Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
SpaceX's Starship has failed, again.
Elon Musk’s private rocketry company staged the ninth launch of the craft on Tuesday and notched up one success by managing to leave the launchpad by re-using a Super Heavy booster for the first time. But multiple fails for Flight 9 followed.
SpaceX paused the countdown for Tuesday's launch at the T-40 mark for some final tweaks, then sent Starship into the sky atop the Super Heavy at 1937 Eastern Daylight Time.
After stage separation, the booster crash-landed six minutes into the flight, after SpaceX used a steeper-than-usual angle of attack for its re-entry "to intentionally push Super Heavy to the limits, giving us real-world data about its performance that will directly feed in to making the next generation booster even more capable."
The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, did better than the previous two tests flights, in that it actually reached space, but subsequently things (like the craft) got well and truly turned around.
One of the goals for Musk's space crew was to release eight mocked up Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX already failed at its last two attempts to do this when the pod doors never opened. And it was third time unlucky last night when the payload door failed yet again to fully open to release the dummy satellites. SpaceX has not yet provided a reason for the malfunction.
Another goal for Flight 9 was to check out the performance of the ship's heatshield – SpaceX specifically flew it with 100 missing (on purpose) heatshield tiles so that it could test key vulnerable areas "across the vehicle during reentry." (The spacecraft also employed “Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling" to test different materials for future missions.) But it needed controlled reentry to properly assess stress-test that, and that failed too.
After the doors remained stubbornly closed, a "subsequent attitude control error resulted in bypassing the Raptor relight and prevented Starship from getting into the intended position for reentry." It began spinning out of control, blowing up, er, experiencing "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" upon re-entry.
SpaceX boss Elon Musk had rated Starship’s re-entry as the most important phase of this flight. But Starship spinning out as it headed back to Earth meant SpaceX was unable to capture all the data it hoped to gather. Although it says it did gather a lot of useful information before ground control lost contact with Starship approximately 46 minutes into the flight.
Musk nonetheless rated the mission a success.
“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!” he Xeeted. “Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent. Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.”
The billionaire added: “Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks.”
That may be a little optimistic, as the USA’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must authorize Starship launches and is yet to do so for future flights.
Previous Starship missions caused concern in the aviation industry after debris from SpaceX hardware fell to Earth. For this mission the FAA enlarged the Aircraft Hazard Area that aviators avoid after launches. SpaceX’s commentary on the launch made several mentions of the company having secured permission and chosen remote – and therefore safe – locations for touchdowns.
The FAA, however, is not keen to authorize flights until it is satisfied with safety. Three explosive endings in a row could make Musk’s timeline for future launches harder to achieve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @04:21AM (3 children)
> “Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling"
Interesting. From distant memory I remember seeing a technical analysis of one proposal for the Dyna-Soar space plane project...and this concept included copper wing skins with liquid cooling (likely the cryogenic fuel).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 06, @05:26AM (2 children)
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Friday June 06, @06:20AM (1 child)
AFAIK the active cooling means venting liquid through pores in the heat tiles for evaporative cooling and to create a gas barrier. None of that would draw heat into the vehicle.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 06, @06:24AM
(Score: 5, Funny) by KritonK on Friday June 06, @06:09AM
"I'm sorry, Elon, I'm afraid I can't do that."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday June 06, @08:11AM (55 children)
Failed?
"Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work." [quoteinvestigator.com]
If you are looking to get more data on the Starship assembly's performance, this is one way of doing it. Elon Musk has very little to do with the engineering and development operations of SpaceX - it's delegated to some extremely competent people, so talking about 'failure' and personalising it to Musk himself is being rather petty. If he is to burn money, this is not the absolute worst way to do so - but I would not like to place it on a scale of good ways to use money - too controversial and subjective.
Starship, even if it never achieves it's stated public goals, it still a major engineering achievement. Perhaps it is a modern 'Spruce Goose' [wikipedia.org]- who knows? Are there parallels between Elon Musk and Howard Hughes [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday June 06, @08:50AM
I hope you are wrong. But I am sure it is playing on the minds of many of the engineers at SpaceX - the parallels are not subtle!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @11:56AM (49 children)
I would personalize the Starship failure to Musk thusly:
It's his Peter Principle demonstration. Boldly direct the company to ever-more "innovative, ground breaking" initiatives until you finally make a leap too far and pursue a project beyond current socio-technological capabilities. He has taken SpaceX to its level of incompetence, and beyond.
Starship is, literally, a big leap from previous projects, not a small incremental step.
Technologically, Starship might be possible today, but there's more than technology, there's the culture of the organization pursuing the project, and that is very much led by Musk, especially in the areas of clearing regulatory oversight.
