The position of every Dem should be that NASA will spend $0 on crewed spaceflight. Flights, training, R&D, all of it. It's a waste, we have a deficit, we should spend on cops, blah blah blah whatever.
Republicans have no choice but to throw money at it now, and will trade to ensure that happens.— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) December 21, 2024 at 7:30 PM
Rich guys with big fantasies:
… Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule…
Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.
If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk’s company…
In fact, in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He’s also been critical of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin award came after NASA gave a multi-billion dollar contract to SpaceX for the same mission…
Farrar says Isaacman would not immediately be able to restructure NASA’s large programs, such as its Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the moon. That’s because many aspects of those programs are dictated by Congress, which sets the budget for the space agency. “The real question for NASA is whether Congress will permit it to abandon legacy projects like SLS so the budget can be redirected to SpaceX,” he says…
Back during the first Gilded Age, plutocrats started the trend of buying themselves vast Western dude ranches (frequently using government dollars), where they could live out their manly Cowboy & Indian dreams. That’s still popular, of course, but Space, beyotches! has both a technocratic sheen and the imagined advantage of becoming an actual God-Emperor in a whole new realm. Especially for a soutpiel like Elon Musk, who’s been steeped since birth in the idea that when the going gets tough, the privileged elite skip out…
One thing I find interesting about Musk's descent into politics is that he's destroying his Mars plans. Even if heavy rocket launches were free, putting people on Mars requires a decade or more of grinding near Earth to develop life support capabilities that simply don't exist.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024
Like it or not, the agency that has the institutional knowledge on life support, deep space tracking, and a dozen other technologies needed for Mars is NASA. Not to mention that for reasons of practical politics, a half-trillion dollar Mars landing has to be a national project
The irreducible length (~two years) of a Mars mission is so far out of our experience that it frontloads any landing attempt with multiple two-year testing cycles in far Earth orbit, to work out the life support bugs. There’s just no way around this grind as a prerequisite.
That means that to go to Mars, you have to sustain the support of Congress for a decade or more, as parties come in and out of power. Old Elon was on track to achieve this, his pose was disdaining politics in favor of a good old wailing electric guitar American can-do spirit
He had the cultural capital, the money, and a promising rocket program that put him on track to realizing the Martian dream, and he gave that up to become an ideologue in an administration where such influence has historically had a short shelf life. Talk about a mind virus!
By transforming himself into a hyperpartisan political figure, Musk has made sure that he can’t realize his stated dream of Mars colonization—he can’t even do a Mars landing—because the only way multi-decade megaprojects get done in US politics is by slow institutional capture.
You have to remember that even three years ago, Musk was a politically unaligned memelord whose real passion was robot cars, supertunnels, a kind of techno-optimism rooted in American greatness, exceptionalism, and ability to build shit. And he threw that valuable clout away.
It's not just a money question; you need a long near Earth research program which necessarily means launch permits, and for going to Mars in particular you need enough political clout to ignore COSPAR rules on planetary protection, a matter of international treaty.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024
My point is if Mars became a national priority tonight, it would take 15-20 years to get to the landing, with no way to shorten the process. That's a long time to rely on Trump and his political successors to stay in power, and keep liking you.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024
For those interested, I wrote the start of a rant last year about what actually makes going to Mars difficult, and why it's a terrible idea to boot. https://t.co/Q8oD7otgqn
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024
Something to argue about while we’re waiting for the goodies to finish baking, or the (grand)kids to drop off to sleep:
The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.
The buildup to Mars would not look like Apollo, but a long series of ISS-like flights to nowhere. If your main complaint about the International Space Station is that it’s too exciting and has a distracting view of Earth out the window, then you’ll love watching ISS Jr. drift around doing bone studies in deep space. But if you think rockets, adventure, exploration, and discovery are more fun than counting tumors in mice, then the slow and timorous Mars program will only break your heart.
