an estimated just under a half-million business customers, and this is an embarrassing bug.
Does that mean that they're got it out of their system for another million customers? Or that this is just the first time it happened and was big enough a deal to make the news?
((Okay, the real answer is I'm being pedantic and reading too much out of a turn of phrase.))
The bigger problem is that Cloud has long been sold as The Professionals Doing It Right. That was always a little more true at the margins than the center. As bad as rando small businesses trying to maintain a Gitlab instance can get (and it can get bad: even by web software standards, it's a masochist's tool), no small number of seemingly-legit smaller cloud providers have gone belly up, wildly revised their offerings, or just plain disappeared. It's quite possible that Unisuper moved to Google Cloud in part because the Broadcom buyout of VMWare (only finalized in December 2023, but after 18 months of regulatory review) raised concerns that they'd start lopping down product offerings.
(But to move to Google?)
It's increasingly tenuous, here, though. Unisuper are not fresh college grads confused by the difference between a RAID and a backup, but a massive company that maintains many sites as a matter of course. Google is one of the Big Three when it comes to cloud provisioning. One can imagine counterfactuals where a self-run or classically-hosted Unisuper herped the derp, but the factual here makes them look like the competent ones. And that's not alone.
Which would be one thing if Unisuper were the only people pressed into cloud services.
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses.
Yes! I wanted to bring it up in this comment but it ended up slipping my mind. This discussion is useful in figuring out where Elon's strengths and weaknesses are. Like you said, from the replies it seems like Falcon 9 and Starlink are his strong points.
Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so
Well, the only "short" I'd urge people to do is to avoid falling on any swords for the guy. He (rightfully) won a lot of goodwill with his takeover of Twitter, but I'm worried people are too defensive of him. It might all be very silly in the end, I doubt preventing the establishment to have a gotcha on the contrarians will work, even if it's achievable... but, I dunno, I feel like this will end up being a pretty big egg on some people's faces.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
First, your premises are wrong. Each prototype Starship launch almost certainly doesn't cost $1 billion. Per SpaceX, the whole development program is expected not to exceed 10 billion dollars. Estimates of the production cost of the Raptor engine is about $250000 each, so round that up to 50 engines per flight, double and you're still at only about $25 million. The rest of the ship is made out of relatively inexpensive stainless steel coil sheet, and the thermal tiles are made in-house. $250 million would be a liberal estimate, and more conservative estimates are about $100 million per launch.
Second, there is no desire to just rake the cash in. As with Amazon, the goal of SpaceX is to rake in cash for the purpose of further development, so as to obtain a position that is not just nearly unassailable by competitors, but creates a completely new market. And of course, Musk, as the controlling owner of the company, has goals for the company that do require Starship, which is capable of orbiting more than 100 metric tons of payload per launch, such as establishing a continuous presence on Mars. This requires lots of bulk mass, which only Starship could possibly deliver. One reason it was selected for HLS despite the development work needed is because you'd be landing not just a small landing craft on every mission, but what amounts to an entire base.
SpaceX has been quite explicit that the goal with Starship is to completely cannibalize Falcon 9 launches, and to eventually discontinue Falcon 9 altogether, as they expect a fully reusable Starship launch cycle (even expending $1 million in propellant per launch) to cost less not just per kilogram but per launch than Falcon 9 which does requires a new upper stage for each launch. (Though I think Falcon 9 + Dragon will remain the preferred human launch system to LEO for longer, unless some kind of Starship transporter with more robust abort modes is developed.)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Everything Musk does depends on the government being fairly friendly. The government is the big customer for SpaceX and Starlink (note that the FCC cut off some grant funds recently). The government is behind a lot of the push for electric cars and solar energy (both Tesla). The Boring Company would make its money from government if it ever made any. Twitter doesn't depend on the government but he makes no money from it thanks to the Left, Inc. boycott. This kinda leaves him in a tough spot -- he depends on government friendliness but he and the Democrats have a somewhat hostile relationship and they are willing to punish him for it. The Republicans, on the other hand, are less likely to push for electric cars and solar energy, though they're fine for SpaceX.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1hr ago
This is why I think he is so valuable - he has both the vision to see openings for large progress, and the ambition to make an honest try.
I'd also point out that he has the capital, not as a knock in the false 'inherited from his dad's emerald mine' vein, but in that I bet I could find plenty of nerds with the same phenotype (obsession with engineering/science, poor social skills, visions of grandeur) but without the cash. Hell, just wander around the labs at MIT and screen out anyone who looks well put-together and has any kind of connection to VCs/business in their CVs and I bet you'd be able to find a couple Musks.
Maybe the drive/aggression and obsession with details are a bit harder to replicate...
sliders1234
1hr ago
Not founding Tesla is a technical difference without a real difference. The company was an idea before him with I believe no revenue but maybe they sold some hand build cars. And now does $100 billion in revenue. Warren Buffett didn’t found Berkshire Hathaway. It was a shell company with a cheap asset or two he completely build and revolutionized. In a meaningful use of the word he created Tesla.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
I forget who said it, but some Carl Sagan type science communicator/futurist predicted that whoever mines the first asteroid will be Earth's first trillionaire.
