Elon Musk said he was ‘highly confident’ his new SpaceX Starship, designed for voyages to the moon and Mars, will reach Earth orbit for the first time this year, despite a host of technical and regulatory hurdles yet to be overcome https://t.co/ykx6obNRDD pic.twitter.com/uBig9EmOp6
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 11, 2022
What an amazing thing it is, to have a Fandom of one’s very own…
California is suing Elon Musk's Tesla, alleging it runs a "racially segregated" workplace and discriminates against Black employees.
Black workers report being concentrated in parts of its factory (one called "the plantation" by other workers) and hearing slurs up to 100x daily. pic.twitter.com/2vmD3oo13G
— AJ+ (@ajplus) February 10, 2022
Think that’s Jordan Peterson between Musk & Rogan:
One thing to ask yourself as you take in this image: why would Musk alienate the affluent, largely left-of-center demographic that made up the initial core of Tesla's customer and evangelist base?
One answer: many of them were already turned off by the ownership experience. https://t.co/gZ3bkeqHFK
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) January 30, 2022
having interviewed with elon companies, the reverence is not just a trope.
once was unironically told that "Elon is very focused on embedded security", so engineers not whistleblowing is not surprising
— Rum and Cokes for President (@RnC_for_pres) February 2, 2022
just to give you a comparison, waymo has 0.033 disengagements per 1000 miles. tesla "full self driving" has 0.22 disengagements _per mile_.
— ?? (@Theophite) February 2, 2022
so he’s pulling a mengele on a bunch of primates and tesla is apparently a giant racism factory but other than that seems like a swell dude https://t.co/goWOwzk6zg
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) February 12, 2022
You would be WRONG, Popehat…
You know I bet Elon Musk’s Twitter fans don’t support him enough to volunteer for this. I bet they just don’t have what it takes. https://t.co/eY6BpZSMpp
— ClassifiedMeansDeliciousHat (@Popehat) February 11, 2022
swear to God pic.twitter.com/cGVc01v9i7
— macb.eth (usd hodler) (@Theophite) February 12, 2022
Never be a beta tester, the tech gurus told me.
A geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent outburst of the sun destroyed up to 40 new SpaceX satellites.
They are drifting back into Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up, potentially costing the company about $100 million.https://t.co/3fa6R8Uj21
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 10, 2022
Eolirin
Fuck Elon Musk.
Major Major Major Major
SpaceX does good work. Musk’s insane hyperbolic promises aside, they’ve done some impressive things.
I really do want to (briefly) meet the sort of weirdo who would test a first generation brain implant from Elon Musk, an idea that gets worse with each word.
NotMax
Could be worse. Could be COBRA.
;)
sab
My lefty sister in law loves Elon Musk. I do not understand the appeal.
NotMax
The real Tesla was a certified oddball and a dyed-in-the-wool genius.
Musk get half the equation right.
//
Chetan Murthy
@sab: does she have stock in tesla ? My thesis is that it’s all about that. You’re invested, you’re committed.
NotMax
If for no other reason (whole thing only about 40 minutes long) the story of taking Werner von Braun and other high level Nazi rocket scientists shopping for women’s lingerie in <Camp Confidential on Netflix is worth it.
LeftCoastYankee
He got ridiculously rich buying into a company that was at the forefront of allowing people to sign up for internet porn and not have “internet porn” show up on their bank statements.
Everything since has been leveraging “Tech Genius” into fleecing rich and powerful rubes to pay for his half-assed ventures, which naturally brings those folks’ fanboys along for the slobberfest.
PT Barnum tips his cap.
Jerzy Russian
What is this neuralink thing supposed to do?
Also, too: The Sun is my new hero. I mean, I have always liked the Sun, but its actions recently have made me like it even more.
sab
@Chetan Murthy: No! Something about what he does in media appeals to her. She thinks he is innovative, adventurous and daring, instead of the corporate grifter that he actually is.
Major Major Major Major
@Jerzy Russian: an attempt at an implanted brain-computer interface.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Obligatory?
Bonus Pink Floyd.
:)
mrmoshpotato
Oh look! Another space cock from another undertaxed, rich prick!
