Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“But what about the lurkers?”

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Bark louder, little dog.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

You are here: Home / Politics / Republicans in Disarray! / Friday Evening Cheap Shots Open Thread: Rapid! Unscheduled! Disassembly!

Friday Evening Cheap Shots Open Thread: Rapid! Unscheduled! Disassembly!

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Because sometimes we need an easy laugh. *Everything’s* a metaphor, now…

Breakup of SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Disrupts Florida Airports
Video showed the upper stage of the most powerful rocket ever built spinning out of control in space, a repeat of an unsuccessful test flight in January that led to debris falling over the Caribbean.
By Ken Chang
nyti.ms/41KW7oK

[image or embed]

— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) March 6, 2025 at 7:46 PM

SpaceX still calling it a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Also known as an explosion that sent debris falling over thousands of miles.

[image or embed]

— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) March 6, 2025 at 8:05 PM

FAA grounds SpaceX Starship yet again. It will not be able to fly again until SpaceX completes an investigation into this accident. Although the investigation from January's flight explosion did not last much longer than a month.

[image or embed]

— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) March 6, 2025 at 8:24 PM

Didn’t Trump say he’s asked Elon Musk to take the Space X Starship to the International Space Station to pick up the two astronauts who were stranded up there?

— It’s Too Early For This (@not2early.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 8:28 PM

[image or embed]

— Plantsmantx.bsky.social (@plantsmantx.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM

Reader Interactions

111Comments

  1. 1.

    Urza

    Please send the whole crew up on SpaceX rockets every day until the problems are solved.  Which problems you ask, all of them.

  3. 3.

    TONYG

    I’m sorry to repeat myself but — goddamn NPR.  I was listening to NPR bloviating a week or so ago and one of their talking heads was blathering about “the good things that Elon Musk has done” — and citing Space X as an example of Musk’s “talent for efficiency”.  I had to restrain myself from bludgeoning my radio.

  4. 4.

    prostratedragon

    TRUMP: “We have people up in space that Biden and Kamala left behind. Elon Musk is going to rescue the stranded astronauts.

    Should I join the mission and be part of the journey to save them?”

    YES!!! the people cried out.

  5. 5.

    Steve LaBonne

    No worries, Skum will just fire anyone at FAA who gets in his way. As happened to the guy who was the head of FAA when Trump took office.

  7. 7.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Open thread?

    Tomorrow, the Schaumberg IL library will hold its local author fair from 12-3

    I’ll be there along with a bunch of other writers with books to sell and sign. If you’re around, come meet up. Look for the little old lady

  8. 8.

    Shakti

    SpaceX explosions also affect cruises. This is cruise season iirc. If I had paid absurd amounts of money to be on a cruise right now in the Caribbean from Florida or Louisiana ports, I would be quite pissed off — that is if if could even get news [Starlink provides the extremely costly (and unreliable) connection for cruise ships].
    The astronauts should be able to come to earth without worrying that their transport back home is going to turn them into reentry ashes.

    Jokes/Not Jokes: They’ll either find a way to get themselves home or NASA will bring them home or the Blue Origin flight will and Lauren Sanchez will do some victory parade spread.

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    someone needs to hold a hearing and ask the FAA why they okayed this launch before they’d completed their investigation of the last explosion of the exact same type of rocket? Could it be because Musk was breathing down his neck demanding the date while his minions were crawling through their computers and threatening to fire everyone?

  11. 11.

    Halteclere

    I have two nephews who were traveling through Miami to see tomorrow’s Liverpool soccer match. Their 40 minute layover has turned into an 18 hour layover because of this explosion.  Last I heard, they were still hoping to find a flight that gets them to England on time.

  12. 12.

    Nukular Biskits

    Good evenin’, y’all!

    Putting my motorcycle back together, found I needed a 3/4″ 1/4″ button head bolt to finish remounting the windshield.  Went to big box hardware store only to find the one size I needed was the one size they didn’t have.

    So I bought four flowering crabapple trees.

  16. 16.

    Geminid .

    @Baud: I never wanted to take a cruise until I heard a travel agent pitch a one week cruise to Bermuda. It would leave Norfolk, Virginia on Sunday and return Saturday, with three days in Bermuda.

