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
Commentor Leto asked about finding (what I’m fairly sure was) this post the other day. Mars, Beyotches! originally appeared just after 7pm on Christmas Eve, and I’m guessing more than a few of you were busy with other things. Since Musk and Trump seem to be accelarating towards their inevitable murder-suicide political divorce…
Trump has more leverage over Musk. Trump got elected. He will probably never go to jail. He doesn’t need Musk’s money for another election.* What could Musk divulge about Trump that wouldn’t be self-incriminating? And is Musk—picking fights w Microsoft & Apple—a net asset in running the government?
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Lol access journalism has broken fucking brains.
They're knifing Elon, you maroons. They're leaking "He's in charge, not Trump" which is like the one very, very real thing that gets Trump all sorts of mad.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 9:16 PM
… Here’s the December post, with full linkage:
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…
War for Ukraine Day 1,067: The Russian Drone Swarms Continue & the Drone Safaris Expand to Kharkiv
SpaceUnit
Guess it’s hard to go to Mars and be a full time goose-stepping nazi.
JoyceH
I honestly don’t think Trump is that interested in Mars. Has he mentioned it lately? On the other hand, he said just today (or yesterday by now) that Denmark refusing to let us have Greenland “would be a very unfriendly act”. It’s like Putin with Ukraine – refusing to surrender immediately is an aggressive move and merits invasion and conquest.
Yutsano
There’s another solution here: tax the rich.
Paranoid Android
The board game “Terraforming Mars” is fun, though.
Jay
@JoyceH:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War#:~:text=The%20Whisky%20War%2C%20also%20known,to%20direct%20conflict%20or%20violence.
pretty sure Canada will back Denmark, full on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ktSPMzKqVPo&t=54s
Ten Bears
No, no, no Yutsano, eliminate the rich
But don’t eat them. Leave for carrion …
Marc
I’ve been aware of Musk since his PayPal days. He was a known right wing racist asshole back then (as was Thiel), nothing has changed.
strange visitor (from another planet)
you can take musk out of apartheid south africa but you can’t take apartheid south africa out of musk.
Marc
@strange visitor (from another planet): Those of us who were non-white and non-Asian working in Silicon Valley from the 80s to early 00s used to discuss the various places we worked, along with noting companies which clearly would not consider hiring anyone except white male engineers (which was still a thing well into the 90s). Companies involving Thiel and/or Musk (and a few others) were at the top of the don’t even bother applying list.
Baud
I’d pay good money to send the whole lot of them to Mars.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: I would chip in..
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Trump’s razor says it’s drugs with a social media addiction. People refuse to accept someone rich could be a stoner.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: very cool. I didn’t know about that. International relations, foreign relations the USA has with other countries, is high on my list of most important issues, when I’m voting to national candidates. I don’t know much, and the different diplomatic strategies often go over my head, but I recognize viscerally, that it matters.
I think many USians don’t understand that these other places, cultures and peoples are quite real. And now, as our #47 guy pulls us out of soft power via foreign aid delay and NIH funding delay, and putting such an interesting man in charge of DoD, we’re quite possibly leaving behind most of our soft power and leaving the game. FAFO.
Im happy to know about Denmark sharing a border with Greenland. And to think about other countries upholding the NATO alliance.
choosing a mild understated feeling word for the moment: crestfallen.
TBone
Day One (first full day) of Noah the Love Cat at home yesterday! He is more lethargic BUT who can blame him for sleeping a lot after his long stint? He’s still showing mucho affection and even managed to drink water voluntarily! And use the litter box. He walks funny because Gabapentin which also makes him lethargic. At first, I had a heckuva time of sheer panic using a magnifying glass to work out the different dosages of all the meds because of the teeny tiny markings on the plastic syringes, but I got a Sharpie for marking them more clearly and got it done, and worked out his every 6 hours schedule of which meds when using the sort of cryptic discharge instructions. Today he gets an increased amount of food. He’s tolerating the tube like a champ! I woke up wearing a fur hat again YAY.
Geminid
@Marc: I am curious: were there other companies in that sector known back then to be less discriminatory? Where did most companies fall on the least racist/most racist continuum? Did the sexism generally track with the racism?
sab
@TBone: That is such good news. Especially the fur hat.