Sticking a flag in the Martian dust would cost something north of half a trillion dollars, with no realistic prospect of landing before 2050. To borrow a quote from John Young, keeping such a program funded through fifteen consecutive Congresses would require a series “of continuous miracles, interspersed with acts of God”. Like the Space Shuttle and Space Station before it, the Mars program would exist in a state of permanent redesign by budget committee until any logic or sense in the original proposal had been wrung out of it.
When the great moment finally came, and the astronauts had taken their first Martian selfie, strict mission rules meant to prevent contamination and minimize risk would leave the crew dependent on the same robots they’d been sent at enormous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the spacecraft, uninformed of the mission rules, would be free to go wander outside. They would become the real explorers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.
How long such a program could last is anyone’s guess. But if landing on the Moon taught us anything, it’s that taxpayer enthusiasm for rock collecting has hard limits. At ~$100B per mission, and with launch windows to Mars one election cycle apart, NASA would be playing a form of programmatic Russian roulette. It’s hard to imagine landings going past the single digits before cost or an accident shut the program down. And once the rockets had retired to their museums, humanity would have nothing to show for its Mars adventure except some rocks and a bunch of unspeakably angry astrobiologists. It would in every way be the opposite of exploration…
Baud
North Korea will get there first.
eclare
Hell I don’t even think we should go to the moon again. Been there, done that. But I’m not a space enthusiast, YMMV.
Now exploring the deepest oceans, on the other hand…
dmsilev
@Baud: For All Mankind is a fun series, but I wouldn’t exactly suggest using it as a template for national space policy.
Although it is probably more grounded in reality than some of Musk’s fantasies.
SpaceUnit
Don’t underestimate the con-do spirit of these grifters. And also a majority of Americans are no longer tethered to reality. They’ll probably swallow this shit hook, line, and sinker.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Since living in zero gravity has known bad effects on eyes/vision, bones etc, even in the relatively short term, how are astronauts going to be affected by 2+ years in space getting to Mars? Wouldn’t starting with the Moon make more sense ( I actually think the fact we can’t fix the problems we created on the planet we evolved on means it’s ridiculous to assume we can have permanent colonies on another planet. And that’s before considering what much lower gravity would do to a pregnancy, embryo, fetus or growing infant.)
Annie
There’s a very interesting book about this — “ A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” Have just started it but the authors, Kelly and Zach Wienersmith, say it would cost a lot more than we expect, take a lot longer, and have many fewer benefits.
Musk is good at shooting off his mouth. He doesn’t care about or even acknowledge the detail work necessary to even try something like this.
NotMax
Don’t tell Elon, but someone even more well known got there first 60 years ago.
:)
Ohio Mom
So funny — these nitwits love AI but think people would do a better job of exploring various aspects of space than high-tech robots could.
Hungry Joe
Even if the tech, biological, radiation, and support problems could be overcome — which they can’t now, or even in the middle-distant future — life on Mars would be a dreary, slow-motion nightmare. Remember how mind-numbingly bored people got during COVID? “We have to have groceries delivered! We can’t even go to the movies!” Well, on Mars they’ll be stuck in a sealed apartment-building like dwelling with the same couple of dozen people for … YEARS. Want to go for a walk outdoors? Suit up, then stroll around for a few minutes in the same vegetation-free desert you strolled around in last week. They’d end up killing themselves, or each other.
Ohio Mom
@NotMax: Link doesn’t work. I usually enjoy your links so I am disappointed.
NotMax
Crapola. Bad linky. Fix.
Don’t tell Elon, but someone even more well known got there first 60 years ago.
:)
Baud
OTOH, triple breasted women.
Another Scott
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Beyond that, it’s a really bad idea healthwise.
PLOSOne (from 2013):
tl;dr – Radiation is a big issue, and there’s still a lot of biological unknowns (and the Sun isn’t totally predictable either).
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
@Hungry Joe: All problems the robots wouldn’t have.
I’m fine with the idea of remotely exploring places in space, I like science and us finding out new things.