    That sounded pretty cool. Norfolk is a three hour drive. I’d need some new clothes, but that seems more a feature than a bug.

  19. 19.

    hells littlest angel

    Me personally, I wouldn’t refer to a rocket that is unable to get more than a few miles high without exploding as “the most powerful ever built.”

  20. 20.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Baud @Geminid .:

    I’m “meh” about cruises. Ms. Biskit loves ’em.

    I keep telling her that I go on all-expenses-paid cruises all the time (I get underway on US Navy ships) so I don’t understand why I’d pay good money to do something I already get paid to do.

    She refuses to listen to my good sense.

    Plus, this:

    No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
    James Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 16 March 1759

  21. 21.

    Jay

    Learned something new today.

    Tesla has a deal with other US Auto manufactures. Tesla sales in the EU “underwrite” US ICE sales for a combined Emissions rating, (Fleet).

    For that, Ford, GM, Stellantis  pay Tesla $20billion, annually.

    Tesla is not going to sell enough Tesla’s in the EU this year, to make that number. GM, Ford and Stellantis will have to pay massive carbon taxes to the EU.

  22. 22.

    Redshift

    It’s sad that so many people now associate “rapid unscheduled disassembly” with Elon and SpaceX. They just adopted it, it goes back at least to the 1970s, black humor among engineers because designing new rockets is hard and they blow up a lot. (I first heard it at a NASA public event.)

  24. 24.

    sab

    And we wonder why in a big country ( not a bunch of little countries)  we should have one FAA with big enough teeth to bite the world’s richest sad little man.

  29. 29.

    sab

    @TONYG: You will be happy to know that NPR will soon be Federally defunded, so I won’t get my local news and classical radio. I hope you are happy. I am not at all.

  33. 33.

    John Revolta

    *knock knock*

    “Who’s there?”

    “International Space Station, this is SpaceX! We’ve got a vehicle outside your station ready to pick you up and take you back to Earth!”

    “……………………..Naahh, we’re good.”

  35. 35.

    sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: My sister is flying out and then in. Bad idea all around. There are busses from Ohio to Canada, but they nave billions of frequent flyer miles on a particular US airline.

  39. 39.

    WTFGhost

    I’ve just completed two days of testing that might determine if I live or die. Um, yeah, I know, melodramatic much? But, it might. I’m exhausted, scared-but-dealing, and recognizing that, since I didn’t always know what was being measured, all I could do was the best I reasonably could, and hope the data supported what we need it to. I also wonder if we might extend the testing, if needed, to get more data, because, wow… I came out with just enough energy to realize my social skills and language skills are totally effed up (not “effect up” autocorrect), while I’m’ so anxious I’m babbling. And, part of me was like “hold on, I can feel a lot worse!” and part of me was relieved as heck to get out of there.

  48. 48.

    catclub

    @Shakti: The astronauts should be able to come to earth without worrying that their transport back home is going to turn them into reentry ashes.

    Space travel by any means is not that reliable.

    They ALWAYS have to worry they will turn into re-entry ashes.

  49. 49.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Without having read the opening post, only the headline (I know)

    I wouldn’t mind blowing something up, myself. Maybe only in fantasy life.

  50. 50.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @WTFGhost: uh oh. Do you have a list of your tools and skills that help when it becomes too much?

    ( positive vibes emojis )

  52. 52.

    catclub

    @Nukular Biskits: I’m “meh” about cruises. Ms. Biskit loves ’em.

     

    Looking at massive amounts water is wonderful. Looking at massive amounts of ice and water is amazing.

    …..Unless it is going to sink the vessel you are looking from.

  54. 54.

    Jay

    Family of 4 rescued after crossing the border into Canada, getting lost in the Quebec woods, hypothermic, no shoes, Tshirts, recovering in hospital, asylum claim being processed

  56. 56.

    bbleh

    I have the uncomfortable feeling that POTUS is heading toward a psychological rapid unscheduled disassembly …

  57. 57.

    prostratedragon

    Arts can be a path to self-knowledge. Watching North by Northwest, I’m reminded that that’s where I probably learned the incandescent rage provoked in me by cocksure stupidity. For one’s own safety, that is a good thing to know in these times.

  61. 61.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Gloria DryGarden:

    Reddish-pink.