David_C
In my day job, I works with counterparts in NASA to address the challenge of reducing injury caused by space radiation, which would be a serious concern for a Mars mission, or even a return to the moon. Just took grandchildren to the Air and Space Museum in DC. Maybe bad timing – the March for Life was yesterday and MAGA was in the air yesterday. I drove in, but I’m sure that Metro escalator etiquette was seriously challenged the last few days.
I tend to be more bullish on space flight, but with eyes wide open.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: This is so great.
smiling broadly with gladness for you. Soon you’ll have a routine, and he’ll be improving more and more. You need his love in your lives, and you got it, you got him back from a scary brink. It’s quite wonderful.
TBone
@sab: thank you! the cat hat is a wakeup I’ve been loving for a long time and if he’s not on my head, he is always very close to it when my eyes open!
@Gloria DryGarden:
I want to thank you especially for recommending a homeo vet – she agreed to review Noah’s medical records and will come to my house to meet him and evaluate – we’re gonna give Noah the best possible chance to recover!
eclare
@TBone:
Yay!
Princess
@strange visitor (from another planet): If you’re saying that you don’t believe that Musk was a quirky tech Mars nerd who somehow suddenly became a white nationalist in proximity to the Trump campaign, come sit by me. He is who he always was; he just has permission to let it fly publicly now.
prostratedragon
Josh Johnson explicates the recent discomfiture of a certain South AFRICAN!!! in the American mediaplace.
“Why They’re Turning on Elon”
Dorothy A. Winsor
Trump’s ramblings about Greenland and Canada sound full-on demented.
TBone
@eclare: broad smile emojis!
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZzEzDkeHzI
Shalimar
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Musk is definitely a stoner. He hasn’t even made a secret of it. And if you know any stoners, you know they do not work 16 hour days. They have relatively productive mornings and then productivity nosedives as they get higher and higher the rest of the day and night.
TBone
@Dorothy A. Winsor: and those are the “normal” part! Remember, for instance, the giant northern water faucet, the shark batteries, the love letters to North Korea where he was called (*TBone snickers) Dotard, and the references to Hannibal Lecter! And so much more that he’ll invent to keep the rubes distracted.
kalakal
@TBone: Yay! So happy for you all
TBone
Mood music by JJ Cale
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFI4ykK64A
TBone
@kalakal: thank you! Less online time has been very healthy too – more Noah time! I’m checking in periodically while on breaks but in the grand scheme of real life, touching grass (cat fur) is a remedy!
Cheryl from Maryland
@TBone: such joyful news.
lowtechcyclist
@Paranoid Android:
Whenever anyone talks about terraforming Mars, I can’t help but think that the Earth is already terraformed, and all we have to do is maintain that.
Princess
@Dorothy A. Winsor: To me, they sound wicked but not at all demented. I don’t think we can dismiss them lightly. Demented people are easily distracted. Trump is not. I’m not saying there’s no cognitive decline here but Trump is not presidenting like someone losing control. I think that was out wishful thinking in the campaign.
lowtechcyclist
@TBone: Yay for Noah!!
kalakal
@TBone: Couldn’t agree more! Every day I am woken by a furry alarm clock so my days start well
TBone
@Cheryl from Maryland: we are celebrating 🎉 thank you! Seems Ike a weird time to be happy but we must all feel joy whenever we can. It’s so important for health.
Shalimar
@Princess: We will see what happens in the next few months, but the way I read it is staff led by Miller has kept Trump focused on his obsessions, so he won’t fuck up all the evil things they actually want to do that he doesn’t care much about. He tends to agree with whoever he speaks to last, and they want to make sure everyone he talks to is speaking about Greenland instead of immigration.
TBone
@kalakal: I’m not sleeping well yet (keeping one eye open and ears perked all night) but I’ll sleep later! Middle of the night feedings (every six hours) is grueling on top of already precarious sleep but I’ll recover right along with my fur hat!
NotMax
“It’ll cost a quadrillion dollars to get there. Seems like a lot but cutting out the complimentary peanuts and loading only one ply toilet paper will result in savings enough to bring the total down.”
//
BretH
That idlewords blog doesn’t have much content but it’s really really excellent! I went there after it was mentioned in a comment here a while ago. Glad to see it get some front page love.
Geminid
Georgia, on my mind.
From Al Arabiya:
Al-Ula is an oasis in northwest Saudi Arabia, a couple hundred miles south of the ancient Nabatean capital of Petra. It was a Nabatean market city situated on the historic incense route that linked India and the Persian Gulf with the Levant snd Europe.
BretH
@TBone: That made my morning a little brighter!!