Suzanne
In every bit of seriousness…. we need a big dose of this spirit. It is in no way coincidental that the during the midcentury period when we built a strong middle class, and great institutions, we also built just loads of great stuff: interstates and bridges and works of great art and architecture (public and private).
Our tech lords dream so damn small. What’s another billion in the bank account? We don’t even get a Carnegie Library out of them.
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
Fixed. at #11
You wouldn’t believe the number of things I’m screwing up today. Totally spastic Xmas and Chanukah Eve. For example, misread a recipe and used 4 cups of water instead of 2 cups.
UncleEbeneezer
@dmsilev: I’d go way beyond “fun.” The first two seasons are some of the best tv in recent years.
Starfish (she/her)
Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farm land, and farmers have some conspiracy theories.
scav
Trees up! It’s officially Christmas Eve if anyone’s been waiting.
SpaceUnit
I’d be okay with using robots to do space exploration so long as they’re like sci-fi movie robots from the 50’s and 60’s. All clunky and lurchy.
Cuz that would be funny.
TBone
@NotMax: I didn’t call the usual florist in time to deliver the annual Christmas evergreens centerpiece to my elderly aunt. Here’s my email to her about that delivery.
The entire day went like that, you are not alone!
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
This is a dipshit with more money than many – at least a few nations, and he’s done all the crap he can here, he’s 53 and it’s
possiblerather likely that we would only get to Mars with a manned flight after he and his money are long gone. There are so many issues, the technology, the oxygen, the design of all the equipment, the building all the equipment, the food and water, finding people that would want to give up the rest of their lives because if it would take a long time to get there it would take that same amount of time to get back. It’s a nice science fiction story or comic book tale but the reality is that even the ground crew would have to be replaced because the total time of getting there and back would be over the workable decades unless you sent infants. And that seems a bit much because maybe they really didn’t want to spend what, 60 yrs in space…..We have to figure out how to go dramatically faster and live through the decades to get there and back, and for what, just being able to say we did it – finally? Seems just a tad asinine to me. (And that word tad is doing a hell of a lot of work. And I wanted to be an astronaut at one point in my life!)
linnen
Thanks I needed the laugh. Let’s just say that the success of his companies are inverse to how deeply and personally he is involved with running them.
Starfish (she/her)
@dmsilev: I don’t see our space agency and Russia’s space agency ever working that smoothly together.
TBone
@Starfish (she/her): Sissy SpaceX doesn’t seem like the type to share a spotlight.
Ruckus
@Annie:
It doesn’t take a lot of talent or smarts to sign a check (and of course he very likely wouldn’t be the actual person signing the check, he has help for the hard stuff….)
Suzanne
@Ruckus: Oh, agreed. Mars is a super-dumb idea, for all the reasons you list.
What just kills me about the whole thing is that he could use some of that money to build cool shit here! Like, the U.S. used to be the world leader in cool shit! We are not any longer! China and Singapore have better contemporary architecture, Europe has better engineering projects. The avant-garde is not here.
Cool shit is cool, yes, but it’s also a deep sign of optimism and creativity, and of commitment to one another. A shared destiny.
dmsilev
@Starfish (she/her): Well, in the show’s universe, the Cold War kept going along with the space race, so the relationship between NASA and Roscosmos was not exactly ‘work together’ except when forced to by plot contrivances.
Hungry Joe
@Ohio Mom: Exactly. Most of the problems and costs involve life support. Send robots/machines. They aren’t as fragile, or as easily bored.
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’ , y’all!
Starfish (she/her)
Hear me out. If we send some billionaires to Mars right now, they can record science data on what a bad idea that is, and we will reduce the carbon emissions here on Earth by having one less billionaire flying around in their private jets. Maybe instead of planting trees, we can buy carbon credits to send billionaires to Mars?
Van Buren
So my dog has decided that my nephews are Defcon 5 level threats to my safety…they have been here every Christmas for the 4 years Rosie has been here with no problem, but she barks, lunges and nips if they come within 6 feet of me. A level of stress I don’t need. She hasn’t eaten dinner because she’s so busy guarding me. WTH??
