i am coming around to the idea that we need a federally sponsored jingling keys app that employs subliminal messaging to subversively encourage people to swap to flip phones and leave the social internet forever
[image or embed]— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) July 23, 2025 at 10:47 AM
From Wired, “Searching for Humanity’s Last Hope—and a Taste of the Future—at the Tesla Diner”:
Renuka Veerasingam believes Elon Musk is humanity’s last hope. “I want to go to Mars, and he is going to take us,” she says. “Space is the final frontier. It’s in our DNA to find the final frontier—to keep going until we get to the edge.”
Though Veerasingam is 140 million miles from Mars, she is currently on the edge of Santa Monica Boulevard and North Orange Drive, in the heart of Hollywood, for the opening of the new Tesla Diner, modeled in the likeness of the same kind of retro-futuristic space station she one day dreams of inhabiting on the Red Planet.
An actress who lives in Toluca Lake, Veerasingam wanted to see Musk’s latest window into the future up close. Every one of the 200-plus people assembled have their reason for coming, many seemingly curious to find out what the seeming Midas touch of Musk has to offer on a Tuesday afternoon in July…
That vision came to life at exactly 4:20 pm Monday, a cherished stoner reference of Musk’s and one that probably peaked when he was still in college. WIRED’s photographer, Ethan Noah Roy, was there when the doors opened, meeting a man who had dedicated the last 13 years of his life to work at Tesla with the sole purpose of meeting Musk. “That has yet to happen,” he said.
I arrive in the middle of the lunch rush, around 1 pm the following day, with some 80 other people waiting to get in. In the parking lot, there are 80 v4 Supercharger stalls— “the largest urban Supercharger in the world,” according to Tesla—and two 45-foot movie screens that showed a selection of movies, TV clips, and Tesla ads. Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation play as servers on roller skates hand out free ice cream to people waiting in line. For now, parking only accommodates Teslas and other EVs. Customers with gas-powered cars were instructed by security to park on the street…
Despite being advised to get the burger and apple pie, I opt for a hotdog, fries, a salad, and the creamsicle “charged soda” instead, totaling $40.61—and am directed to the pickup counter, where even more people are waiting for their number to be called.
The aesthetic inside the diner is “very modern, very Jetsons,” says local Joseph Macken, referring to the 1962 cartoon about a family living in a futuristic utopia with flying cars and a robot maid. (Veerasingam loves the bathrooms “because it’s really like you are in a capsule,” on a spaceship, “looking at earth looking down at you.”) But much of it is very typical of an American diner: curved white booths and a long countertop that peers into the kitchen. From behind the countertop, chef Eric Greenspan woofs orders to staff, calling out numbers and making sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. If you’ve ever watched an episode of The Bear you know the clattering from the belly of the kitchen well. There’s a brute choreography to everything happening—loud, constant, unblinking. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” blares from the speakers…
… Fusing the nostalgia of a McDonald’s Happy Meal with the gloss of Tesla branding, food is served in Cybertruck boxes with Cybertruck-shaped wooden forks. Every part of the experience is a reminder of—and an opportunity to sell—the Tesla ethos.
“I think this might be the new spot,” says Xavier Hardy, a realtor and DJ, who orders the chicken and waffles, and raves about the black pepper mayo sauce it came with. “I saw that the diner is 24 hours. I feel everyone is going to come here after events, clubs. All the celebs will probably be here. I’m surprised no other car companies have thought of this before. And the food isn’t too expensive either.”
I mention to Hardy that the hot dog—which has a rubbery texture and taste—costs $17 dollars (if you opt to add the cheese and Wagyu chili).
“For some people, that’s nothing though,” he says…
It’s important that elected Democrats be committed to obliterating SpaceX, which serves as a vehicle for funding Nazis and their confederates as they destroy democracy in America. SpaceX’s debatable benefits to science are far outweighed by its concrete harms.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article…— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Bloomberg — “SpaceX Warns Investors Elon Musk Could Return to US Politics” [no paywall]:
There’s a new warning tucked into the tender offer for Elon Musk’s SpaceX: The billionaire may not be done with politics just yet.