    I have redbuds planted in the backyard but they seem to be struggling.  These are for the outside of the fence to replace the four pink dogwoods I planted last year but didn’t survive.

    Part of the problem in a subdivision is the the ground is hard-packed red clay with sod thrown on top … no real topsoil or subsoil.  That makes it hard for plants with deep roots (like trees) to get started.

    Plus, the dogwoods and redbuds really like partial sun whereas the crabapples supposedly prefer full sun, which is the case where I want to plant them.

  63. 63.

    Timill

    @Virginia: Since the rescue mission will be a Falcon9/Crew Dragon, it’s not likely to go wrong (an F9 went bang in 2015, and a second stage misfired last year on a Starlink launch, and they lost a secondary payload in 2012, for 455 successes from 458 launches)

    Trump is more likely to do a D D Harriman on launch, so I’m all in favor of it…

  64. 64.

    Miki

    Paul Krugman’s post today with a transcript of his conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele was incredible. Her metaphor of an immersion blender in an aquarium making fish soup that cannot be put back together is better than perfect.

    And perfectly descriptive of where we are.

  65. 65.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Nukular Biskits: it ate my comment.

    clay: clay buster amendment/ cotton bolls/ pesticide risk.

    expanded shale? I love this for my clay

    mattock and crow bar time, to poke deep holes?
    line the outer parts of your hole w green scraps for worms to compost, for some nice mycelium to grow in?

    I’m told where there’s lots of rain, the soil gets striped of soluble minerals. Your clay situation might be different than mine.

  66. 66.

    Jay

    @Nukular Biskits:

    People think the fix for clay is sand.

    It’s not, compost is the fix.

    Sod is grown in a clay mix, so it stays together when being cut and laid.

    Because of this, in the Lower Rainland, sod lawns become lakes when the rain hits.

  68. 68.

    YY_Sima Qian

    50% of what is wrong w/ the development of STEam human capital in the U.S., in two tweets:

    Asian Dawn@AsianDawn4

    Benjamin Choi, 17, tackled the high cost of prosthetics-typically $450,000 and requiring brain implants – by creating an affordable alternative. His Al-powered prosthetic, costing under $300, uses forehead electrodes to detect brain activity and translate it into movement. He trained the Al with thousands of brainwave data points, wrote 23,000+ lines of code, and analyzed nearly 900 pages of calculus

    litquidity@litcapital

    Just looked him up to see what he’s been up to since getting accepted into Harvard. He’s now an incoming quant intern at D.E. Shaw lmao

    The other 50% is not nearly enough college students enrolled in STEM majors, period, & too many of those that do are international students more likely to leave for the home countries (especially in the age of Trumpian misrule, & the reactionaries want to shut off that pipeline, too!

  69. 69.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Gloria DryGarden @Jay:

    Unfortunately, all I can do is use my rolling compost spreader to add organic material but this is going to be a long term project.

    I don’t know how they do construction in other parts of the country but here, for subdivisions, they pretty much clear the lot of the top 12″ – 24″ (give or take) and then backfill with red clay/sand mix, which is then compacted to provide a stable subsurface upon which to form and pour a slab.  The rest of the yard gets the same material, which is compacted into a near impenetrable crust during construction of the house.

    Finally, when the actual structure is completed, the landscaping contractor hauls more of the same stuff in, spreads it, compacts it and then throws sod down on top.

    So, yeah, it’s almost like laying sod on top of granite.

  70. 70.

    bbleh

    @Gloria DryGarden: @Miki:  musing about the Elonpocalypse today, I figured that, presuming there is a hereafter, governmental structures won’t be that hard to reconstitute — and even improve somewhat upon — since the templates and lessons-learned are still there, but getting people back to make them alive and functional is gonna be much less certain.  Some will return, and others will emerge, but whether it will be enough, in time, I dunno.

    The bigger question for me though is, what kind of country will be left, especially the relationship of the people to the government?  They’re leaning really hard into the nihilism now — burn it all down and Something Better will result — but when they have, and what’s left is nothing better and a lot less of anything, where are people’s heads gonna be?

    Adderall, ketamine — coupla emotionally stunted legacy-rich-boy junkies going nuts because they can.  Thanks again, Republicans!