Chief Oshkosh
@TBone: Great news! Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
It’s none of my business, but I’m concerned that you describe the discharge instructions as “cryptic” and I encourage you to call the vet and get clarity. Gabapentin has many effects and is powerful stuff. I try to keep dosing as low as possible and slowly wean off as soon possible (I’m not a pet or human doc, just a long-time cat person and neuropathic pain patient).
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Hey, we’re on a path of venusaforming Earth.
//
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: thank you! Every good thought I receive here helps me stay calm and centered so I can do what I gotta. Yesterday morning was rough but I got settled into a routine much quicker than I thought. Today it was a breeze! He’s tolerating a gradual increase in food volume WOO HOO!
different-church-lady
and small…
TBone
@Chief Oshkosh: yeah that drug has me worried, I’ve had to take it in the past and it made me walk funny too. Anticonvulsant yuk. Homeo vet will be here making a house call soon (hopefully tomorrow) and I will ask her if/when we can wean him off of the Gaba yabba doo.
Thank you smart person!
ETA I spent time yesterday rereading the instructions several times, double checking, and made a chart for myself and am keeping a medical notebook for Noah where I write everything down.
Chief Oshkosh
@lowtechcyclist:
Yep. But not only are we not maintaining it, we are punishing people who are simply trying to research HOW to monitor and maintain it.
zhena gogolia
@TBone: You’re heroic.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: What do you have against Marvin the Martian?
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: I’ll see that and raise you a Delbert McClinton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX8evj1fUb8
TBone
@zhena gogolia: awww shucks, thank you! I am smiling hard!
The Thin Black Duke
@Princess: Trump is a puppet. Someone behind the scenes is telling him what to do.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: thank you, I ain’t never been rocked enough hahaha!
That is badass!
TBone
@BretH: YAY good morning sunshine!
Geminid
@Geminid: Some more Italy news:
I expect this is about restarting mothballed nuclear plants. That’s being done in the U.S. in two places at least: the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania and a plant on Michigan’s Lake Michigan coast.
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: As is this and I’ll stop, now that the caffeine and music has the blood flow going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Pia-wz7ts
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: Excellent!
No more caffeine necessary now – thank you for being you!
TBone
I wanted to also say how wonderful my new church priest has been with consoling me and keeping me okay – he is also a drummer (he’s still a young guy) and he keeps the beat for me!
Steve LaBonne
Surely there must be some 1950s extremely low budget SF movie about Nazis on Mars.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@prostratedragon: That’s another bit of leverage Trump has over Musk… there’s plenty of evidence Musk was earning income here while on a student visa, which violates US immigration laws and might put his entire path to US citizenship in jeopardy so Trump could report him.
Trump probably has the same leverage over Melania but so long as she gets her chunk of the family fortune I doubt she much cares whether she’s here or somewhere in Western Europe.
Steve LaBonne
@TBone: Noah is lucky to have such a great human.
Chief Oshkosh
@TBone: It’s great that you’re so detail-oriented about dosing. I tend to not worry about much in general, but kitty drugs bring out the worry-wart in me.
Steve LaBonne
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I recall that the German oligarchs thought Hitler worked for them and ditto the Russian oligarchs and Putin. In both cases it didn’t take long for them to discover their mistake, sadly too late.
Denali5
According to Google, Musk is a naturalized citizen. The Greenland thing is very unsettling. To claim a part of a NATO aligned country. The mind it is boggled.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: But the immigration stuff is clearly designed to be seen, too. Big flashy ICE raids intended to terrify and impress.
It sounds like the biggest thing that’s happening behind the scenes is just that the whole federal bureaucracy is getting shut down and dismantled. They’re not going to be able to do ANYTHING. Yet Trump has all these vast plans.
He touts keeping us out of war, but he has territorial expansion ambitions that would really require fighting World War III. Is the military even going to be able to function a year from now? Could he leave it as a machine that could invade Canada or defeat the EU to seize Greenland or whatever? These are appalling visions of war crimes on a global scale, but I wonder if we could even do them.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: Some of them–automotive manufacturers, chemical companies–made out great. Even after Hitler lost the war, they survived and kept going. Lost some of their international business for a while.
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
All too true. And the fact that we’ve returned Trump to the White House makes me a lot more pessimistic about whether we’ll do enough about reducing the use of carbon-based fuels soon enough to make a difference in where this planet is headed.