Move fast and break things is better suited to a loosely coupled, low criticality "microservices" architecture, the opposite of Starship where most of the components of the system are critical to mission success. When the critical path is schedule pushed to take shortcuts, the results are as demonstrated: five times now.
When things are this close to the achievable / not achievable boundary, leadership matters more than usual.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Friday June 06, @04:31PM (48 children)
"When the critical path is schedule pushed to take shortcuts, the results are as demonstrated: five times now."
Which element of the critical path were "schedule pushed" to take which shortcuts? Citation please.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. When you are testing modes of failure, you have to have failures. It's a feature, not a bug.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @07:36PM (47 children)
>Which element of the critical path were "schedule pushed" to take which shortcuts? Citation please.
Ask an employee of SpaceX on that critical path, they'll tell you all about it over a beer - possibly have to get them in a SCIF [wikipedia.org] before they open up to you, though.
>It's a feature, not a bug.
At some point the feature exceeds the budget, then it is absolutely a bug. Exactly what that budget is is both "need to know" information, and doubtlessly constantly being revised.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @06:15AM (46 children)
In other words, you know nothing. And not in the cool Socrates style.
Let's revisit that when it becomes absolutely a bug. Not much point in discussing it now when they're still deliberately destruction testing the vehicle.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 07, @11:44AM (45 children)
When it is called an unscheduled rapid disassembly, I consider that a bug.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @01:29PM (44 children)
So what? They were planning to break it anyway.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 07, @05:14PM (43 children)
So, how many times in the future are they planning to break it?
I never heard the plan that said: "We expect to fail 9 times..."
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @07:02PM (42 children)
Until they get it working. I remain puzzled by your criticism. You are an engineer. This waffling about "current socio-technological capabilities" isn't engineering-based reasoning.
What you neglect is that SpaceX has already demonstrated more than sufficient competence using their current approaches to R&D - including developing a new platform from scratch with very high reliability. A modest amount of failure doesn't indicate that any goals of the Starship/Superheavy combination are insurmountable.
Why would they do that? It's a normal part of managing public expectations.
Sure, the whole thing may end up in tears, and it is a complex system where a lot can go wrong. But merely having some failures with these failures occur further and further down the launch process isn't a sign of the endtimes. Continuing to bend metal and making aggressive progress is a sign that things are going well.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 07, @07:58PM (41 children)
> This waffling about "current socio-technological capabilities" isn't engineering-based reasoning.
That's the opinion of a bean counter.
Real world engineering takes into account the capabilities of the team, the available schedule and budget.
>SpaceX has already demonstrated more than sufficient competence using their current approaches to R&D
On little bitty rockets, as compared to Starship.
> It's a normal part of managing public expectations.
Oh, you mean: "need to know", meaning: you don't know anything about it, and not in a cool Socratic way.
>the whole thing may end up in tears
The press agrees with you:
https://futurism.com/spacex-failing-starship [futurism.com]
And these point to some "Mercurial Personality" problems that also need to be taken into account when managing the whole program:
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1l5r52g/threats_over_spacex_contracts_send_officials/ [reddit.com]
https://www.caller.com/story/news/2025/06/06/trump-elon-musk-spacex-starbase-starship-texas/84065812007/ [caller.com]
> Continuing to bend metal and making aggressive progress is a sign that things are going well.
I see molten metal along with the bent and burnt stuff, and while it's being aggressively pursued, is it progress?
All I see it as is a sign that they haven't decided to pull the plug on the funding, yet - which is a very good thing, just ask NASA about the alternative.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @10:28PM (40 children)
I did that. When will you? Don't waste my time when you clearly aren't using those engineering chops.
And? Scale causes some problems, but we have yet to hear of those problems. Lockett's analysis [planetearthandbeyond.co] shows some serious problems with the analysis such as claiming without justification that "Starship" (the Superheavy/Starship combo) needs to lose 100 tons and arbitrarily labeling it as "basically impossible"; claiming a ridiculous number of refuelings (33) required for some unspecified lunar flight profile (something is veryu wrong with that claim - but I can't be bothered to figure out how); and contriving a narrative of inevitable failure while ignoring the steady progress of these test flights.
In other words, not an engineering problem. Again, when are you going to approach this from an engineering perspective rather than an ideological one?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @12:40AM (25 children)
>>Real world engineering takes into account the capabilities of the team, the available schedule and budget.
>I did that.
No, you actually implicitly said that you don't know the available schedule or budget, so whatever accounting you are doing is imaginary.
>Scale causes some problems, but we have yet to hear of those problems.
https://spacexnow.com/stats [spacexnow.com]
Ouch, I didn't realize Starlink launches were such a clusterfuck.