NotMax
Whoops. #12 ought to have been Jerzy Russian.
Mea maxima culpa.
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
No thanks, even if I was gay, I don’t believe I could hate myself that much….
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Good on that giant, atom-smashing, gas ball!
Major Major Major Major
If he really wanted to up his supervillainy level he would start pushing for nuclear bomb powered spaceship propulsion.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Footfall!
;)
mrmoshpotato
And that, boys and girls, is why Elon Musk tried to destroy the Sun.
mrmoshpotato
@Jerzy Russian:
Meh. It’s too hot during the summer. Spicy, spicy Sun.
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major: That’s insane enough too… Eh, no, it’s just insane.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
And that’s why humankind in its sapienstude invented the Tom Collins.
Major Major Major Major
@mrmoshpotato: it’s actually really smart! Engineering-wise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Geminid
A sobering report from the Times of Israel, about efforts to evacuate Israeli citizens from Ukraine by Tuesday:
There are believed to be 10,000 to 15,000 Israeli citizens in Ukraine, including 4,500 who have registered with their embassy.
Brachiator
By God, that’s worth a commendation. Maybe a presidential medal.
I think that government space exploration money should be spent on non-manned spacecraft and robots. But if Musk and Tesla want to throw money at Dickie Rickie Rockets, it’s fine by me, especially if it brings down the cost of manned spaceflight in the future. I would love one day to vacation at a lunar colony hotel.
Meanwhile I hope that California sues the crap out of Musk’s Tesla operation.
And I hope they double sue the crap out of game companies like Blizzard for their awful sexism and racism.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
See: Project Orion.
Tangentially, H.G. Wells was off by several order of magnitude early in the 20th century.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: incidentally, I can’t wait for Kerbal Space Program 2.
The Dangerman
Elon Musk : Starship
::
Howard Hughes : Spruce Goose
I should give a shout out for the Aerospace Museum where The Goose is (McMinnville, OR?). Quite well done. I expected to spend a few hours there and it was an all day thing and I could have gone back for more. They were kind enough to take a fairly big problem off my hands (a Family member who was a BIGTIME modeler passed and I had no idea what to do with … I don’t recall actually … it was over a thousand, I think, and this museum took em all … thank goodness).
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Tried Lost Ark by any chance?
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major:
One small, survivable, nuclear space boom please!
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
And risk getting scrooched?! You silly moose!
Anne Laurie
AFAICT, Musk makes an earnest effort to stay in the regulatory ‘grey zone’ where he can brag on his Free Market Mastery without *quite* doing anything actionable.
The minute he starts (publicly) investigating nuclear anything, I have the impression 17 levels of governmental agency would be crawling over his various enterprises like ants on a dead rodent.
Shalimar
Oh God, even Zuckerberg would be a better deity. WTF is wrong with cultists?
Spanky
@Anne Laurie: I’m not sure government agencies would have jurisdiction over his secret island lair.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Just my luck to be in residence when a massive explosion on the far side of the Moon propels it away from Earth. (Pace “Space:1999”).
;)
PeakVT
NASA Raises Concerns About Starlink Expansion Plans
patrick II
I can’t sleep. I am kind of jittery tonight. We are moving into our new house tomorrow.
Geminid
@patrick II: I hope it will be a happy home for you and yours. And that you get a good night’s sleep tonight.
SiubhanDuinne
@patrick II:
I am moving in about a month and am already having dreams about it. I hope your own move goes smoothly and that the new home is a place of joy and peace for you.
prostratedragon
@PeakVT: Sun, do your thing !
patrick II
@Geminid:
@SiubhanDuinne:
Thank you. That is very thoughtful of both of you. I am very lucky. It was one of those things you read about, I happened upon a one-day estate sale for a beautiful house on a small lake that I would never have thought I could own. It is next to a nature preserve and deer come wandering through my back yard, and in my home town which I have moved back to to be near family. If I am not happy here, it will be my own fault. It is very beautiful.
Geminid
@patrick II: That’s nice to hear. I lucked out myself, caretaking a property that is an old apple orchard.
Geminid
I caught this joke on @wonderking82’s Twitter feed:
SiubhanDuinne
@patrick II:
That sounds amazing! If you can, please take pictures and submit them to WaterGirl for the “in your own back yard” part of OTR. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d love to see your lake and the occasional deer.