Musk previously served as senior adviser to President Donald Trump “in connection with the Department of Government Efficiency and may in the future serve in similar roles and devote significant time and energy to such roles,” according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and people familiar with the content who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
The company added the language laying out such “risk factors” in paperwork sent to investors discussing the transaction. It was the first time this language is believed to have appeared in these tender offers, some of these people said.
SpaceX’s most recent offer values the rocket and satellite maker at about $400 billion, which would make it the most valuable private company in the world…
SpaceX is a key government contractor with both NASA and the US military. Besides launching its Falcon rockets and work developing Starship, which is designed to take humans to Mars, SpaceX oversees a network of roughly 8,000 space-based satellites known as Starlink.
As part of SpaceX’s recent tender offer, certain shareholders will be allowed to sell stakes in the company — an increasingly popular option for startups that are staying private longer, but want to give early employees and investors a chance to cash out.
SpaceX will buy back as much as $1.25 billion worth of shares from staff and other holders, Bloomberg reported.
this man has never built a sustainably profitable business, and is currently destroying the fundamentals and public image of his other companies at an absurd rate… why would anyone ever give him billions more?
[image or embed]— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) July 22, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Of course, there’s the argument that SpaceX is going to blow itself up: Per NYMag, “Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed? The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.”
And that’s despite all the illicit assistance Musk’s fellow grifter can provide… ProPublica, “Trump Administration Looking to Slash Environmental Protection Rules for Rocket Launches “…
this kind of behavior should force the government to seize your wealth and commit you to a reeducation camp where you learn how to throw a football and bake a cake and talk to someone about the weather
[image or embed]— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) July 23, 2025 at 10:24 PM
(For the uninitiated, the cartoon character that looks vaguely like young Charlie Sheen is Musk’s hand-chosen avatar. The blonde waifu was crowd-sourced for maximum appeal to Twitter’s remaining hardcore Elon fanbois. The background is, yes, the Tesla Diner. And the red pandas are some kind of DOGE reference, which I can’t be arsed to investigate further.)
War for Ukraine Day 1,246: The Reversal
SpaceUnit
Walked past a parked Tesla the other day and it had a bumper sticker explaining that they’d bought the car before they realized that Elon was an asshole. Pretty funny.
BellyCat
@SpaceUnit: The bumper sticker should have a line that permits the owner to write, with a fat Sharpie, the date reality dawned on them.
WTFGhost
The first most important thing to understand about inhabiting Mars is, since Mars has no magnetosphere, people *can’t* live there long term; you need a magnetic field to deflect cosmic rays. Cosmic rays will *not* give you the power to stretch, “flame on!”, go invisible, or turn into a rocky strong man – they will, instead, kill you.
Now, if Musk has a massive plan to create an artificial magnetosphere around mars, I’ve seen scientists speculate that, hey, maybe, possibly, it could be done. But the first step of his mars colonization does not seem to be investing umpty billion dollars in a hairbrained scheme that nevertheless might work.
But so far, I’ve heard him thinking like Heinlein, “we just have to get there, and then people will come, for a dream of unparalleled economic freedom, and opportunity,” and, it was okay when Heinlein had that thought, because we didn’t yet realize mars is uninhabitable… but now we do.
And Musk isn’t just trying to tell a fine story about a young white man who will only ever meet 2-3 mannequin women throughout his adventures (sorry, Mr. Heinlein, but… dude!). Musk is supposedly the guy who might pull it off.
Well, if it’s your leg, yes, he might pull that off!
Chetan Murthy
@WTFGhost: Yes, this is the key thing that all those “Occupy Mars” idiots skip over. And once you understand this, then (as Charlie Stross said) it becomes clear that if you’re serious about colonizing Mars, then you should start by colonizing Antarctica — digging under the ice, thru the rock, to build habitations down there. B/c it’ll be easier than -anything- you’re going to have to do on Mars, easier by a good number of millions of miles. And of course, a magnetosphere. And an atmosphere. etc.
pacem appellant
@WTFGhost: Seconded. There is a reason there isn’t life on Mars. I’ll have to dig up the essay, but someone righteously pointed out that Antarctica, where humans notoriously die because it’s so inhospitable to life, is 10,000X more habitable than even the warmest region of Mars.