Otherwise, it looks like those little bitty rockets got their shit together after 5 launches, Starship is at 9 and counting, and much more expensive per launch.
Saturn V, by comparison, had their shit relatively together before they got big, loud and expensive.
https://nextspaceflight.com/rockets/153 [nextspaceflight.com]
And: SpaceX has the benefit of Saturn V development preceeding it, but ignores lessons learned such as the launch pad and many others.
>>"Mercurial Personality"
>In other words, not an engineering problem.
35 years of professional engineering have taught me: it's all about the program funding, and that tends to come down from some very non-engineering personality types in all kinds of endeavors. Even when you're "in the thick" of the engineering work, you may choose to ignore the funding issues, but they don't ignore you.
What engineers can do with control of their own budgets is a) fantasy, and b) very different from getting things done in the real world.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 08, @05:45AM (19 children)
Even if we were given those numbers, it doesn't mean that SpaceX gave them in good faith or is operating efficiently on those numbers. You have to look at firmer stuff than that. The testing regimen is such an observable - but one needs to observe it first. Not pontificate on the 33 imaginary fuelings that a straw rocket needs.
Here, we have a high test frequency: nine tests in two years. Further, these tests progress. The Superheavy/Starship stack (combination of the two) gets much further along in the tests than it used to. That indicates substantial improvement. In this way, we don't need to know numbers that might not be real in the first place. Nor booze up imaginary SpaceX employees in imaginary bars.
Every such project is subject to an engineering version of the stopping time problem. We can never know for sure that an R&D process will stop at (that is, achieve) a particular goal until it does. But we can as above figure out if they're making progress towards that goal. Even your talking head acknowledged that such improvements were happening, but that the improvements didn't count because feeble reasons (for example, jumping from the reasonable hypothesis that SpaceX didn't receive good flight data from the upper stage on the last test flight to confidently assuming that it didn't, or fantasies about Musk fan pearl clutching rather than present an unbiased argument).
In other words, it tried a launch once without a deluge system. Now it doesn't. So it isn't ignoring said lesson. Given the high reliability of the launch vehicles in your link, maybe it's paying more attention to those lessons than you are?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @04:03PM (18 children)
>booze up imaginary SpaceX employees
If you want some real data, that is actually the way... It's more often obtained through existing contact networks, but lacking those - staking out a local watering hole is a tried and true methodology.
> talking head acknowledged that such improvements were happening, but that the improvements didn't count because feeble reasons
The press is irretrievably biased, one way, the other, sometimes both simultaneously like Schrodenger's cat in some attempt at the appearance of balance, but they seem incapable of true neutral presentations anymore. And yet still, they are a more efficient source of limited information than traveling to the local watering holes yourself.
>it tried a launch once without a deluge system.
Most engineers who ignore existing published data and go out on their own for a government backed $100 million destructive test to re-prove what has already been demonstrated and established are called reckless, untrustable, wasteful, and fired.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 08, @10:00PM (17 children)
In other words, a methodology that won't work in internet discussion.
It was blog requoted on anther blog. Sure, that is press, but not press with the expectations you have here.
I sense you think there is a problem here. My view? They're doing that any more. Lesson was learned. Keep in mind that NASA has some serious problems itself. It is an extremely biased source. Among other things, they're a lot more carefree with money and they overemphasize modeling over real world testing.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday June 08, @10:01PM
They don't do that any more.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @11:07PM (15 children)
> a methodology that won't work in internet discussion.
Internet discussion, believe it or not, is quite impotent in terms of accomplishing things of value.
>Keep in mind that NASA has some serious problems itself. It is an extremely biased source. Among other things, they're a lot more carefree with money and they overemphasize modeling over real world testing.
Such is the realm of politically exposed development projects. Modeling doesn't make big boom for taxpayers to point at and bitch.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @04:34AM (14 children)
You never looked up an error message via search engine? Ever wonder how Trump got elected? Internet discussion has a bit of value. I'd put it above imaginary bar talk.
You think about that and then we can talk. I find it interesting how you can say right there the big thing wrong with NASA R&D and just not connect the dots.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 09, @12:45PM (13 children)
>>Such is the realm of politically exposed development projects. Modeling doesn't make big boom for taxpayers to point at and bitch.
>You think about that and then we can talk.
Let's talk about putting programs of existential importance to the future of the human race in the hands of individuals instead of nations, or the world at large.
It's bad enough that NASA is nationally driven, despite the fig leaves of international coopetition.