I’m sure the Earth will continue to support human life, no matter what we do to it. The question is, how many people and at what level of civilization. But every time someone conjectures on what historians a century from now will say about this era, what I always wonder is whether there will be any.
Mars, OTOH: even if we managed to establish a colony on Mars, it would still be dependent on Earth for a long while. Which means that things on Earth don’t have to go downhill all that much before dooming anyone on Mars.
Princess
@Shalimar:
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’ll just repeat again that “The king is a puppet, manipulated by his evil advisors,” is an ancient trope, told by people living under a capricious monarchy to console themselves.
Ockham s razor suggests it’s a lot more simple: Trump, an angry man who loves chaos is sowing chaos and enabling those who approach him with the intent to sow more chaos.
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia: I’m sorry, but I have strong issues with someone who wants to blow up the Earth because it obstructs his view of Venus.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: Absolutely, and the current Russian oligarchs are doing pretty well sanctions notwithstanding. But the prerequisite for this was bending the knee to those actually in charge.
zhena gogolia
@Layer8Problem: Haha, I totally forgot my comment and thought you were talking about Musk!
zhena gogolia
@Princess: I don’t think these commenters think Trump isn’t evil. They just think he’s mentally incompetent, which is true.
lowtechcyclist
@Princess:
Yeah, he knows what people like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought are about, and that’s why he gives them lots of room to operate. He may not know or care about the details of every last EO they put in front of him to sign, but that’s hardly the same as Trump being manipulated by his advisers.
What I wonder is why he wants to wreck our military, which is what Hegseth will do. It’s hard for me to believe he cares what Putin thinks anymore, when all the big shots in our own country are sucking up to him. Back during his first term, it was arguable that Putin had some killer kompromat on him. But at this point, it’s hard to imagine anything Putin might have that could be more than a one-day PR problem for him. And with the world’s richest people cozying up to him, he hardly needs Putin’s approval.
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia: Good god, do not give the man ideas, he’ll forget he needs to get to Mars first before doing that!
TBone
@Steve LaBonne:
Awww, thank you SO much!
@Chief Oshkosh: THANK YOU too, the vet said I can start weaning today and see how he does! Also
HE POOPED and I’ve never been so glad to see a turd in my entire life! Taking stool sample in for testing today WOO HOO!
Also I got them to prescribe some good probiotics for Noah’s gut flora!
ssdd
Musk isn’t concerned about losing a chance to go to Mars because he was never actually going to Mars in the first place. The Mars mission was always bullshit marketing sizzle. What Musk wants to do is become the global ISP — that’s where the money is, Starlink. But he’ll never finish his network launching a couple dozen satellites at a time on Falcon 9s. He needs a giant cargo rocket that can dump hundreds into orbit at once. That, not Mars, is what Starship is for.
The Thin Black Duke
@zhena gogolia: If right-wingers weren’t blinded by their ideological bigotry, Trump’s cognitive and physical decline would be obvious to them. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I’ll be surprised if Trump survives to the end of his term and I believe his puppet masters are are aware of this as well, so they want him to check off on as many boxes of Project 2025’s as possible before he’s gone.
Doug R
@JoyceH:
Denmark is part of the EU and part of NATO.
Article 5 should be interesting.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist:
Maybe this is Pollyanna speak but I actually think this is largely out of the United States’ hands at this point. Carbon emissions coming *directly* from the US do not dominate global emissions and have been decreasing. Putin is doing what he does in part because he’s part of a petrochemical oligarchy that realizes its business is dying one way or another, and seeks to wreck the world to stop that. And Trump is 100% a creature/dupe/puppet of that oligarchy.
But the *Chinese* power structure? They understand. They’re massive polluters, have no commitment to saving the Earth, but they also see the writing on the wall and are not wedded to indefinite fossil fuel oligarchy. They are trying to roll with the punches.
And it’s interesting, but the petro-money autocracies of Arabia understand it too, that they’re dead as the dodo unless they figure something else out (not clear 100% what that is yet–they’re trying for outrageous luxury tourism; they also happen to have solar energy in abundance but there are technical challenges).
If we don’t get with the program it’ll hurt us more than it does anyone else.
Doug R
@Princess:
Yeah it does feel that someone is keeping him focused, I honestly didn’t think he had the focus to work through that entire Project 2025™ agenda.
Unless Stephen Miller has it all printed out already.
Doug R
@Matt McIrvin:
True capitalists like the Chinese understand there’s a lot of Yuan to be made rebuilding to a carbon neutral infrastructure.