Splitting Image
@Chetan Murthy:
The other thing that they skip over is that any colonization project is going to have to be hardcore communist, with an ethos of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Freedom, liberty, and market-driven economics won’t get it done. If Musk ever did manage to get a group of people to Mars, they’d have to kill him five minutes later because he’d be dead weight.
Gin & Tonic
@Splitting Image: I say we send him and his fanbois there toot sweet. Because nobody is ever coming back.
Harrison Wesley
What a horrifying future. Turn our world into a 1950s science fiction movie.
Aziz, light!
Decades from now there may be a small scientific base on Mars, but no one for centuries is going to settle this very dead and deadly planet. If you have to live your entire life underground, you may as well do that here, where there is air to breathe. I enjoy science fiction, but I know what the word fiction means.
bjacques
I wouldn’t live on Mars for all the Can-D and Perky Pat layouts in the world.
And I just don’t get chicken and waffles, which you can even get in the junk food joints in the tourist Ground Zero of Amsterdam. I thought it was meant to be a joke in the movie Tapeheads. I’ve had my mind changed about a lot of things since then but not that. (Oldish fart rant / TEDx Talk ends.)
NotMax
Why Musk Is Wrong About Mars.
Chetan Murthy
@bjacques: PK Dick represent!
Tony Jay
I love it for Musk that he’s reduced to de-aging himself on short films to try and make it look less weird that he’s going on supervised dates with a blonde cartoon.
At least when Thiel makes films of himself dressed up in black armour and draining blood from beautiful teenagers with prosthetic pointy ears, it’s only for his personal viewing pleasure.
NotMax
@bjacques
Pennsylvania Dutch chicken and waffles leaves the southern style floundering in the dust.
Marc
Heh! Y’all work for the company now, and if you want to keep on eating and breathing, you better get on back to work, now!
bjacques
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah! PKD invented shitty futures filled with shitty people, pretty much like his present (Southern California in the mid-1960s) and got it right more often than not. And Musk became the Palmer Eldritch of Xitter.
Marc
It’s funny, it only happened a few weeks ago, but it seems that a lot of people have forgotten that this latest Epstein flap was started by the most honorable Technoking Elon I with his Xitter proclamations. I’m surprised he still retains his head, unless he has a lot more data…
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
The “epic bacon” reminds me of the epipen automiscorrected text exchange.
So, the Berman/Braga straightwashed future? Seems like a thing Musk would approve up to a point.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Harrison Wesley: A lot of GenX and later-gens’ cultural anger comes from being cheated of the gleaming, naively tech-friendly, cheap-energy-infused future promised up until the mid-70s. Flying cars, self-catering kitchens, 30-hour work weeks with time off for art and culture, all mysteriously vanished with Three Mile island and the oil crisis of ’73. Discovering that tech just requires you to work longer, that flying cars are mass suicide when drivers are so unskilled/self-absorbed they can’t not kill each other on the ground let alone in the air, that the power required for that future involves energy production nobody can supply, and all the rest of the unrealized predictions of a better, comfier, (whiter?) lifestyle made a lot of folks very angry even if they don’t realize or won’t admit it.
Nostalgia for that kind of predicted future drives a lot of conservatist rejection of the collective lifestyle improvements that technology can provide.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@SpaceUnit: Whoever makes those bumper stickers is making a killing.
Quaker in a Basement
bsky.app/profile/rotanen.bsky.social/post/3lul2445k522c
Harrison Wesley
2001: a processed pork odyssey
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Sigh. I’d rather be living in the world where Elon Musk has to license the Tesla name from Nikola Tesla’s nuclear-powered Nazi-punching AI brain-child.
Baud
Red pandas are pretty cute. I’m sorry to see them associated with Elon Musk.
Matt McIrvin
@Splitting Image: A large corporation already looks like a socialist command economy on the inside. (Ones that try to apply libertarian competition principles internally, instead, tend to destroy themselves.)
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: Mid-20th-century science fiction was already usually ignoring astronomical evidence of how inhospitable Mars and Venus were. The space probe era just made it more obvious.