Jamestown followed Colombus by over 100 years, and involved over 1700 investors - it, and most successful colonies, wasn't a single personality driven venture.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 10, @12:51AM (12 children)
I find it interesting how you started this thread massively downplaying SpaceX's efforts. Now it's programs of existential importance. A bit of cognitive dissonance. SpaceX wouldn't be in that position, if they weren't good at what they do. Similarly, if the Superheavy/Starship development is a waste of funds, then it joins a huge blob of non-existential importance public spending. Only if it succeeds does it achieve that importance.
Further, we had almost 70 years of national and international space development. There have been some impressive achievements, but it's telling that the world has retreated from those achievements near universally - every nation with a space presence has done that. SpaceX upended that stagnant environment. The hands of these individuals are way more capable than nations or the world at large.
Finally, I think it's a bullshit move to sabotage a business on the flimsy pretext that the activity is too important for business. I'd take your claim of importance more seriously, if you had a plan for who would take up the resulting slack. But no, it's too important to allow SpaceX to do, but not important enough to do.
Bartholomew Gosnold [wikipedia.org] is the obvious rebuttal. Also, SpaceX has a lot of investors (sounds like a couple hundred with some of those themselves being aggregates of much larger groups of investors). It's not merely Musk's personal vanity project.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 10, @01:14AM (8 children)
>A bit of cognitive dissonance
In your head.
Space capability has always been of paramount importance, though much less beneficial when privately controlled.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 10, @02:06PM (7 children)
Sorry, crazy Bug Paste Joe isn't getting it. Let poor Professional Engineer Joe out of his cage. Does Professional Joe agree that the best way to develop space capability is to take the best attempt in history out of the hands of the people responsible and thrust it into the hands of parties who couldn't do that with at least an order of magnitude more funding and time?
Finally, let's consider the future. If we allow SpaceX to keep their rockets and profit, then that provides huge incentive for other businesses to get into the market and compete. If instead we go out of our way to destroy SpaceX, then what kind of message does that send?
Simply put, if space capability genuinely is of paramount importance, then SpaceX stays. Think rather of ways to encourage competition.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 10, @05:21PM (6 children)
> If space capability is paramount, then why sabotage that capability by transferring it to entities who have failed to develop space capability for longer than you have been alive?
I was sitting on my grandmother's lap watching Apollo 11 land, both on the moon and in the ocean. You and I have different definitions of "failing to develop for longer than I have been alive."
> Sorry, crazy Bug Paste Joe isn't getting it.
Rich asshole apologist khallow strikes again. Transferring space travel capability out of the public sphere into private hands means even less benefit for the majority of people, and more profits for people who already are making more than they can reasonably spend on a harem of 30 wives and 250 children. (Say: $1M/year per dependent = $280M per year, or 0.14% of Musk's reported income.) One ketamine addict's opinion of what should and should not happen in space capability development is not likely to benefit man/woman/itkind as a whole nearly as much as an at least somewhat publicly accountable program.
>develop space capability is to take the best attempt in history
See this face? This is the: Starlink launch success rates suck donkey dick face. Besides the lost money (unscheduled wasteage of human effort and raw materials), what's the collateral damage of all that carnage? Externalized costs being absorbed by the creatures of the deep ocean where most of that fail is crashing into?
>If we allow SpaceX to keep their rockets and profit, then that provides huge incentive for other businesses to get into the market and compete.
Oh, yeah, the present political environment looks veeeery friendly to other multi-billion dollar businesses - but what happens when Trump & Co get bored because they've been bribed so heavily that they can't even imagine what to do with it all anymore?
>If instead we go out of our way to destroy SpaceX, then what kind of message does that send?
First, it sends the message that new management is not destruction. Take a poll, how many SpaceX employees would be happier, more productive, and more likely to continue to develop their careers there without a "strong personality" at the top. How many "strong personality" businesses do you have experience with? My first was my first real job out of school, it ran for 12 years because that strong personality was actually a genuinely good guy - still human - still a touch stingy/greedy - but overall far above average. Since then, I have experienced working with a half dozen or more "strong personality" led companies, and not a single one do I remember as being efficient or nearly as productive as they could have been if their leader wasn't such an asshole. They had varying degrees of success, but thinking back I believe only one lasted more than 10-15 years without being bought out by cooler heads, or simply bankrupted out of existence.
>Simply put, if space capability genuinely is of paramount importance, then SpaceX stays.
In your head.
>Think rather of ways to encourage competition.
Stage a chain-saw massacre of some oligarch headquarters, throwing control to people who care about the missions more than the money they make.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 11, @02:33AM (2 children)
This illustrates the problem. You had great feels back in 1969 - almost 56 years ago, but what else did you get from that?
So what happened next? Six more Apollo missions (five successful with another almost leading to loss of crew) and that was it. No more manned missions to the Moon. That pause was so profound that NASA didn't even do unmanned missions to the Moon for over two decades afterward!