And a lot of soft power too.
Matt McIrvin
@Doug R: Chinese use of “soft power” right now is on the level of what the United States managed in the late 20th century (sometime in spite of itself). I see Americans talking about Chinese social media in the way that people in the Eastern Bloc regarded Levi’s jeans and rock and roll.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Maureen McHugh’s science-fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, set in a future in which the US is a backwater dominated by a fantastically rich and autocratic (and LGBT-intolerant, which is a problem for the gay American-born-Chinese protagonist) PRC. Seems prescient in many ways. The least believable thing in it is… the bits set at a Mars colony (to get back to the subject of the thread)
RevRick
@Baud: My ugliest fantasy would be to dump them in the Atlantic all chained together.
But then I remember that the one impermissible prayer in Judaism is to wish harm on others.
That even goes so far as nixing, “I hope it’s not my house,” when you see fire trucks racing down your street.
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist:
Given that he’s threatening wars with Canada, Mexico, Panama, Europe, and seems hell bent on starting a Civil War ( or at the very least use the Army to patrol every major city in the country) he’s going to need a bigger and better military.
I’m beginning to suspect he may not be the world’s greatest military thinker
RevRick
@Doug R: Miller and Russell Vought will take care of implementation. Trump will continue to profess innocence.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: @Princess: I definitely think Trump has approved of everything. Even directed everything to begin with. But they know he’s mercurial, and they don’t want someone like Musk to change his mind on something. So they keep his focus on crazy shit where they can keep his interest up and it doesn’t really matter if someone talks him out of it.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist:
Despite being full of right-wing conservative people, our military services are by and large not stupid, reject fantasies like climate-change denial when they actually affect their practical operations, and have trained themselves to disobey illegal orders.
That makes them problematic from the POV of a fascist autocracy. They need to be broken and rebuilt with loyal puppets who will follow orders, even if those involve suicidal wars or attacking Americans.
Yes, that also reduces their ability to actually do anything that leads to ultimate success. But they can do a lot of damage in the short term. Am I thinking of historical analogues? Yes, all of them. Not just the Nazis either.
Matt McIrvin
@kalakal: Neither is Putin, who is wrecking his own country as part of his project to grind Ukraine into nonexistence, but Trump still seems to see him as a model.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe Trump (or whatever lunatic is filling his empty head with this nonsense) thinks this Greenland and Canada stuff will allow him to inspire the military something like the Wehrmacht’s original forays in Sudetenland and beyond. The thing lacking here if course is that the US military isn’t nursing hundreds of years of grudges against Greenland and Canada and thus would not be particularly motivated to shoot people they probably view as kind of American anyway. The difference is that the US hasn’t lost any wars that really mattered, just some failed colonial stuff that most of the population isn’t all that invested in. The only war that generated anything like that sort of blood revenge was the Civil War, which of course had nothing to do with Greenland or Canada, neither of which the US has made any serious historical claim on.
Another Scott
OMG, yes! That’s exactly what his Mars stuff is. It’s The Vagabonds all over again, but with Mars.
The riff-raff who don’t know their place ruined everything, again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: I’m interested to know your list of historical analogues, as I might be thinking of many of them.
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: +1
Best wishes,
Scott.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: the medical notebook is a super idea. When I trained in med admin for children, we had to write it down, chart it every time we gave meds.
and one time I was glad of said charting for myself. In hospital after broken bone surgery, I called the nurse station at 2 am my second night, and said it was time for my next dose of pain meds. They said no, the nurse says she already gave it to you. And I requested for her to please come check my charting, because she would have written it down. And, nope it wasn’t charted, and I needed that med, and once she saw I hadn’t gotten it, we fixed it.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: I have traveled afar in my life and everywhere I go, notes taking PAYS OFF!
RA
Any chance Musk will get so sure of his talents and abilities that he becomes the Stockton Rush of Mars exploration?
artem1s
the reason SpaceX got their government contracts in the first place was because their proposal aims specified developing asteroid mining as a route to keep the Mars program going thru multiple administration. It had the added benefit of the giving the private sector an incentive to staying involved. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin didn’t get the DoD contracts because their proposals were human flight focused (space tourism) instead. Now Soutpiel-X has derailed NASA and the DoD’s whole long game of keeping the private sector and Robber Barons engaged in getting humans back into space. He’s truly is the adderall addled mini-me TCFelon-in-waiting who ruins/kills everything he touches.