Suzanne
@Nukular Biskits: Good evenin’, hope you’re having a great Christmas Eve!
I’m gonna have to go wrap presents soon — BLAH!!!
Suzanne
@Starfish (she/her):
I’m in. Don’t need to hear any more.
Nukular Biskits
@Suzanne:
Already did mine.
Actually, working on the last one. And when I get finished, I’ll share with you the art of giving mean gifts.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Just got back from a drive around looking at lights in a couple of neighborhoods. While I fix dinner, my wife has put on MST3K (it’s on Prime).
Surprised they’re not running ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians’ on 24/7 rotation for the next day and a half.
narya
@scav: the Christmas after my sister died I insisted we have a tree, so my brother and I went out looking for a tree on Christmas Eve. I made sure to hang the ornament w her name on it. The whole holiday was brutal, of course, but I still contend the tree helped us all put one foot in front of the other, which is what we could do.
love and care and kindness to every last jackal.
YY_Sima Qian
I mean, corruption in the US has always been rampant, if only thoroughly legalized. However, the plutocracy, kleptocracy & the nepotism are quickly becoming so transparent that the US is now set to become the banana republic that US elites (& population) have long derided in the developing world. & Trump has not even been sworn in, yet!
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Actually, if Arthur C. Clarke is considered, it’ll be China.
frosty
@scav: Our tree is up and presents are wrapped but our Christmas Eve won’t be until Sunday after my older son arrives. He’s working today and tomorrow.
Fretting about what to have for dinner on the 25th, since we’ll do our holiday meal on Monday. Hmm. Takeout? Nah, nobody will be open … waitaminute … Chinese! (Although we decided on Thai instead.)
artem1s
so $100B minimum and the new director of NASA wants to give it over to someone who just wasted $40B on a dying social media site whose end was hastened by the new owner. Somewhere Carl Sagan is poking out his eardrums so he doesn’t have to listen to the id10ts who just sold out 6 decades of solid planetary science in favor of another spam in a can project (that will probably kill anyone stoopid enough to go along for the ride).
Nukular Biskits
@frosty:
For some reason, Ms. Biskits decided to make gumbo for Christmas. Which is odd, given the neighbors across the street are Cajuns from Houma, LA, and gave us some pretty damned good gumbo (along with a pan of hogshead cheese) a few nights ago.
Urza
I would put my life savings in a gofundme to get 1 rocket to Mars with all the grifters and assholes being given a homeland. It doesn’t really need more fuel than to go boom or crash properly or food so it wouldn’t actually be that expensive.
Nukular Biskits
@Urza:
I’m in.
Dan B
@Another Scott: Thanks! I thought I’d read that radiation would be a severe danger on a flight to Mars but had forgotten it was because the Magnetosphere protects from it. I wonder if it’s any protection on the moon or if it’s too far from the earth’s Magnetosphere.
kindness
I would be so overjoyed if Elon went to Mars.
raven
@Nukular Biskits: I made a big batch to take to Asheville tomorrow!
TONYG
“online payment company, Shift 4”. I have a dumb question. Didn’t the methodology underlying online payments essentially become a commodity about a quarter century ago? That being the case, what is the value-added of whatever “Shift 4” is doing?
Dan B
@Ohio Mom: It boggles the mind that people want to send humans to space. We’re incredibly heavy and delicate. Besides the coming generation has grown up with virtual reality and would be very at home with today’s cameras. And there are many ways to “see” things that the human eye cannot. Why sent meat bags for trillions when we could send cutting edge electronics for millions?
Aziz, light!
Nobody is ever going to live on Mars. It’s an utterly preposterous idea. Great, if you want to live underground and never venture out, but one can do that here. Maybe in the spirit of exploration we’ll see a brief and very costly visit to Mars by a small crew some decades from now, but that will suffice. Elmo’s inner twelve year old revels in the fantasy that he is the savior of humankind, but his real motivation is to hype SpaceX and keep funneling billions of tax dollars into its coffers.