That is a huge sign of failure. We didn't go into space merely to generate some feelgoods or get the "Been there. Done that." t-shirt. We did it because we expected to keep doing stuff on the Moon.
"Even less benefit for the majority of people"? You already mentioned Starlink - basically a global, high speed internet. That's far more valuable than the occasional feel. And do you really think that a large harem is the only purpose for wealth? My take is that Musk's goal of colonizing Mars is a bit more expensive - especially if one then moves the harem there!
It's time for Professional Joe to show up. That same link listed extremely good launch rates for Falcon 9 rockets. That's more applicable to the Starship thing than whatever they're doing with those satellites.
As to the crabs allegedly getting startled by the occasional piece of falling Starlink satellite? They don't send me birthday cards.
Let's not go bug paste stupid here. Trump is irrelevant. If you screw over a well functioning business for doing its job, which is what would be happening here, you are chasing away any other private efforts to develop competing space launch. Because any potential business has to worry that you will screw them too!
And by then destroying SpaceX - because you aren't replacing SpaceX leadership with anything competent - you'll delay space development for another generation or two. Just like what we experienced since the end of Apollo. Is that what you want?
I find it remarkable that you don't get how this works even with 70 years of history to guide your thinking.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 11, @02:42PM (1 child)
>This illustrates the problem. You had great feels back in 1969 - almost 56 years ago, but what else did you get from that?
Yes, Apollo was "great feels" but to be realistic about it: The US was still mired in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, both very real issues much more pressing to resolve than handling radiation poisoning outside the Van Allen Belts.
Our "Apollo winding down" dividend mostly didn't get invested in peace on earth or domestic tranquility, it started shuffling GDP off to an oligarchy and, yes, there were plenty of people calling it that back in the early 1980s. Looking around at where #2 in the Space Race / Nuclear Weapons competition went, socially, with their transfers of wealth to their oligarchy, it's not a Great model to be following, at least not for 90%+ of the population.
>That pause was so profound that NASA didn't even do unmanned missions to the Moon for over two decades afterward!
Unmanned tech took two decades to develop to any level of usefulness. Apollo regularized the use of digital clocks instead of hands on a face - it's quite a ways from there to an auto-pilot flight computer that can take radar altimetry and other data to successfully soft-land on an extraterrestrial body. Small, lightweight CPUs in 1989 were still in the onesy-twosey MHz clock range, barely getting past 16 bits of memory addressing, and those were the non-space radiation hardened cutting edge models.
> You already mentioned Starlink - basically a global, high speed internet. That's far more valuable than the occasional feel.
https://theweek.com/politics/starlink-what-elon-musks-satellite-soft-power-means-for-the-world [theweek.com]
https://www.newamerica.org/planetary-politics/blog/starlink-and-sovereignty/ [newamerica.org]
https://www.e-ir.info/2025/02/26/starlinks-rise-as-a-geopolitical-disruptor/ [e-ir.info]
Unelected power to manipulate nations.
> My take is that Musk's goal of colonizing Mars is a bit more expensive
I'll lean toward Stephen Fry's take that it's more insecurity on Musk/Bezos et al's part: they're afraid they're going to trash the Earth to the point that Mars is a better option - and that's a lot of trashing.
>That same link listed extremely good launch rates for Falcon 9 rockets.
Oh, hey, sure the Ford F150 bursts into flames in 60% of the garages it parks in, but they also make the Mustang and it almost never bursts into flame spontaneously.
>As to the crabs allegedly getting startled by the occasional piece of falling Starlink satellite? They don't send me birthday cards.
It's not just dying crabs for the coming centuries, it's also all air traffic crossing the Caribbean being diverted every time another one bites the dust, thousands of people being delayed for an hour or more at great expense not just to their lives but added fuel costs for the commercial jetliners, etc.
>Trump is irrelevant.
Trump is just a symptom of a very serious disease that has been visibly metastasizing since Reagan (with signs of its formation long before.)
>If you screw over a well functioning business for doing its job, which is what would be happening here
Calling SpaceX well functioning is a laugh- https://abcnews.go.com/US/musk-works-slash-federal-spending-firms-received-billions/story?id=118589121 [go.com]
https://payloadspace.com/estimating-spacexs-2024-revenue/ [payloadspace.com]
SpaceX is sucking from the government teat, and would starve without that income.
>you'll delay space development for another generation or two.
Well, just make me king of the world and I'll make space development a priority for the world for the good of all mankind. (Oh, wait, I wasn't born into a position to win the billionaire's lottery, those slots are already taken...)