The W administration Great Recession and two forever wars effectively convinced a significant portion of the population and legislators that running the government and Wall Street like W did his ‘businesses’ was a bad idea. There are now some of the 1% and influental legislators that believe there are certain things (social security/health care) that are better managed by the government. And a significant portion of the voting block understands how important government funding and regulations are to their lives, even if they don’t always believe ‘those people’ shouldn’t benefit from those programs. As much as this is going to hurt, the next step might have to be reminding those who are too far removed from the Great Depression to remember it’s lessons and that handing the government functions over to the new age Robber Barons (Tech Bros) isn’t going to work any better than it did a century ago.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: my flag to write it down is when I think, oh, of course I’ll remember. That means write it down, don’t be silly.
Gaffer
Really? BJ is still posting twitter/x crap posts? Celebrating the hitler salute are we?
Another Scott
Meanwhile, why go to Mars when Afghanistan is still right there??
This timeline keeps getting stupider…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
taumaturgo
“Seven Democrats — including John Fetterman, Tim Kaine and Andy Kim — joined 52 Republicans to confirm Noem.”
From the greatest treat to Democracy to docile compliance. I would think the only job the democrats have in congress is to convince any republican of the treat to our system. If none come onboard, then vote to oppose, otherwise the party will further sink into insignificance.
WTFGhost
@Gloria DryGarden: My fear is that Trump is trying to copy the most successful strongman he knows. Can’t you hear the conversation between the two of them? “We need some land for security; *you* need some land for security. If *you* don’t interfere with *our* landgrab, *we* won’t interfere with yours!”
And Trump would be so stupid as to be *surprised* when Putin was the first to condemn his aggression against Greenland in the strongest possible terms.
Want to bet he’s also so stupid as to think withdrawing from NATO would make them *less* willing to defend Greenland? I don’t – you can’t make the odds attractive enough, because the situation’s simply too serious.
WTFGhost
@TBone: Glad to hear some *good* “Day One” news! Good, *life affirming* Day One news.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: The Confederate States of America, for one. Renowned, rightly or wrongly, for their martial valor and tactical brilliance. Clueless at grand strategy because their fundamental motivation was bonkers and evil, but had loaded oligarchs backing it.
Bret Devereaux likes to talk about the reality of Sparta vs. the myth of Sparta, which has been ascendant on the right today. What do you get from a total warrior society built on slavery and aggression? They were terrifying and impressive. They weren’t actually that great at winning wars without a lot of help.
But I’m not much of a military historian.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: NATO’s military power is of course much lesser without the United States, but Trump is dumb enough to think it’s zero and they’ll fold, like Putin’s plan to conquer Ukraine in an afternoon of blitzkrieg.
The UK and France have nuclear deterrents. I think France’s isn’t really under NATO control but of course it could be so used.
Matt McIrvin
@artem1s: The fact that the financial industry has not drunk Trump’s Kool-Aid in the way Big Tech has fascinates me.
Leto
It was! We were having a discussion about this in my Greco-Roman Civilization class, and I basically broke my poor teachers heart/spirit that, no, we’re not going to Mars for a whole host of reasons. I wanted to send this to him as a more thorough explanation of why.
Ty AL! ❤️
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: That’s one of the things that gives me some hope that Donnie won’t be able to get a critical mass on board for his stupid, dangerous, and Unamerican policies. The billionaires’ wealth is tied up with the stock market, bond market, art market, housing market, etc. They’re not going to be onboard with a self-inflicted 10-20% drop in GDP and crashing markets so that Miller can get his Whiteland or so that Donnie can grab a few million acres of glaciers. There’s going to be pushback.
Whether it will be effective is partially up to us as well.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: Trying to start wars on or near the North American landmass is one of the most profoundly dumb things even a guy like Trump could do, because of course our greatest advantage in war in the modern era has always been that they’re not happening here and it’s extremely difficult for some enemy far away to bring the war here–the best that they can manage is a traumatic localized attack like Pearl Harbor (not even in North America proper) or 9/11. But he’s proposing to remove that advantage by having the theater of war nearby, and doing it against the allies who are part of our protection–an alliance he thinks is useless and always has. Because he’s stupid.
There is no casus belli to motivate people except for the dumbest of Manifest Destiny/lebensraum stuff, but of course that’s worked in the past. Watch for some new attempt to gin up a grievance that we haven’t heard of already.