  71. 71.

    danielx

    I gotta admit, “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is this best euphemism for “blowing the fuck up” that I’ve ever heard.

  72. 72.

    Geminid .

    @Gloria DryGarden: Yesterday Syria saw the heaviest fighting since the Assad regime fell three months ago. It’s a complex situation with a lot of conflicting accounts. I have followed this some through a Syrian news site, Levant 24 and a couple others. Reuters is also reporting on these developments, and I expect others like the BBC and Agence France Press are also.

  73. 73.

    bbleh

    @danielx: you may have seen, there was an “energetic event” prior to said R.U.D.  (Note: this is different from R.O.U.S.s.)

    What ever happened to (somewhat) simpler words like “vibration” and “disintegration”?  The extra verbiage comes off kinda … pompous.

  74. 74.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Good thread on the Sino-US technological competition, which the Trump Administration has basically conceded w/ DOGE gutting S&T spending, lots of useful links in the thread:

    Cole McFaul@colemcfaul

    Excited to share that my (first sole-authored!) op-ed just came out for @thehill! In it, I argue that Washington’s science cuts are a gift to Beijing. The US innovation advantage is diminishing. A thread putting these cuts in context RE: US-PRC competition. viz: @kyleichan 1/12

    First, context: China is rapidly overtaking the U.S. in critical technology sectors—including advanced manufacturing, consumer drones, EVs, and 5G. In all metrics of S&T excellence, China is catching up to the US. 2/12

    How has China caught up? One key factor: Imitation. For decades, Beijing has studied and replicated key aspects of the US innovation ecosystem. Natl. Natural Science Foundation of China is modeled explicitly on NSF; NSFC fashioned its biomedical research division after NIH 3/12

    While the WH proposes slashing indirect costs, Beijing introduced them into S&T grant administration processes to better support PRC research institutions, something it learned from US science agencies. 4/12

    There are other examples: the Thousand Talents Plan to offset US advantage in intl. talent recruitment, the creation of STAR stock exchange to rival the NASDAQ, large investments in “original innovation” and “patient capital”. 5/12

    Meanwhile, the US is cutting. Major layoffs at NSF/NASA/NIH/FDA/NIST will weaken US advantages in S&T—NSF is set to lose up to half (!!!) its staff. These moves will not ‘restore US S&T leadership’ to prep for sustained US-PRC tech competition. 6/12

    These cuts are only the latest in a long trend of weakening federal support for basic science. US govt spending on basic R&D is close to all time lows (as % of GDP). NSF’s budget was cut 8% last year. from 7/12

    The US’ greatest tech advantage over PRC is our basic R&D ecosystem. Universities train future scientists+entrepreneurs. They also attract the world’s best and brightest, who usually want to stay and contribute to US S&T ecosystem post-grad (We should let them!) 8/12

    The US gov plays an irreplaceable role here, funding R&D projects too risky for the private sector and supporting grad students. We can already see the impacts. Top universities are scaling back grad admissions and are freezing hiring—a disaster for future competitiveness. 9/12

    China isn’t waiting around. Beijing has ramped up talent recruitment efforts, and is investing more into S&T. They are already seizing on recent govt layoffs  10/12

    Without sustained federal support, the US innovation advantage over China will continue to diminish. We must avoid this own goal. 11/12

    Would love to hear your thoughts! Lot’s more in the article:
    Washington’s science cuts are a gift to Beijing

    All sensible advise, but still written as if for the Biden/Harris Administration.

    Even if the cuts are reversed later, the U.S. might find that a lot of its human capital has already been snapped up by competitors. & when it comes to economics & technology, all countries are competitors.

  75. 75.

    TONYG

    @Steve LaBonne: Yeah.  But the sad thing is that in my area (northern New Jersey) the alternatives to NPR for radio news are either AM commercial news radio (useless) or the Performative-Cosplay-“Leftist” radio station WBAI (10% useful, 90% infuriatingly stupid).  Maybe I should just listen to music!  (Or I could get a Neuralink attachment and just have Elon Musk tell me what to think directly.)

  77. 77.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Nukular Biskits: brutal! Im sorry!
    The city and water department contractors dug up a portion of my yard for a lead pipe main replacement. They mixed my almost decent topsoil in with this yellow clay, and they filled it, and compacted the bejesus out of it. later by layer.