Beware, part of my program will include the capability to push around large rocks - to hopefully avert the next major impact event. Of course in development of this capability, I will also be demonstrating the capability of dropping smaller rocks on terrestrial targets with pinpoint accuracy. Do you really want that capability in private control?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 12, @06:12AM
More relevantly, the US was mired in a dead end space program that never did surpass Saturn V in over 50 years of operation.
Apollo started by shuffling money to that oligarchy. And SpaceX wasn't a member of the oligarchy.
Unmanned tech was useful in the 1960s. A large number of unmanned missions (21 missions split between orbiters, impactors, and landers) were launched to pave the way for the manned part of Apollo. The real reason was that any unmanned mission would have political cooties - it would be a reminder to the public that we weren't going back to the Moon anytime soon. Besides: been there, done that.
And of course, the feeble attempts at spinoff spinning. There are very few technologies that NASA could promote that nobody else would. It's way overvalued.
How will Musk "trash the Earth" with his fleet of electric cars? Sounds to me like there was a very thoughtless assumption that billionaire == "trash the Earth" and went from there.
Your vote and speech are that too. How much should we restrict that?
To give you an idea of how much bullshit you are peddling right now, let's consider that stats page [spacexnow.com] again. Falcon 9 has a better launch success rate than the Space Shuttle - and that's if you don't count the Columbia Shuttle accident as a launch failure (even though the accident was due to damage caused by a launch ice strike) (1 failure in 135 launches). The block 5 variant has half the failure rate of the overall Falcon 9.
We are talking extreme reliability by your standards. So fuck off with the "bursts into flames" nonsense.
To give an idea of how mouthbreathingly stupid this complaint is, an outboard motor boat used consistently in ocean for a few years will cause more damage to marine wildlife than the entirety of Starlink. The reason is obvious. That boat with those exposed propellor blades is passing through hundreds or thousands of miles of water over its lifespan. Plenty of opportunity to mess up animals that happen to get in the way. The Starlink stays in space the whole span of its life and then deorbits once - most of it to burn up in atmosphere. A few small bits would land and that's it. When are you going to lose your shit over Bubba and his fishing boat? Because that guy is more of a threat to wildlife.
Similarly with air traffic, it's nonsense. You'd probably be safer to just do nothing than to redirect traffic. The latter has significant risks (well, they might be ridiculously minor too, but they're much more likely to be a problem than getting hit with space junk) - such as pilots flying more aggressively to make up time for the delays.
That "very serious disease" is irrelevant too.
No, it's that other thing: accurate. How else can you explain 3 failures of the Falcon 9 in 489 launches? If your narrative were even remotely relevant, there'd be a lot more failures than that.
And of course you completely miss the point. Here, you have a thing of "paramount importance" and a huge private sector that presently is providing that through SpaceX. With incentive to compete, you can leverage that massive industrial base to get more of that paramount importance. If instead, you screw over SpaceX, then nobody will touch it without getting paid for it ahead of time. You just turned the biggest innovation in space capability ever into a rerun of the past 50 years.
So what really is important to you? Space? Or making sure billionaires don't get "unelected power" because reasons. It's interesting that you have yet to describe what's supposed to be of paramount importance, but you have no similar qualms about talking up the grave threat that Starlink presents to the free world. Or precision impacts by asteroids. Maybe that's a good thing? We didn't like that city anyway!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 11, @02:38AM (2 children)
As an aside, SpaceX was formed in 2002. So it's well past the lifespan of your companies. So right there, it's outside your life experiences.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 11, @12:15PM (1 child)
>SpaceX was formed in 2002. So it's well past the lifespan of your companies. So right there, it's outside your life experiences.
Company 1 was formed in 1978, I joined in 1991 and stayed with them until the "big shrink" in 2003, they're still traded on the pink sheets. The charismatic leader, my mentor, died in 2021 - he was actively involved in operations from foundation until his death.
Company 2 was formed in 1994, still actively traded on Nasdaq, though the charismatic leader took his golden parachute a month after I resigned in 2006 and they merged with a similarly valued company around 2015.
Company 3 formed in 2005, ran until 2023 at which point the investment bankers burned everyone who ever put an ounce of faith into their operations, all in the pursuit of maximal monetary gain for the primary shareholder - themselves. Their charismatic leader parachuted out - he already had his gold extracted and stashed (no faith), effectively retiring around 2018.
4 was a 4 year flash in the pan mostly operating on grant funding (you'll find a lot of that around universities), and 5 made it about 7 years before getting sued into oblivion.
Company 6 was formed in 1991, their charismatic leader did a couple of "big shrinks" to the workforce over the years, with a very big one in 2020 wherein he retired but I understand it is still running under the same name in the same offices today.