I am concerned that a bunch of the neocons who have opposed Trump thus far will be sucked in. It’s *easy* to get sucked in by war fever, surprisingly so, and it may scotch a lot of the liberal plans to come back in future elections even if the elections happen. That was how it worked under Dubya. But the wars may also be less popular, who knows.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: I’ve thought for a while that some of the super-rich actually like economic crashes, because they lose a lot of money on paper but it increases their power over other people, which is what they really get off on. They’re still super-rich, and the sudden great poverty of everyone else means that they have tremendous leverage.
But maybe that’s not the case for everyone.
Matt McIrvin
@Leto: At the moment we can’t even get a functioning Moon landing program together, even though it’s been going on for ages, and that’s a case where we have a known proof of technical feasibility in that we did it before.
Though the fact that we did it so long ago contributes to the popularity of conspiracy theories about how we really didn’t. I think many younger people today can’t understand how socio-politically weird the Cold War was. It made stuff possible that wouldn’t have happened in any other era.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Good point.
Donnie said years ago that he loved crashes because it meant he could buy up stuff on the cheap. It’s probably based on some J.P. Morgan quote that he remembered to try to impress the MotUs that he so wanted to be.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Marc
Far too late to reply (I do sleep occasionally), but when I first started working in SV in the mid-eighties, with very few exceptions, all of the programmers/engineers were white males. The most diverse companies were in SV were HP, Xerox, and Lockheed Missiles and Space, all were serious about their affirmative action programs (they had to be), but they tended to prefer graduates from certain universities or ex-military folks, which was not me. The only other company where one could walk into the door and actually see other black people was Silicon Graphics, as one of the founders was black. Having been a hiring manager back then, the way the game worked was that by the time resumes got to me, they were always white males. I don’t so much blame it on racism or sexism (they’d hire me but I’d usually come in through the back door as a contractor), as it was random white guys assuming all engineers looked and acted just like them.
Random story, I ended up working for Autodesk in Sausalito starting in ’88 after a back door entry as a contractor. They hired me and I eventually ended up managing one of their development teams (3000 employees, 500+ programmers, of those programmers, two women, one Asian-American, and me, pretty typical of SV at the time). One day I was walking though the telephone support area, and there was a new young black kid sitting there. Turned out he had just graduated from Berkeley with a double major in Math/CS and his GPA was in the top 10 of his class. He’d actually spoken to and given a resume to one of my co-workers who had gone to Berkeley to recruit some programmers, somehow, it never made it back to us. So, he applied for a phone support job in the newspaper. I went straight to the CEO and told him he needed to fix this, right now. I didn’t have an opening in my team, but they quickly found one for him. That’s just the way it worked back then.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: In the History Channel’s 2012 8-part series on Gilded Age plutocrats, The Men Who Built America, they had a bunch of current rich people comment. One of them was Donald Trump talking about how much he liked downturns because it was a opportunity to buy distressed property at great prices.
Shalimar
@Another Scott: should have read further to see your reply.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Shalimar: lolol.. nah. unless you’re talking opiates, that’s exactly the opposite.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Steve LaBonne: iron sky is a 2012 movie with zombie nazis on the moon? it’s not mars, but baby steps, right?
Ryan
I am all in favor of making sending Elon to Mars a national priority.
Geminid
@Marc: Thanks. I always appreciate your knowledgeable comments.You speak from a very solid base of knowledge, and not just on this subject which you know well firsthand.
Dan B
@Geminid: I bet I know the Michigan nuke. It was built a mile from the beachfront “cabin- sleeps 16” that we stayed at almost every summer. It had been willed to my father’s sisters who lived thousands of miles away so my father maintained it. The plant loomed and made creepy noises.
Geminid
@Dan B: The nuclear plant reopening is part a clean energy package Governor Whitmer pushed through the Michigan legislature.
There is a project to install the first of the new generation of smaller “modular: nuclear generation plants in one of the northern Rocky Mountain states (I forget which). It’s almost through the permitting phase. Bill Gates is one of the investors.
Dan B
@Geminid: That’s good for greenish energy and sad for the wonderful old resort in dunes that had forested over. The cottages were connected by bridges and walkways because you couldn’t build roads into the old dunes. And there were the Alewives and Lampreys that came in from the Saint Lawrence Seaway that decimated the lake salmon that were the apex predator. Swimming was in dead Alewives that crashed from overpopulation and disease.