Reboot
Renuka Veerasingam is an actress (hired?). “I want to go to Mars, and he is going to take us…. Space is the final frontier. It’s in our DNA to find the final frontier—to keep going until we get to the edge” sounds scripted.
Splitting Image
@Marc:
That’s the thing. If you’re gonna say that to your employees, you need to have a police force backing you up, and on Mars the nearest police force is going to be 150 million miles away.
Deputinize America
Elon Musk is a walking ad for the restoration of peer-based social correction in the form of daily swirlies and constant mockery of his weirdness in middle school and high school. Guarantee he’d have had the nerdy smart ads knocked out of him at mine and would have learned to keep his goofy thoughts in check.
The Alpha Betas were the good guys in “Revenge of the Nerds”.
Baud
@Deputinize America:
Given that Trump is Biff from Back to the Future, it feels like the nerds, jocks, and rich kids have joined forces against us without us noticing.
I think it’s because we let women be presidential nominees.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize America: There were no good guys in “Revenge of the Nerds.” Trumpism is a 100% bully ideology and the rednecks who regularly beat me up in junior high are, I am sure, all in on it.
I think the spectacle of DOGE’s futurist kids destroying science funding is instructive–it’s aesthetic, vibey geekdom destroying the kind that actually learns and innovates.
Baud
Deputinize America
@Baud:
Ah, but in true 80s fashion, Marty McFly forgot all about that macho shit and learned how to play guitar.
Sports and music greed isn’t going to kill us all like nerd greed will.
p.a.
Did the modern corporation structure its top-down decision-making and command/control structure after the USSR, or did the USSR design its based on the corporation? Because both are un-and-anti democratic.
Baud
As it should be
Baud
Just learned of this kerfuffle.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize America: Speaking completely seriously–pro-bullying advocacy is a major right-wing culture war shibbloeth. They want to bring back regular beatings in school for LGBT people, minorities, the disabled etc. The way I remember it, the people who got the worst of it were the kids with cerebral palsy. So, no, I ain’t signing up for that.
But I do think the jock-nerd dichotomy we all believed in was a harmful thing that obscured more than it illuminated. A thing that I think needs more attention is the cultural *opposition* between science and engineering, something I saw slowly gathering during the 1990s or so.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, at some point, engineers went right and scientists went or stayed left.
My only guess is that engineers learned the rules well, and became rigid rule followers, but lost the ability to expand their thinking on other topics.
All generally speaking, of course.
ETA:
Both professions share a sad history of misogyny.
p.a.
@Baud: Back in Eisenhower-times the “hard” scientists had roughly split lib/con self-definition. Trending more and more liberal over time as conservatism becomes crackpotism. Except, as noted, engineers.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: Would definitely try it, but fried chicken RULES!
Baud
@p.a.:
Makes sense. Modern right wing thought is fundamentally incompatible with the scientific thought process. Indeed, modern science and liberalism have the same historical roots.
But engineering rules are engineering rules in any ideology.
Deputinize America
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve had surprising success with my air fryer.
Deputinize America
theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/24/far-right-israeli-politicians-and-settlers-discuss-luxury-gaza-riv…
Now THAT’S a face demanding that a fist be rammed into it repeatedly.
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: The right’s push for “creation science” and opposition to science-supported environmentalism contributed. There was an observation on Usenet talk.origins in the 1990s, the “Salem Hypothesis”, that a person claiming scientific credentials and advocating creationism was almost always an engineer, often a EE.
Professor Bigfoot
@SpaceUnit: Saw one a couple of weeks ago with a sticker that said “Anti-Elon Tesla Club.”
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize America: I’m air fryer-curious but am waiting for my ancient toaster oven to go tits-up so as to have the counterspace to add a small appliance. I’m leaning toward a multifunction model that is a toaster oven, rotisserie, etc
@Professor Bigfoot: I see stickers like that on Teslas, and hat tip to those drivers, but I saw one on a Cybertruck, and no, you don’t get a pass, dude — Musk was fully out as a fascist prick before those dumpsters rolled off the line.
Deputinize America
@Betty Cracker:
If you go with the instapot version like mine, it doubles as a pretty sizable pressure cooker. I use the hell out of it for things like bone broth, pho broth and to do a quick version of bean soup straight from the dry bag without soaking, all in about 45 minutes. There’s a sauté function that works great for stews, etc.