Aziz, light!
@Dan B: Earth’s magnetosphere offers some protection in low earth orbit, but that protection goes away when you orbit further out.
Aziz, light!
dupe
Suzanne
@kindness: I want Elon to go to the Sun, personally.
lowtechcyclist
@eclare:
I am a bit of a space enthusiast, but tbh there’s no real point in crewed space travel. We really shouldn’t be spending a dime on it.
Space is for robots. They don’t need water, food, or oxygen; they don’t need to be protected from cosmic radiation, and they can withstand way more G’s of pressure than we can. Just keeping humans alive in space is the most costly part of any crewed mission.
And they do great work that humans can’t. Look at our robots that have been exploring Mars. They’re doing great work, decades before we have any hope of landing a human there.
Better to have more robots exploring more planets, asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, and what have you, than to attempt to get humans to Mars, or to return humans to the Moon (though I’m surprised some other nation hasn’t tried this, given that we managed it with 1960s tech), or to shuttle humans between here and the ISS.
Nukular Biskits
@raven:
Of …?
raven
@Nukular Biskits: Gumbo
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I’d be good with that.
Another Scott
@Dan B: It looks like the Moon is too far away to have much protection via the Earth’s magnetosphere. I found this:
(Emphasis added.)
The issue with going to Mars vs the Moon is it’s so much farther away, will take so much longer to go and return, so the total radiation dose will be much, much higher than a “typical” 1-2 week Moon mission.
At least that’s my understanding. Corrections welcome.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Nukular Biskits
@raven:
Good.
But I had to ask, given the range of consumables that this blog covers. LOL!
eclare
@lowtechcyclist:
I am all for robotic exploration, just not human, for the reasons you and others have posted.
Jackie
@Suzanne:
I miss my adult kiddos being wee ones – BUT I don’t miss the late night Xmas Eve wrapping Santa gifts at all!
NotMax
@TBone
The birth of a new tradition. Seeking out the most unattractive centerpiece each year!
Speaking of holiday traditions, ugly Christmas sweaters, anyone? A related short video.
;)
SteverinoCT
Tonight at midnight (local or Zulu time), US submarines go to periscope depth, raise the snorkel mast and open the head valve. So Santa can get in. The Chief of the Boat will distribute gifts the families gave him to stash prior to underway, and the cooks will whip up a feast. Subs traditionally have good food, but of course no fresh: it’s mainly because the crews are small enough that the cooks can be creative.
eclare
@Jackie:
When I was growing up the Santa gifts were unwrapped! The only gifts that were wrapped were from relatives.
One year I got a bike from Santa, how do you wrap that?
eclare
@SteverinoCT:
Interesting! I once talked to the wife of a submarine crew member, and she said whenever he returned from a deployment, he would sleep perfectly straight and not move.
NotMax
@SteverinoCT
And also whip up the recipe for submarine gray cake icing which AFAIK remains a classified secret.
Suzanne
@eclare: One year, I was probably 9 or 10, poor overworked single SuzMom had run out of time and she had me wrap my own presents.
dmsilev
@Suzanne:
Obligatory pedantic science nerd note: sending a spacecraft directly to the Sun is really really fucking hard. Needs far more fuel than sending a craft to e.g. Jupiter or Saturn.
However, if you’re ok with it taking fifty or a hundred years to deliver Elon to his destination, there is a somewhat doable technique, which involves sending the spacecraft out to the orbit of Neptune or thereabouts, making some orbital adjustments, and falling into the Sun from there.
Lily
If you’re in the mood to feel appalled you could read Is—=man’s Wiki page.
eclare
@Suzanne:
I enjoy wrapping presents, up to a certain number, but unfortunately I don’t have anyone to buy for anymore.
NotMax
@dmsilev
This is true.
I’d settle for Mercury. Either side.