    I used a large crow bar pry bar thing, hurling it straight down over and over. There were some parts I still couldn’t loosen enough to dig and replant with my xeriscape planties I’d saved. It was quite a lot of work.

  78. 78.

    Geminid .

    @TONYG: So you are from New Jersey. I’m curious: how’s the Democratic primary for Governor shaping up? Last I saw there were several viable candidates. Do you have a favorite? I’m guessing it’s not Josh Gottheimer.

  79. 79.

    HopefullyNotcassandra

    Wow

    Mr trump wants to know if we think he should get on a rocket that keeps exploding?

    Any awareness there, man?

  80. 80.

    bbleh

    @YY_Sima Qian: this one genuinely mystifies me.  The only … rationale I can imagine might be behind this (assuming it’s something other than ketamine-fueled frenzy) is some fuzzy notion that “private enterprise” will do the basic research and profit thereby, which of course is entirely at odds with the reality of how basic research is conducted in the US and subsequently taken up and profited upon by business (and has been since WWII btw, tyvm Vannevar Bush et al).  And frankly I’m not sure there even IS such a rationale, and that it isn’t all like a drunk guy deciding to re-do the whole kitchen one night, with predictable results.

    In addition to wrecking our geopolitical leadership, they’re wrecking major parts of our global economic leadership.  MAGA indeed …

  81. 81.

    WTFGhost

    @WTFGhost: I guess I should expand on this.

    I have a severe disability; it’s lifelong, so, it took a long-ass time to figure out what I have. Well – I very nearly worked myself to death, twice, as in, I had a plan to die, but, because I had a plan, I didn’t need to carry it out, you see? I could always wait a day, a week, two weeks, and, it never seemed that important once time passed.

    So: I worked until pain and exhaustion left me in a state in which I was constantly thinking about dying. Then, I found out that it’s nearly impossible to get ERISA disability for invisible disabilities. The rules are all stacked in favor of the employers, who’d rather see you die than win disability payments.

    So I got a lawyer, and I ran through a test that I thought showed I was good and properly disabled, and it does – it shows my exhaustion drops my IQ a significant amount.

    Well, make up some numbers. 20 points is a lot of IQ, and 130 IQ down to 110 IQ means you’re *still* above average. (Let’s not discuss what IQ *is* or how reliable it is, or how it’s overused.)

    One thing I don’t think people get, is, you don’t get the guy with the crippled arm to do the job that forces him to use that arm, right? Even if he doesn’t have to use it much, even if he doesn’t think it’s all that painful or uncomfortable, you don’t push people to use their disabled body parts, you let them push you so you’re convinced you’re not being mean.

    Well, using a defective brain hurts. You try to sum a column of numbers, and you know you can do it faster, and more easily, and it’s frustrating. You keep trying to draw conclusions, and you have to keep checking and re-checking things to make sure you’re keeping the thread of the problem, because, what if you made a mistake?

    That’s not enough to win disability. So, I went in for a two day assessment, and… well, I kind-of wish it was a 3 day assessment, it’s like, I only worked myself to *exhaustion* – I’ll be glad to go one more day if that’s what it takes!

    What if I don’t win my ERISA claim? Well… all my life, I’ve had to accept the pain other folks offer me, see? I’m always in the wrong, and my pain never matters, because my pains are invisible. To me, having worked myself nearly to death, the ERISA disability payments are what I deserve – literally, part of the contract with my employer.

    If I don’t get it, will I suddenly die? No, I’m already starting Social Security Disability applications, with an attorney to help, I’ll be 59.5 soon-ish, and that will let me pay off the house (which I bought in 2010 at fire sale prices)… it’s just, I’ll have lived a life doing my best, and gotten kicked in the ass for it every step of the way. I’m in constant pain, which robs me of every pleasure in life (yes, that one, that one too, and no, I can’t read(!!!), and, yes, *especially* that is ruined), and… I’ve been depressed (diagnosed) for over 31 years, and OMG I just want to lay a heavy burden down.

    If the assessment comes out in my favor, well, everything should be fine. I’m just terrified we didn’t get enough of the right data, and, of course, I won’t know more for a while, and, I’m afraid of what one conclusive kick in the teeth, in return for having done the right thing, would do.