ETA – and fries done in the air fryer are superior. I cut my potatoes and soak in salt water for about an hour before frying, and season them with Old Bay.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Fixed
different-church-lady
Okay, just hear me out here…. What if we gave all the money in the world to an eight-year-old?
cmorenc
@Baud:
Those photos of Trump posing with a smirky-grin face are precisely those of the school bully enjoying sadistically taunting some kid he thinks too helplessly weak to resist or retaliate, after he’s stolen their lunch money or stuffed them in a locker.
Yep, Biff exactly.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
An eight year old would probably design a better truck.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Friend who was a professional chef has naught but good things to say about his Sur la table machine. Have seen them at Target as well as Amazon. Wait for Black Friday sales?
(Don’t have the space in my Lilliputian kitchen for one.)
different-church-lady
@Baud: I absolutely noticed.
Booger
@Harrison Wesley: Open the pork bay doors, Ham!
vigilhorn
At first glance, I thought the robot-thingy with a CRT for a head sitting at Elon’s table said “Supercrook”.
p.a.
@Baud: The guy on youtube: “Care Care Nut” described it as looking like a nine year old was trying to draw a car.
p.a.
How many shitheads sticker their Teslas just to avoid issues but still support Melon?
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: Yep, the Swastikar Wankpanzer was a Nazi product from start to finish.
I know some truly wonderful people who own Teslas from “back inna day” so I’m willing to give many of them a pass.
But not the Wankpanzer.
Baud
@p.a.:
It’s like a modern version of Passover.
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: We have a Cuisinart toaster oven/air fryer and it’s GREAT.
In fact, it’s the second of its name, the first one we killed in 3 years of use.
I only have two “complaints” about it– for toast, it seems to take forever (8 minute toasting cycle??) and for ordinary baking, everything has to be done 50 degrees cooler than the recipe and for some time less than the recipe calls for.
AND if we have fried takeout leftovers, they reheat marvelously in it. Never used to bring home fried leftovers ’cause what was the point, they never reheated well… until now.
NotMax
@NotMax
For my household of one, a compact 2 quart air fryer has worked out well. Ought to be just as suitable for a household of two, No rotisserie, however, if that’s your thing.
Bit of a PITA to clean unless you have a dishwasher (I don’t) but that’s the case with all such similar units.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
hells littlest angel
A Mars colonist would be long dead before cosmic rays could harm them — from suffocation, exposure, or embarrassment.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Ramalama
@Deputinize America:
what
What
What device is this, exactly?
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: Thanks for the rec — will check it out! Might be a while before my toaster oven gives up the ghost. I too am cursed with a small kitchen; there is room for exactly one small appliance.
@Professor Bigfoot: 8 minutes for toast? Good lord! Still, it sounds like a worthwhile machine if it can reheat fried leftovers to an acceptably crunchy state. I like Cuisinart products; the elderly toaster oven is one that’s been faithfully toasting bagels, reheating leftovers, etc., for about a decade now.
Baud
NotMax
@hells littlest angel
Martian cookbook: 101 ways to cook pooptatoes.
:)
Nettoyeur
@p.a.: Capitalism came first. Stalin made it State Capitalism with Total Company Cities like Magnitogorsk and Norilsk. Gulags more or less, but with much better food, heated apartments, and playgrounds.
NotMax
@Ramalama
Yup. Beans cooked in the Instant Pot do not need presoaking.
Librettist
Crossing the credulity event horizon.
Your dystopian off-world future is a strip and stuff warehouse in the inland empire.
Lucas had an all-American diner as a touchstone in American Graffiti, which was deconstructed in Pulp Fiction.
All the pockets Musk is picking are old white people’s….
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: Speaking as an engineer, it seems to me that we engineers are very well trained, but poorly educated.
There’s simply no room in the engineering curriculum for the humanities and history and philosophy; and we’re expected to be able to go directly to work and contribute the day we get that BS.
Scientists, on the other hand, tend to hold Masters and PhD degrees— they go to school longer, but that lets them take the other classes that remind them they’re human.