You know what, a quick google later, and it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Make of that what you will.
sliders1234
1hr ago
I’ve personally thought Tesla was overvalued for a while.
But even if you just use reasonable valuations like 2x sales or a 10 pe and give little value to breakthrough tech then Tesla is still a $150-200 billion company. He has $95 billion in trailing sales. That is still a huge accomplishment and something no one else has done in physical tech. This is why I feel like your arguments are like holocaust deniers. Maybe 6 million Jews didn’t die in the Holocaust but 1-2 million is still a lot. Same thing with SpaceX maybe he doesn’t put us on Mars, but as others have said it’s verifiable he’s lowered the price of putting a kg in space by 10x after essentially no improvement in decades. It just has the same feel of maybe this detail is a lie, but if you take away all the exaggerations the verifiable bottom in accomplishments is still extreme.
If the hype is all fake then it’s like he’s only Ken Griffin level accomplishment. Not a messiah but easily in the top 10 innovators of my lifetime. He wouldn’t be Tom Brady only Ben Roethlisberger.
For the record I’ve never owned a Musks investment. I have been short Musks before.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It is!
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
I think quite the opposite – if you get the cost low enough, sending stuff to space becomes a high school science project and everyone wants to do it. Lots of amateur CubeSats in this vein.
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
Maybe you're right. To clarify, your position is that Starship will never make a successful orbital payload delivery? Or that it will never land successfully?
The bets I placed are on the former, and I admit that it's not impossible I will end up losing it. Fire-and-forget is a lot easier, after all, but I don't think Starship development is going well.
Right now they can't, can they? New Glenn is having its own developmental issues
Hence, why I brought up EscaPADE. If they pull it off, that might trigger questions and concerns from SpaceX investors and clients.
dr_analog
razorboy
1hr ago
Hasn't China developed reusable rocket tech? ( despite not owning a single emerald mine!)
Not that I would expect the CCP to be awesome with allocating capital, but if you assume they're not completely incompetent then it would blow up the theory that SpaceX can't possibly gain economic advantage from it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
On the contrary, I don't think anything Musk has really accomplished rises to the level of the iPhone, which is, so far, the defining innovation of the 21st century.
In magnitude, surely. In terms of positive outcome, that seems pretty questionable.
czr
1hr ago
Elon Musk didn't found Tesla. Electric cars existed long before him. Satellite internet has been around for a long time before him (though I will admit his has better performance). Him backing OpenAI is cool, but it could also be counted as a miss. I bet he wishes he were at the helm instead of sama.
On the contrary, I don't think anything Musk has really accomplished rises to the level of the iPhone, which is, so far, the defining innovation of the 21st century.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
seems like there's no reason humans WOULDN'T push out into space as far as they possibly can if the cost of doing so was brought within reason.
As a thought experiment, I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony. I grew up watching Star Trek, so I like the idea, I just can't really reasonably picture people of 2024 electing to go live their lives in such confined quarters. What are we missing to make that palatable, or am I just not the target audience? Maybe "fully automated", but we can't even deliver that terrestrially.
The reasons previous generations packed up and left their homelands are pretty well documented: religion, economics, escaping conflicts, and such. I don't see as clean a mapping there into moving into space, but I'm curious to hear ideas. Are we waiting for a cult explicitly based on sending it's followers to live in the Promised Land Sea of Tranquility?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Even without Starship, there is no other company that can hope to do anything like those numbers anytime soon.
Ok, why the push for Starship then? My contention is that Starship is one of the galaxy-brained promises Elon will never deliver on, and that this will be the end of him. If Falcon 9 is more than enough for them to rake the cash in, why not just rake the cash in, instead of blowing $1 billion on every rocket that goes boom?
Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.
There's some subset of the population who have a different (arguably, defective?) risk calculus/tolerance when it comes to tackling new frontiers. It seems likely that >1% of the population is willing to sign on for such a trip with relatively dubious reward.
The tricky part, from my view, is that we'd need some of the best, brightest, and most adaptable, and they might be in shorter supply.
The cheap and easy answer is to what would motivate such action is to assume we send automated drones ahead to make things habitable and reasonably pleasant before the average biological human travels there.
In my mind, a probable option is the creation of O'Neil cylinders that are very directly optimized for some particularized environment which would make them extremely appealing for long-term habitation. One thing humans have consistently been willing to uproot and relocate for is desirable places to live.
Instead of retiring down to Florida or going on nonstop cruises, for example, I could imagine a dedicated "retirement orbital" which can house millions upon millions of septuagenarians while guaranteeing they all get to live on waterfront property, have sunshine and temperate climate year-round, and have minimal risk of crime or external diseases sweeping in.
You say this is an overly ambitious project which would require an obscene amount of resources and labor to construct, and you're right. I counter by pointing out that mankind has already built The Villages and similar communities across the state of Florida and elsewhere at great economic cost, so really I'm just proposing we scale up a model that has already been proven.
This partially solves the issue of who would be willing to risk it. Older people who have lived their life might not mind a risky trip to the place of endless bliss, even if it does make it nigh-impossible for the grandkids to visit.
My tongue is in cheek when I say this, but my larger point is that starship is a necessary step if we want to figure out what viable business models might be available in space.
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