  82. 82.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @bbleh: The hardcore libertarian-authoritarians around Trump want to establish a techno-feudalistic society. Having the state dole out money presents the state as an alternative.

    The sole exception, for now, is defense spending.

    This is not just Musk, & the rhyming w/ the Great Leap Forward is getting stronger all the time.

    As I’ve said, the national suicide continues apace.

  84. 84.

    bbleh

    @YY_Sima Qian: I get the techno-feudalism, and the similarity to the Great Leap Forward, and I can see where that might be feasible (if not a good thing) in some respects, but it almost doesn’t work at all with basic research.  Post-research development and commercialization perhaps, but to try to compartmentalize fundamental research that way — or worse, simply to assume it will happen somehow — is badly unrealistic imo.

    Not saying they’re thinking it through.  In fact, this would suggest they’re not.  And as you point out, and as mentioned in #70 above and in others’ comments, trying to put things back together after they’ve been busted up is NOT straightforward, especially as regards the people.

  85. 85.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @bbleh: These TechBros have never done research, they’ve only ever ordered researchers around. Their businesses don’t even engage in basic research. They are detached from reality & are too arrogant to know it.

  86. 86.

    pajaro

    MAGA, like the 1950’s.

    And one thing I remember from the 50’s was rockets exploding on launch pads.  One after another…as we tried to keep up with the Russkies, who had already put their satellites into orbit, which we were told to look for in the night Soviet sky.

    They said they would bury us.  God knows it took them awhile, but here we are, under the boot of Russia, with our rockets blowing up.

  87. 87.

    Nettoyeur

    “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
    That’s not my department, ” says Wernher von Braun.” by Tom Lehrer

  88. 88.

    Bill Arnold

    @YY_Sima Qian:
    There has been significant research, including publication, some of it fundamental, in corporate laboratories for many decades. AT&T, IBM, others. There still is, but much less. And always with a focus on areas with monetization potential, though e.g. IBM’s investments in quantum computing have continued for decades, with no products that outperform conventional computers, yet. (Yeah, with funding from an interested US government agency that also has long-term visions.)

  90. 90.

    Geminid .

    @YY_Sima Qian: Have you heard of the Teknocracy movement? It was popular in the 1930s. They believed that society should be managed by experts, in place of democracy.

    I had never heard of this until I encountered the term in a New Lines Magazine article about Elon Musk. It turns out his grandfather Joshua Haldeman was a proponent of Teknokracy.

    The article was written by  Capetown-based reporter Joseph Dana. It was published February 17 and titled:

       The Worldview of the Afrikaner Diaspora Now Haunts the US

    Elon Musk and other tech moguls with roots in apartheid era South Africa have been shaped by the history of right wing white nationalism.

    This link ought to work:

    newlinesmag.com/argument/the-worldview-of-the-afrikaner-diaspora-now-haunts-the-us/

    Like most New Lines articles, this one is long and in-depth. Its conclusion:

       Apartheid’s deepest ideas are back. They are circulating in the Western world. They have purchase.

  91. 91.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Geminid .: Thanks for the link. I’ve not heard the term, but the concept in popular in East Asia.I think the difference is that East Asian polities are still very heavily influenced by Confucianism of the responsibility of the rulers to the ruled, as well as the developmental mindset of growing the pie & lifting all moats. The TechBros want to reestablish feudalism to entrench their positions.

  92. 92.

    Geminid .

    @YY_Sima Qian: I ran into New Lines Magazine last December when Oz Katerji recommended its founder, Syrian American Hassan I. Hassan, for his Syria reporting and analysis.

    New Lines is quite a resource, with in-depth articles covering a wide variety of subjects. They are all long and detailed, which is a  challenge for me. I’m so used to reading news aggregation sites my powers of concentration have declined.

  93. 93.

    TONYG

    Wait.  So Space X is going yo “investigate” its own fuckup???!   What’s next?   Murderers will conduct their iwn homicide investigations?

  94. 94.

    Another Scott

    @WTFGhost: With everyone else here, I’m hoping for a positive and peaceful path forward for you.

    Good luck!