Company 7 was formed in 1996, their charismatic leader committed suicide in 2013 and I joined in 2014. They were bought out by a behemoth who I still work for today. He was a strong personality, railing against the FDA in his pursuit to help patients served by his invention / product.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Wednesday June 11, @10:49PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 10, @08:50PM (2 children)
As for Bartholomey Gosnold, put in a little effort and demonstrate that he had something resembling a majority share in the founding of Jamestown effort...
And as long as we're calling out colonial promoters, there were of course all kinds - we tried to buy a house on Gregor MacGregor street leading to us learning his story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Wednesday June 11, @02:35AM (1 child)
No way. Your argument was garbage. All the early colonies had charismatic founders involved. You merely need to look to figure that out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 11, @11:57AM
My point was: a closely held venture, a single person substantially guiding the course.
e.g. silent partners don't matter. Most investors these days amount to silent partners, even when they have voting rights. A baby CEO I knew put it this way: "promise them whatever they want to hear, once you've got the money do whatever you want anyway." In a rare stroke of karma, his company was actually sued out of existence about five years after he said that, but not by anything the investors did - it was actually a hatchet job by a competitor.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday June 09, @04:58AM (4 children)
Sounds to me like 35 years of professional engineering has taught you how to use the argument from authority fallacy.
In addition, this argument is completely irrelevant. It's quite clear that Superheavy and Starship have quite a bit of program funding, both public and private. There wouldn't be nine test flights in two years or Soylentils whining about the productive use of their tax dollars otherwise.
I don't know what the problem is here, but it's not 35 years of professional engineering talking.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 09, @11:31AM (3 children)
My main problem with Starship is that I don't enjoy watching $100M fireworks shows.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday June 09, @12:22PM
Then it's not much of a problem, is it? Don't watch it and you don't do something you don't enjoy.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday June 09, @10:49PM (1 child)
A lot of that is money from American taxpayers too. Enjoy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 10, @02:11PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @01:11AM (13 children)
Another fun premise:
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/musk-trump-nationalize-spacex-starlink [jacobin.com]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 08, @06:04AM (12 children)
Given that the author blathers on about the row between Trump and Musk, I gather it's the fascist themed version. But perhaps they're using that as a pretext to implement generic stealing from rich people. That would make it communist. The two ideologies are so close together and universally dishonest that it probably doesn't matter what motive the author really has for this scheme.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @04:24PM (11 children)
Labeling things communist of fascist is obfuscating the actual situation which is relatively original.
For all of its similarities to previous authoritarian regimes, what we have here today deserves consideration on its own demerits rather than bucketing into "Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, Videla, et al" comparisons.
AT&T circa 1970-1990 is the best argument I know against heavily state regulated private business. Whether Starlink and SpaceX were "Nationalized" or heavily regulated (as they should be with the subsidies they are receiving), I view the results as similar. The main benefit of subsidies+regulation as opposed to full nationalization is voter perception - shielding the "private" companies from the kind of scrutiny that programs like NASA (but, somehow, not the military) inevitably receive.
I have very mixed feelings about the relative de-regulation of the airlines in the 70s/80s - while I like the cheaper airfares, I think - overall I prefer the way things were with fewer people travelling by air. As things are, service has bifurcated where "decent" service by the old standards is now much more expensive, and there are unavoidable unpleasant aspects of the new way that affect anyone using common air carriers. Is it "good" for tourism? Again, there is such a thing as making remote areas of the world too accessible, while they may receive more dollars from tourists, are those dollars adequately compensating for the negative consequences of the bigger crowds?
My point: even as operated today after "radical de-regulation," the air-travel system in the US is still heavily nationalized, with large important aspects of it regulated, funded and even operated by the government. There are similar private-public hybrids throughout NASA, our nuclear materials processing operations, public utilities, etc.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 08, @10:05PM (10 children)
The massive deregulation of the telecommunications industry, not just in the US, but also Europe created the present cell phone sector. It would have eventually come about in some form. But private industry made it happen in the 1990s rather than some time this century. Same with the airlines. If passengers wanted the nice aspects of the old way, they would be paying for it. They don't.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 08, @11:11PM (9 children)
> If passengers wanted the nice aspects of the old way, they would be paying for it. They don't.
I disagree. Mass movement of the market to lowest cost providers is giving a lot of people service they don't want, service they're willing to pay more to have better - but it's not being offered due to the reality of providing the low cost crap product that actually is externalizing costs rather than saving money overall.
