domain:alexberenson.substack.com
roystgnr
3hr ago
SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts.
Yeah, and those are getting to be less important. SpaceX used to have relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, and nothing else; today they have larger but still relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, but the sum is being dwarfed by Starlink subscriptions. Even when they get a peer competitor for launch provision, that competitor is going to need some time to launch a competitor to SpaceX's several-thousand-satellite constellation.
Blue Origin currently has its own major problems and dysfunctions and doesn’t have much actual developed capability yet.
Well, they've had one successful launch (albeit with an unsuccessful booster recovery) of a rocket that's aiming at roughly twice the payload of Falcon 9 for the same price. Their development's been extremely slow but it's likely to start ramping up soon and they've got incredibly deep pockets to keep trying.
SpaceX’s only actual peer competitor, Roscosmos
If you mean present peer competitor, Roscosmos doesn't make the cut. Dozens of launches a year is nice, but it's not hundreds. SpaceX has no present peer competitors.
If you mean future peer competitor, there's a pretty wide field of relatively near-term possibilities. China's got a half dozen space startups working on Falcon 9 class vehicles; none are at SpaceX's level yet but like 4 of them have at least reached orbit. Rocket Lab has put Electron in orbit dozens of times now and Neutron should be a decent Falcon 9 competitor. Firefly has made orbit a few times, and (after launching on a Falcon 9, admittedly) was the first commercial company to successfully soft-land on the moon. Relativity Space and Stoke are long shots right now, but Stoke is an interesting long shot working on full reusability.
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities. It’s not the bread and butter. The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line and even if it flames out completely it’s not going to even get close to tanking the whole company.
Yeah, but SpaceX needs the future capabilities to continue being SpaceX. Mass delivery of remote high-speed internet is a sweet cash cow, but it's not The Dream that got a bunch of high talent to work for them for super-long hours at barely-competitive salaries. Falcon rockets won't take anybody to Mars, and SpaceX without the driving goal of putting humanity on Mars would just turn into another decaying Boeing.
Also, the Starship program is also pretty significant a cost still. They've spent like $5B over the project lifetime, and are ramping up hard now, probably nearly $2B this year out of revenues of maybe $15B. It makes sense, since they're probably also spending like $2B this year on Starlink launches and are salivating at the prospect of cutting that by an order of magnitude while increasing capacity, but it only makes sense if it eventually works. Everybody used to say that the R&D to make Falcon 9 reusable was a waste, that it would never pay for itself, and they were so wrong about that that nobody thoughtful seems to dare to suggest the same for Starship, but it's still not impossible that they just can't get cheap second stage reuse working and the pessimism will turn out to be right this time.
Must we marginalize and contain these people? I reject this premise.
I'm certain you don't: you just draw the line a little bit further down the hierarchy. Imprisoning people is marginalizing them. Putting people into custodial care (mentally-deficient adults, etc.) is marginalizing them. Keeping disruptive, aggressive children out of normal classrooms is marginalizing them. This is obviously necessary. Again, the question is where the line ought to be drawn.
It's not hard to imagine an argument that segregation was the humane, minimally-marginalizing functional solution here. Main issue with it being that it was indeed deeply unfair to outliers, genetic hybrids, and so on.
What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life
Disagree. That's possible for those who wish to improve themselves; who are willing and able to receive such education. Many do not fall into this category.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3hr ago
Problem is therapy works, but 80-90% of therapists are very bad at their jobs
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3hr ago
I don’t believe it has been done correctly. Love is not endless, empty compassion. Love is pushing people to become better, even if sometimes against their will at the moment.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
Not exactly what you're talking about, but Zimbabwe does come to mind, what with their begging whites to come back and do basic things like organize agriculture and start businesses. In that case they're not asking for a foreign ruling class, but a foreign middle class. Interesting stuff.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3hr ago
You can absolutely love people into more virtue. Christians did it with entire societies and came to basically rule the world.
These are excuses that I don’t accept.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
Family man is generally motivated to make sure he keeps a job and is less likely to jump ship so all things equal probably more valuable.
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
Maybe.
Alternately, Transhausen by Proxy.
All things under the sun are possible, even horrible things that make you weep at the tragedy of it.
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
I think they have a problem with narcissism.
Most women go through their lives being the center of attention. Women Are Wonderful, and most relationships revolve around them and whatever it takes to keep them happy. After all, it's easy for them to replace the men in their lives who fail to live up to their standards.
To a point.