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  96. 96.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Geminid .: you need warmer clothes than you think you would for the days at sea. I did a cruise to Bermuda out of Baltimore once. I would probably be willing to go on more cruises if they ever get Covid and norovirus under control, but Mr. Rudbek gets extremely antsy about being confined to a ship. I tend to point out the themed knitting/crafting cruises to him and we joke about him not wanting to be confined to the ship.

  97. 97.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Nukular Biskits: you’re like my dad was about going camping (the Army made him sleep out in the woods in a tent, he would only do it if he was paid to do it.)

  99. 99.

    Another Scott

    @YY_Sima Qian: Relatedly, … NotebookCheck.net:

    When Elon Musk fired Tesla’s battery head Drew Baglino last spring, he also dismissed the 4680 cell production facilities manager at Giga Texas.

    Drew reportedly wanted to develop the 4680 battery as detailed by Elon Musk himself during Battery Day way back in 2020, with 50% cost reduction compared to Tesla’s more conventional batteries.

    That was taking too much time, though, and Elon felt that if Tesla can’t realize any type of cost reduction by the end of the year, it might as well order 4680 batteries from its suppliers like LG, whose factory in Arizona will churn 4680 cells with an advanced manufacturing process.

    Since then, however, Tesla announced that it has cracked the dry cathode production method that allows it to make the 4680 battery costs largely competitive, and started equipping the Cybertruck with the new cells.

    According to the head of the world’s largest battery maker CATL, however, the 4680 battery as envisioned by Musk “is going to fail and never be successful,” and he reportedly showed him why, leaving him “silent”.

    For CATL’s Chairman Robin Zeng, Elon Musk’s issue is overpromising. “Maybe something needs five years. But he says two years. I definitely asked him why. He told me he wanted to push people,” said Zeng.

    The world’s two biggest EV battery makers CATL and BYD do iterative upgrades to their battery design and chemistry instead, always with the goal that they must be suitable for mass production. This approach has proven correct so far, despite that they have successful solid-state or sodium-ion battery projects in development or execution, too.

    BYD Blade vs Tesla 4680 battery performance

    A fresh teardown of a BYD Blade and Tesla 4680 battery cell now comes to show that Zeng may have had a point. According to a study led by Jonas Gorsch, a researcher at Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components at RWTH Aachen University, the prismatic BYD cell has twice the thermal efficiency of Tesla’s 4680 battery.

    His team took apart the two cells to analyze their housing construction, dimensions, thermal specifications, and the exact material composition and costs of their electrodes, finding intriguing differences as well as similarities, like laser welding.

    Tesla’s 4680 battery returned 241 Wh/kg energy density compared to the 160 Wh/kg Blade cell, which is explicable considering it is nickel-based, while the BYD battery is with the more affordable LFP chemistry.

    When charging current was applied, though, the researchers noticed something off with Tesla’s 4680 battery cell:

    The Tesla 4680 cell resistance increases at high SOC [state of charge] values, especially at low temperatures, whereas the BYD Blade cell resistance decreases with higher SOCs. The reason for this observation could be an increased charge transfer resistance in and at the surface of the anode due to a high lithium concentration, as these resistances tend to rise with increased SOC. This needs to be investigated further; a rise in the total cell resistance at higher SOC is unusual, as the cathode and cathode surface charge transfer decreases with higher SOCs, offsetting the anode resistance increase.

    […]

    (Emphasis added.)

    The graphs show that the battery resistance of the fancy Tesla battery is much higher and thus the parasitic heating of cell is 2x that of the BYD cell. Heating during charging is one of the major limits in fast charging.

    Rather than carefully doing the iterative work to carefully measure what’s happening and iteratively figure things out to overcome problems, Melon makes up arbitrary numbers and “wants to push people”. It’s his approach.

    And progress in life doesn’t work that way for long…

    Thanks.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  100. 100.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @YY_Sima Qian: and I would say that another huge percentage of the problem is that most of the funding and training/education goes to young able-bodied white men (with some Asian men in the mix, particularly in the computer science and electrical engineering sector).

  101. 101.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @YY_Sima Qian: I wish we had these qualities here

    responsibility of the rulers to the ruled, as well as the developmental mindset of growing the pie & lifting all moats.

  102. 102.