SiubhanDuinne
@Geminid:
How wonderful! And delicious!
SiubhanDuinne
@patrick II:
Also, that baby emu is hilarious. Baby emus, what’s not to love?
Geminid
@SiubhanDuinne: The apples played out in the 90’s when warmer winters caused early blossoms that April frosts then nipped. The orchard was never much of a moneymaker anyway. A later tenant planted some pears that bear fruit, though.
My landlord planted 18 acres of apple trees around 1980. He moved to Crarottesville a few years later; his wife worked at the hospital and needed to be closer to work. Bill has been coming out more lately, and last spring he planted three apple trees to see if better pollination will help some surviving apples to fruit. My friend Debbie put up a couple beehives last year and those bees will help too.
mrmoshpotato
@SiubhanDuinne:
The insurance-selling creeper that’ll show up one day.
m.j.
I’m just wondering if the same people who think there are chips in vaccines are enthrall to the machinations of Musk and his mutilated monkeys.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Steeplejack (phone)
@SiubhanDuinne:
Where are you moving?
John S.
@patrick II:
Congratulations! I’m right there with you waking up in the middle of the night with anxious thoughts running through my head…
We also got very lucky finding a place on a lake surrounded by natural beauty that didn’t cost us an arm and a leg. We don’t move in until June, but it’s going to be one hell of a move as we trek from Florida to Washington.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid: Solves the problem of his dad not letting him have a dog!
Robert Sneddon
@Major Major Major Major: Project Orion was from a time when going into space was difficult, rocket science was HARD! and the technology and materials weren’t really up to it — see the Rocketdyne F-1 engine used on Apollo missions for a horrible example. Orion was considered as a possibility since compact nuclear weapons were off-the-shelf and would provide a lot of lift-to-LEO capability despite the crudity of the system (more than half the propulsive energy of each “shot” gets wasted in the wrong direction, the parasitic weight of the shock-mounted buffer plate etc.) Orion’s big benefit was that it would almost certainly work first time and every time, it wasn’t rocket science after all…
Today it’s a rare rocket launch that goes wrong due to the engines and propulsion systems blowing up, mostly it’s “Hey, there was another successful launch of something mundane earlier this afternoon, what’s for dinner?” If anyone wants a thousand tonnes in orbit they can buy a hundred launches from any one of a dozen launch vehicle companies from around the world for a lot less than a single Orion launch would cost today.
Ken
Is “disengagement” a euphemism for “accident”? Or perhaps “fatality”?
Ken
I have to wonder if he knew about the “always install a scratch monkey” urban semi-legend. Also whether, assuming he had heard of it, he deliberately set out to re-create it.
Ken
Another way to think about that: His secret island lair is not under the protection of any government.
I just finished Stross’s latest Laundry Files, Quantum of Nightmares. Part of the plot involves the Channel Islands and their peculiar legal status, which largely amounts to “we haven’t bothered updating the Normal feudal law that was in effect at the Treaty of Paris (1259)”.
Shalimar
@Ken: I assumed disengagement was a situation where the human driver had to take over. Surely they couldn’t put a self-driving car on the market if it has an accident every 5 miles.
Ken
@Shalimar: I was being somewhat snarky, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past Musk to try to market it.
It’s sort of like my “scratch monkey” crack above — I don’t really think he did it deliberately, but he’s one of the few people where I would even entertain the thought.
Matt McIrvin
When I was a kid, I was a huge space fan and while I already knew I was far from astronaut material (you have to be a nerd AND a jock at the same time, and completely immune to panic), one of the things I believed as an article of faith was that when I grew up, non-astronauts would be able to buy tickets to space, so I could go as a tourist.
Well, it’s… nominally true now. If I dumped a large fraction of my retirement savings, I could book a ticket on a moderately dangerous 15-minute suborbital hop to the very edge of what is arguably considered space, from Branson’s operation or maybe Bezos’s.
Somehow, this does not seem that attractive a prospect. There are much cheaper thrill rides.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I would do it if I were rich enough.