;)
Mr. Bemused Senior
So just launch him, don’t worry about aiming.
Brucej
@Another Scott: Maybe they could do it a la Avenue 5 and make a shield out of all their shit…
Suzanne
@dmsilev:
I did not say I wanted to send him in a spacecraft.
TONYG
@Dan B: I think that it’s a symptom of the dysfunctionality of our overlords: 1) They are stupid and lack imagination. Sending humans into space was state-of-the-art sixty years ago, so therefore that’s the way to do things now. 2) They have no regard for human life (other than their own). The astronauts who will suffer and die in the hostile environment of space are the hired help. They are expendible.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Urza: count me in
Gin & Tonic
@SteverinoCT: My son in law was in the Silent Service. He doesn’t miss it, not one bit.
artem1s
the only human space flight project NASA should be involved in is construction and launching of the B Ark.
Gin & Tonic
@Aziz, light!: Getting meat bags to Mars is really a piece of cake when compared to the difficulty of getting them back.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
“Welcome to Barsoom. My name is John Carter.”
:)
NotMax
FYI.
Buttigieg on tonight’s O’Donnell show. Good discussion,
Jackie
@eclare:
We did a mixture of wrapped and unwrapped. Wrapped Santa gifts were only wrapped in Santa paper – carefully hidden away from other Christmas paper. Tags were Santa tags (again hidden away) with only the child’s name on it.
Bill Arnold
@NotMax:
Errol Musk named his son Elon, which just happened to be the title for the ruler of Mars in Dr. Wernher von Braun’s “Project MARS(Das Marsprojekt)” (Book-sized PDF, 1950 (?), Translation: Henry White).
(Spoiler: these were native martians, very much like humans. But still, funny.)
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Hard to have a shared destiny with people that think you should be dead. Or at least locked up.
And you ask why dead or locked up?
Because so many of us do not want the life they seem to cherish. Everyone the same, same language, same church (has to be a church – that verifies that you have the same concepts of life as them) and therefore can properly exist in a world with them. It’s asinine and not the concept of this country and not really any of the countries that their forefathers lived in either. And in this world, in this day and age, it has zero logic or reality. Not that it actually did in any of the ones that their forbearers came from either. It is bullshit. We are humans, in all the sizes, shapes, colors, genders that humans actually come in. Which is a lot of each of those. I have neighbors that are about as white as sheets and as dark as night. In 140 apartment units there are all colors, religions, languages, genders, sizes, but only one reality. Sun come up, sun go down, wind blows, rain falls. We are all still human. We all were born, we all live however long we can, we all end up not breathing. Some add to life, some don’t and some retract as much as possible from it. It’s life, it’s good and it’s not so much. I am an old, born in the first part of the last century. There is a lady here who is 98 or 99, who used to ride motorcycles. Not on them, by herself. There are people that go to church most every week, there are people that haven’t gone for decades or ever. We still breathe and eat and all that other stuff.
It’s humanity, it’s good, it can suck donkey parts, it is what it is. I believe that this country and now most of the others understand individuality and rules and concepts of living in a manner as harmless as possible, and that a lot of this is just the way it is and in a world of the population it has, there really isn’t many other actual ways forward. And also, not everyone agrees, after all it is humanity.
Ruckus
@Starfish (she/her):
I sort of LIKE this.
Do we have to bring them back?
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
There is a 3 story parking whatever across the street from me, I think supposedly for car pools, local workers or the bus stop that is part of the concept and that the buses don’t have to stop on the street and block traffic because they block a lane stopping traffic. Who knows. There are a lot of multiunit homes around here. 6-8 homes per building, each home has a 2 car garage, is 3 stories tall and are being build all over the place and cost about 20% less than the average individual home. They aren’t bad inside and remind me of the concept of row houses in Boston. (sister lived in one for a while) Given the number of people in the LA area there is no way that enough single family homes could be built that would be in any way affordable.
TBone
@NotMax: ♥️💚🎀🌟