    Another Scott

    @Bill Arnold: As you know, AT&T was a special case because it was a highly regulated monopoly.  It could afford to do basic research based on stable, predictable internal funding streams, and because of receiving lots of government contracts (there were fascinating volumes in the 1960s Bell System Technical Journal of their scientists and mathematicians doing the derivations of the equations of motion for the most efficient paths to the Moon for NASA) because they had a hugely successful track record in basic research by experts who had worked on their field for decades.  Kinda similarly for RCA and IBM and GE and many of the big defense contractors (Honeywell, General Dynamics, Hughes, etc.).

    When those monopolies and stable funding sources went away, and the MBAs were called in to goose the stock price, those investments in basic and early applied research went away and the labs closed or shrank dramatically.

    It can, and often does, take 50 years or more to go from an idea to an important commercial product.  Take blue LEDs and solid-state lighting.  Almost no private research labs are willing or able to make that kind of investment anymore.  They tweak ideas that are shown to work and make the products better (and that’s vitally important!), but once someone shows that something is possible, it’s a clear path to making it better. Basic research is the foundation for that clear path, the foundation to create that new industry by actually showing that the new thing is possible in the first place. More of the research is being done in universities these days, but then what happens to the PhDs and post-docs when they’re done with that research?  There are only so many positions in academia, and many people who do research aren’t that interested in teaching or writing 20 research proposals with the hope of getting one of them funded… Who wants to spend another 5-10 years in school before getting a “real” job when the prospects of actually getting a “real” job in that field are bleak??

    Yeah, there are important exceptions.  IBM in nano and quantum stuff, Hypres in superconducting circuits, etc. But there are fewer organizations that have that kind of depth and history, so the risk is that fancy new startups chasing some new breakthrough will spin their wheels a lot, reinventing stuff from 30-40 years ago because too much of the important history has been forgotten.

    Research always goes in cycles. Here’s hoping that the depth of the trough this time around isn’t as bad as the path 47 is on could make it. :-(

    [/soap-box]

    Thanks.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  103. 103.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Gloria DryGarden: It’s an ideal that is often not lived up to in reality, but the population has that expectation, & the ruling classes & government have to at least make the serious appearance of living up to the ideals to maintain legitimacy, or they will face revolution (or lose elections). The civil services in societies w/ strong Confucian influences have far deeper histories & stronger ethos.

    There is a reason the corruption one finds in the PRC & Vietnam is different in nature that than in India or Indonesia.

  104. 104.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Geminid .: I have read articles from New Lines, on recommendation by people I follow on X & BlueSky. They are indeed very good.

  105. 105.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Kayla Rudbek: That, too. & they then want to chase the money upon graduation.

    Participation in STEM fields skew heavily male in the PRC, too, but not to the degree as in the U.S.

  107. 107.

    sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: My sister is sceptical about your point of view on staying in China, but that is just her and she is a normie here and wary in China. Although she is quite shocked about here.

    Unlike her, I have legal training here and I am beyond shocked about how quickly things have collapsed here and how none of the guard rails and checks and balances have worked.

    My conspiracy theory: Putin robbed his own country of their petrol money and used a chunk of that money to buy the Republican Party. And Republicans cannot challenge him because accepting his money was actually illegal, so they cannot discuss why they are behaving as they do. Or they are actually that venal and money grubbing.

  108. 108.

    sab

    @sab: So we are all Russia now, which in two thousand years has not managed to develop a government better than the current thugs are in control. And they want to spread that thuggery across Europe and the Americas.

  109. 109.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @sab: I have my own concerns about staying in the PRC long term. Even aside from the ever more constrained space for expression, succession after Xi passes will be a huge unknown & potentially dangerous moment, & there is no outward sign that Xi is making even long term preparations.

    OTOH, a huge amount of disruption is baked in at this point from AGW, & I think the PRC probably the greatest level of state capacity to face the challenges.

    If neither the U.S. nor the PRC are viable places, there will not be many other places that will be much better.

    Also, at this point, I can be close to a normie in the PRC, & the U.S. feels slightly alien, & increasingly alienated from.

  110. 110.

    sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: I am beyond white ( British ancestry) and even I feel alienated from my country’s government. All of my grandchildren and all of my nephews and nieces are mixed race, some black, some east Asian ( China or Japan), and they all feel threatened here by our government. Just normies trying to live their lives.

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