My theory, anyway.
Librettist
@Nettoyeur:
You can still see the class divisons in company towns by size and location of the housing. Bosses live windward.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I spent my junior high years (and the first part of my high school years) in a nominally religious prep school, so the kids who routinely beat me up in my junior high years weren’t rednecks. But I learned the invaluable life lesson that men in jacket and tie can still be thugs.
Professor Bigfoot
@hells littlest angel: You’re assuming he actually GETS to Mars.
Heinlein (of whom I read everything) and Asimov and Clarke and the other “hard” SF writers really had no idea how hard space would try to kill you.
Sailors understand that the sea is always trying to kill you, but space makes the sea look like Mr. Rogers.
There are people on the ISS right now, working 24/7/365 to keep that one little bottle of air going, and it’s only 250 miles away from regular resupply, not 34 million.
The first challenge in living on Mars is getting there.
Moondoggus
@NotMax:
au contraire my friend!! Mars is a paradise waiting for adventurous souls.
i say the good old USA should contract SpaceX to launch a manned mars mission by the end of the year, draft Elon Musk, and as many of his supporters that we can stuff in the top of that rocket, and shoot them on their way.
and keep launching rockets until everyone who wants to go, has gone.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Professor Bigfoot: Yeah. Engineering is science based but it’s overwhelmingly done in for-profit, hierarchical organizations. That space affects how engineers think. As you suggest, degrees make difference.
Mr DAW has a PhD in mechanical engineering. His career consisted of research on emissions and fuel economy, so lefty projects. EPA regulations made his work possible because his employers needed it to meet those standards.
Librettist
@Betty Cracker:
The Cuisinart is an odd beast. Mine has separate oven and toast timers, but one must crank the oven temp dial to the max for max toaster heat.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. A corporation is designed to channel (and control) competition.
lowtechcyclist
@Moondoggus:
It’s the Nerd Rapture! 😁
The Audacity of Krope
The shade, though…
That did look like some fine bacon, though. Not like extra special, but mighty fine.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
That’s a good point. As with all things, I’m sure there a many factors.
Princess
I would like to find a toaster that toasts both sides of the bread evenly. Bonus points if I don’t have to put it down two times. Is that too much to ask? You wouldn’t think so (Toaster, you literally had one job) but it seems to be.
satby
@rikyrah: good morning from sultry Lexington 🌞
NotMax
@Librettist
There’s toasters and then there’s toasters.
;)
PJ
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. That chrome plated, stylish, optimistic view of the future you are talking about was gone before Gen X became conscious. It was dystopia all the time in science fiction – “Soylent Green”, “Planet of the Apes”, “Omega Man”, etc. were constant repeats on UHF stations. When I first became aware of the news, it was the oil crisis, the end of the Vietnam War, inflation, Watergate, the end of the space program (obviously not the absolute end, but the end of missions to the moon.) PK Dick was all about the decline of humanness in society, and, later, cyberpunk SF was not exactly optimistic about the future. Then the dystopia got ratcheted up 100-fold in reality with the rancid dreams of the tech industry in the 21st century.
The Audacity of Krope
Now, I can’t say for sure, but I reasonably suspect there’s at least one episode there where some ambitious scientist and/or influential decision maker pushes for technological advancement at the expense of the people involved only to discover the cost is greater, and more impactful to him personally, than he had imagined; only to them be saved or stoped from causing further harm by the Enterprise crew. Realistically, there are likely several such episodes.
Elon must just watch for the aesthetics.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@PJ: Same and I agree.
mappy!
I’m surprised Musk Mellon hasn’t published plans for settling Barsoom with the help of the natives…
Cliosfanboy
@p.a.:
The corporate model predates the USSR by decades. The former developed along with the huge railroad companies in the 1870s. The USSR copied the idea, especially from Henry Ford. FTM, so did the NAZIs. Hitler had a photo of Ford in his office.
Geminid
European and Iranian officials met this morning to discuss Iran’s nuclear program for the first time since lsrael attacked Iran June 12. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibababdi said the talks held at Iran’s Istanbul consulate:
The “snapback provision” discussed relates to sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. They were suspended with the signing of the JCPOA in 2015. Germany, France and the UK say they will snap them back in September if Iran does not comply with its obligations under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty.