Matt McIrvin
@Robert Sneddon: Project Orion has really obsessive fans who believe that a future of massive human expansion into space was killed by the libs. We could send whole cities to the moons of Saturn! etc.
The thing is, you get the *biggest* advantage from it if you use the nuclear-bomb propulsion to lift off right from the ground. Which… that certainly would be a thing.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin:
SKEPTIC: “But won’t that cause huge amounts of fallout and harm or kill many people on Earth?”
ORION PROPONENT: “Yes, but I’ll be on the rocket.”
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Always mount a scratch continent.
lashonharangue
If we ever want to travel relatively quickly around the solar system, this kind of nuclear propulsion is something that might eventually be developed. This is strictly intended for use in space, not take-off or landing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
brantl
@Ken: I expect disengagement is the auto-driver program dropping out.
Xavier
Elon Musk has a lot of intelligence, but it’s all one kind.
Robert Sneddon
@Ken: The US fired off over 200 nuclear devices (not all were weapons) aboveground in the US mid-West over a period of about 17 years and nobody really cared. It took SCIENCE! and sensitive instruments to detect significant radioactive contamination in places like Utah and further east from the test sites. The fallout had no noticeable effect on people or animals over several generations.
The Project Orion vehicle(s) would probably have launched from open ocean, maybe the central Pacific so any fallout from the special propulsion bombs, designed to produce specific levels of blast, would end up in the Great Garbage Disposal anyway. The bombs would also be tuned for minimal fallout, preferably isotopes that were short-lived so that most of it it would be gone a few days after the launch.
The really “dirty” weapons are fusion devices, too big and complicated for Project Orion and a lot of the “dirt” is irradiated debris blown up from the ground. Open ocean water doesn’t irradiate to any great extent in comparison.
patrick Il
@John S.:
Congrats. Sounds like we both got lucky.
Chip Daniels
Its been discussed several times why superhero stories are inherently fascist, and I believe its because the idea of a superhero itself slides inevitably into authoritarianism.
The Strong Man On Horseback idea, of a Cincinnatus who rides in to save the day while all the ordinary people stand by watching in stupefaction is the core of all fascist thinking, and Musk is no different.
Major Major Major Major
@Robert Sneddon: which is why nuclear propulsion is a serious contender for once you’re already in space.
Robert Sneddon
@Major Major Major Major: The real problem in SPAAAACE! is reaction mass, not energy sources. A surprising amount of mass into orbit from the ground at five thousand bucks a kilo launch costs is fuel and oxidiser, or in the case of ion engined satellites, pure reaction mass such as xenon.
Nuclear propulsion has a lot of drawbacks even in SPAAAACE! given the large mass overheads of the reactor or other methods of employing fissionable fuels to provide thrust like the Zubrin salt-water open-cycle nuclear rocket. Within the orbit of Jupiter solar panels can provide lots of electrical energy to power ion engines which can provide low but steady thrust — see the proof-of-concept SMART-1 Lunar mission of a few years ago where a small ion-engined spacecraft flew from Earth geostationary orbit into Lunar orbit over a period of eighteen months while consuming only 80kg of xenon gas propellant.
There’s also the VASIMR electrically driven thruster which can generate more thrust than an ion engine but at the cost of efficiency. There was supposed to be a demonstration flight of a VASIMR motor to the ISS to act as a station-keeping thruster but in never happened for some reason. The VASIMR concept has the advantage its reaction mass can be pretty much anything that can be volitalised, like waste gases or contaminated water found aboard a manned spaceship.
kindness
I understand I’m kind of an old, but honestly I would never put a car in self drive. Parking assist? Sure. Self drive? What are you nuts? At least that’s my feeling about it.
Matt
TBH, I’m torn about Neuralink human trials:
Ideally he’ll kill off a couple dozen of his most ridiculous sycophants and then go to jail for the rest of his life, win-win.
patrick II
@kindness:
I am with you about Self-drive until I am satisfied they have worked out the moral choices kink. Say a group of four people was jaywalking in front of you and your car couldn’t stop in time to avoid hitting them. It would have to make the ethical choice to kill four people or drive you over the nearby cliff. I say they were jaywalking and shouldn’t have been there in the first place.