Having a kid takes all the attention they were getting, all the effort people were putting into keeping them happy, and steals it away from them. Now the kid is getting it. There is no comparison to being a man and becoming a father, because nobody gives a fuck about men in the first place. Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Mentally ill parents are incredibly unpleasant. Teenagers will choose ‘rules’ over ‘just fucking awful’. The addition of constant fighting between lesbian parents wouldn’t have helped, either. Young adults usually want their parents to be stable and functional, too, which a train wreck like the mom turned out to be won’t do that(this having been 10 years ago means those kids are almost certainly old enough to make their own decisions).
Rex
3hr ago
What was the nature of the conspiracies? Asking so I can have a rubric for my own views.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant
Then it sounds like either they're specifically upset about the extremely rare cases of rape leading to pregnancy, or else they have an accountability problem.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3hr ago
That's a fair point. But as someone who is, I suppose, a literal exvangelical according to the definition (if not the spirit) of the term, I agree that most conversions away from evangelicalism lead away from faith entirely (or toward performative paganism). But that actually goes to my point -- evangelicalism is so totalizing in its cultural orbit, so utterly identified with Christianity to many Americans, that rejecting it or its culture means rejecting Christianity. I speak from experience here: I knew profoundly little about non-evangelical churches when I left evangelicalism as a teen, except that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism theoretically existed, even if they seemed more like historical trivia than real religious bodies. Even Catholicism has long struck many white evangelicals from the Midwest and Southeast as something for elderly latinas, someone else's ethnic religion, a church for the still-pagan descendents of pagan Aztecs, a place for hyphenated-Americans. That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism. So most who proudly wear the title of "ex-evangelical" do so because they believe social liberalism is the One True Faith, and become evangelical atheists instead of evangelical Christians. Seen it many times; been there myself.
I also very much see cases of increasing non-denominational, doctrinally-loose and progressive churches that explicitly attract people like this; some Baptist friends of mine have a lesbian friend who attends such a church, which is growing. So there's clearly an appeal for a form of Christianity that basically reflects the worldview that Lana had before the breakup of her marriage, and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
Thanks, I hate it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
But the basic issue behind the abortion debate is this: women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant. That's a massive imposition on their lives. It doesn't really matter whether you're doing it out of "hate" or honest conviction, they will see you as their enemy and won't want to associate with you.
Men and women famously had similar views on abortion until 2020. Framing this as men imposing on women doesn't reflect reality.
gattsuru
3hr ago
If you want to take the chemistry metaphor further, and you don't mind a little bit of absolute horror, I'll point to the concept of disappearing polymorphs:
That is, they are metastable forms that have been replaced by more stable forms.
It is hypothesized that contact with a single microscopic seed crystal of the new polymorph can be enough to start a chain reaction causing the transformation of a much larger mass of material. Widespread contamination with such microscopic seed crystals may lead to the impression that the original polymorph has "disappeared". In a few cases such as progesterone and paroxetine hydrochloride, the disappearance gradually spread across the world, and it is suspected that it is because earth's atmosphere has over time become permeated with tiny seed crystals. It is believed that seeds as small as a few million molecules (about 10 − 15 {\displaystyle 10^{-15}} grams) is sufficient for converting one morph to another, making unwanted disappearance of morphs particularly difficult to prevent. It is hypothesized that "unintentional seeding" may also be responsible for a related phenomenon, where a previously difficult-to-crystallize compound becomes easier to crystallize over time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3hr ago
Yeah, I have no idea either way, though I certainly have my suspicions.
I have seen therapy work for people, including genuinely saving the marriage of a close family member, but... mostly not.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
Scott's talked about how bad arguments can act as a kind of vaccine - people reject strong versions of an argument because they've heard, considered, and rejected the bad argument. The woman reminds me of several people I've known personally - quite a piece of work. But the basic issue behind the abortion debate is this: women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant. That's a massive imposition on their lives. It doesn't really matter whether you're doing it out of "hate" or honest conviction, they will see you as their enemy and won't want to associate with you.
I know a guy who's radicalization toward far-right conspiracytardism I can take credit for halting. So reaching out does occasionally work.
Crowstep
4hr ago
Isn't Ozempic-face just an effect of rapid weight loss, rather than something specific to the GLP-1 agonists?
Seems like the solution there is just to take a lower dose and lose the weight less quickly. Maybe take collagen supplements.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I love the series of branch-swinging-assumptions we're making here.
nomenym
4hr ago
One of my first thoughts after reading about Lana was "Did she start seeing a therapist before or after divorcing her husband?" Then I realized that you didn't say she was seeing a therapist.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
Are we honestly supposed to believe that a people requested from foreign stock a new ruling class?
There are recorded instances of something like this happening: the Glorious Revolution, Texas seeking US annexation, or Napoleon III in Mexico.
Frequently it seems to be "please invade us to replace our rulers with better ones."
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
More options
Context Copy link