This will be the first of several meetings. They might continue in Istanbul as it is convenient to both sides.
Turkiye stays out of these nuclear negotiations, but it did host a meeting between Russian and Ukrainian delegations on Wednesday. They were to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine.
That one lasted a half hour. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan huddled with the delegation heads beforehand, and evidently the two sides’ positions as expressed in pre-meeting memorandums were too far apart to be discussed productively. So they agreed to keep the formal meeting short.
Fidan used the public session to state Turkiye’s position on a potential ceasefire. He expressed Turkiye’s willingness and ability to monitor a ceasefire, and essentially proposed a sort of Guarantor status for Turkiye.
Cliosfanboy
@PJ: Yep. The Space Age happy future with sassy robot maids and flying cars is late Eisenhower/JFK stuff for Late Boomers and early Gen-X. The 1970s were dystopian Clockwork Orange / Logan’s Run.
Cliosfanboy
@Professor Bigfoot: Applies to business majors (and their related disciplines) as well.
Soprano2
Some of them are like this, but I think it’s more about “bro culture” kind of stuff. In 2023, the demographics of enrollment at University of Rolla was 75.7% male, 24.3% female, mostly white with some international students. Engineers marinate in this environment for 4 years, it’s no wonder a lot of them are right wing. Being in sewer, I’ve worked with a lot of civil engineers in my career. Other types of engineers may be different.
The Audacity of Krope
I’m glad that Europe at least tried to hold to the deal and even that they apparently had some forbearance while the US and Iran each figure themselves out individually.
Tom Levenson
@Professor Bigfoot: At MIT we require all undergraduates to take 8 classes in the humanities, arts, and/or social sciences, and to concentrate (take three or four classes) in a single discipline within that arena. They must also take two “communication intensive” classes among those eight.
It’s our response to exactly that issue. In my particular department, our motto is, “engineers who can’t write work for those who can.”
Betty
@Tony Jay: Doesn’t that waifu look like a child? That’s what Musk fans chose and he accepted? Okay.
JetsamPool
Japanese transliteration conventions notwithstanding, I somehow had no idea waifu was pronounced “wife”. I’ve been pronouncing it “waif” and upon learning the correct pronunciation I’m going to keep on being wrong.
Also, Musk may be trying to sell us a Heinleinian vision of the future, or maybe one from those old-timey serials, but all I see is shitty, direct-to-tv/video cyberpunk knockoff of a better movie with higher production values.
Doug R
@WTFGhost:
The underground nuclear tests showed you could make a cavern with surprisingly little radiation.
You could make a dome inside that.
Professor Bigfoot
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My former boss (bless him, one of the best I had in my entire career) was a PhD mechanical engineer, and just one of the greatest guys you’ll ever get to meet. When he was in the room, he WAS the smartest guy in the room— but kind, humble, thoughtful. Can you tell I loved the guy?
And a card carrying Democrat.
He’s also a Tesla early adopter, 8 years or so ago; and I KNOW that man is no Nazi; so I cut older Teslas a break.
(but MF a Wankpanzer every day)
Professor Bigfoot
@Cliosfanboy: It’s based on a military model with strict hierarchy and top down command structure.
Post WWII, EVERY man had been in the army; so that kind of organization structure made sense.
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: My impression also is that most engineers are just bog standard American white dudes with everything that implies.
I worked with ‘em. I know ‘em much too well.
ETA I went to engineering school at an HBCU, and that just wasn’t the case for us (at least, as much as I recall!)
patrick II
I resent Elon using those cute Red Pandas to push his Nazi AI.
Iron city
@Professor Bigfoot: When I went to engineering school we had Philosophy for engineers, Sociology for engineers, English for engineers and History for engineers, so who says we are not liberally educated in arts and humanities? Of course Sociology was taught by an engineer, English by some English professor with a huge hard on for Herman Hesse, Philosophy by the philosophy department and they might as well have been speeking Martian. History was history and philosophy of science and was a pretty good course.
chemiclord
@WTFGhost: I’d argue the first most important thing to understand about colonizing ANY extra-planetary world is that human life is pretty damn finely tuned to live on Earth. Yes, there is a degree of adaptability that the human body has… but it’s all centered on living on this partially cooled ball of molten rock.
For example, people out on space stations have to do a ridiculous amount of cardio every single day, because it turns out that extended periods of low gravity causes our circulatory systems to collapse, and that’s because the way our blood vessels flow are optimized specifically for Earth’s gravity.
frosty
@Tom Levenson: At Harvey Mudd a third of our credits were required to be in the Humanities. At the time the school had the highest percentage of graduates going on to get a PhD. I did not contribute to that statistic LOL.
dnfree
@Betty Cracker: We have a Ninja 10-in-1 that air fries, toasts, bakes, makes pizza, and best of all, it stands up against the wall and frees counter space when not in use. It works fine for baking and pizzas, but I haven’t actually tried air frying yet. I like it for baking 6 muffins, or a small pan of brownies, rather than heating up my oven. It preheats very fast. I think it’s on sale at Costco.
ninjakitchen.com/products/ninja-flip-toaster-oven-air-fryer-zidSP151
Bill Arnold
@Deputinize America:
Bezalel Smotrich? Yeah. Apparently it is considered antisemitic to call him a Nazi, or even just fascist scum. Advocating crimes against humanity should never be forgivable.
Tom Levenson
@Professor Bigfoot:
Mon semblable mon frère! (Graduated 1980, here.)
Tom Levenson
@frosty: That’s impressive.
A CS professor from Harvey Mudd spent a sabbatical year at MIT a while back and we became friends. He raved about HM students. MIT’s are really special. In his view, Harvey Mudd kids are in a class by themselves.
Aziz, light!
I can’t decide which I want first: the tech bro minions go to Mars, or the godbotherers get raptured. Please leave the world to people who care about what’s real.
French Onion Soup
@patrick II:
Red Pandas and anything east Asian centric has been right coded for a long time now. It’s an air raid siren.
allium
@Matt McIrvin: – when the opening narration of the 1951 version of War of the Worlds reviewed the planets of the solar system, Venus was noticably absent. Was it a swamp planet with dinosaurs? Did it have a global ocean of seltzer, or petroleum? Or was it a giant desert? Who knows?
Martin
@Tom Levenson: 8 courses is about the minimum that ABET requires for an engineering degree. It’s hard to go much below that.
I oversaw accreditation at my institution and know ABET inside and out. The main problem most engineering schools have with that part of the curriculum is that the schools GE requirements tend to be pretty shit in terms of educational outcomes. They’re usually select intro courses in other disciplines that don’t necessarily have much of a critical thinking component (because they’re intro) and rarely have much connective tissue back to a students discipline where they might be able to bring something to the topic. Economics is a good example where that’s handled differently – the intro Econ courses are insufficient for engineers who really do need to have some specific Econ understanding because engineering usually lives and dies around the economics of the thing you are engineering, so we develop specific Econ curricula for the engineers. Same often for writing as you know. Engineers do technical writing which is a specific skillset and a lot more persuasive communications that people might think (if you do sales at an engineering firm, you will need an engineering background, etc.) so there are often specific parts of the curriculum for the engineers or the STEM majors there. (I ran technical writing and the campus’s communication courses out of my office for some time).
And yeah, 8 courses isn’t a ton, but I think the bigger problem is that those courses tend to be utterly disconnected to engineering. ‘How does technology impact society’ for instance isn’t a course that you typically see.
Martin
@Tom Levenson: Harvey Mudd has a focus on engineering education that even MIT struggles to meet. It really is a phenomenal program. It is also indicative of one of the things most wrong in higher education that if you asked the public what’s the best technical program in the country to send your kid to, they’d mostly say MIT, as well as ‘what Harvey Mudd’. The way the PhD rankings as well as things like sports skew people’s perceptions of education is, frankly, criminal. One of my bigger career regrets was failing to get my and other institutions to topple that scheme.
Marc
@Tom Levenson:
@Martin:
I’m way late to the party, but do either of you pay much attention to the concept behind and current status of Olin College of Engineering? I first noticed it while helping the spawn find a small engineering college a decade ago.