Same thing applies to what McDonalds did to the global beef supply. We might like to pay an extra 10-20% for higher quality product, but that's not on offer, what we get is the lowest cost crap or specialty niche providers that cost 300% more to get what could be offered for 15% more - if the suppliers weren't coerced into supplying McDonalds with lowest possible cost product.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @04:30AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 09, @11:27AM (7 children)
You assume that providers always supply what people want, rather than what providers want to provide.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @12:17PM (6 children)
These agreements are by definition entered voluntarily. So yes, that's a good assumption to make.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 09, @12:39PM (5 children)
>yes, that's a good assumption to make.
In your head.
Let's start with DRM as an example...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @07:58PM (4 children)
Do airliners force their passengers to agree to cheap fares via DRM? This sounds a bit red herring.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 09, @08:24PM (3 children)
Major commercial content providers prefer to sell product with DRM, show me a customer who wants DRM on their purchased music, movies, etc.
Airlines force their passengers to agree to "terms" - Southwest used to have open seating, those were their terms. You want to fly direct between two airports that only Southwest flies, you agree to the open seating terms, or you take a connecting flight with someone else.
Lots of airlines like to charge for checked bags - I have yet to find an air passenger who thinks that's a better deal for them - even when they don't check bags.
I recall an American Airlines flight Miami to Boston that I took several times in quick succession, service? Two bags of peanuts on the first flight, one bag on the the second flight, I asked for a second bag on the third flight and actually got a grand total of three bags, but when I asked for a second bag on the fourth flight they were all out, on a plane half full. This was in the mid 1990s, when carrying your own food onboard got unpleasant reactions from the gate staff. These are 3 and a half hour flights arriving around 7pm, when they're not delayed. Don't like that level of service? Upgrades are available, at impressive markups.
Travelocity says the cheapest fare on an arbitrary random date is $177, $407 for "Premium Economy" which might have something other than a bag of peanuts, and for actual decent service they start at $787 for business/first - meaning: First class is no longer what First class used to mean, it's just Business class with nice cutlery and cheap champagne offered before takeoff. I doubt the situation for passengers has improved in the last 30 years.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 10, @12:30AM (2 children)
What's the point of that argument? Southwest wouldn't be so popular, if people didn't spend money on them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 10, @01:11AM (1 child)
And, yet Southwest is dropping open seating, because their customers want tiered service at higher prices? I don't think so, I know I don't.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Tuesday June 10, @02:13PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @01:48PM (2 children)
Nobody should care if people are burning their own money. But the Starship program is funded by US taxpayers. The $3B of taxpayer money already burned was supposed to deliver a functioning moon lander. They continue to burn taxpayer money and have have not achieved any of the deliverables.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @04:34PM
>Nobody should care if people are burning their own money.
I would say that depends very much on how they acquired that money. As you point out: taxpayer subsidies are very much the concern of the taxpayers.
Money acquired by theft, graft, corruption, those are also very public concerns.
Pyramid schemes, exploitation of forced labor... the list is literally endless.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @04:50PM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday June 06, @07:30PM
Musk has never shied away from glad-handing and claiming the successes personally. So he gets to take on the failures as well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @08:25AM (44 children)
In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately [x.com]
Elon Musk
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Friday June 06, @08:48AM (12 children)
I am appalled at Trump's brazen corruption.
Using government contracts for political reasons against Elon Musk is disgusting, open corruption.
Why are Americans not up in arms about this? Have they become so jaded?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @09:27AM
A Frenchman had offered this in 1811, when US were having slave revolts and about to get their first steam-powered ferry [soylentnews.org]:
Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite [wikiquote.org] (every nation has the government it deserves)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday June 06, @10:34AM
> Why are Americans not up in arms about this? Have they become so jaded?
I guess the flamebait mod is an answer of sorts
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @01:18PM (6 children)
Wake up. I'm appalled that people (you) are so easily mind-controlled by a very liberal "news" media. Are you still unaware that they cherry-pick from facts to present a one-sided view?
It's like our whole "society" has devolved into a gargantuan court case, each side cherry-picking from facts, trying to bias the judge to each side's view.
Before you form such strong opinions, you should try to learn all of the considerations and factors of a given situation.
I'll give you a hint: Musk is more for short-term, immediate result. Trump is looking much longer ahead; but he's trying to fix things that even the most liberal of y'all would have railed against during Democrat regimes.
For example: China child labor making shoes and clothes. How do you fix that? Or are you liberals okay with child labor, as long as it's in another country and you can buy cheap shoes?
And suddenly you're okay with paying people ("migrants") less than minimum wage, no benefits, because "nobody wants to do those jobs"? WTF!?!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @02:38PM
pssst- you didn't put enough space between these two thoughts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday June 06, @02:54PM (3 children)
> I'm appalled that people...
I'm appalled that sheeple...
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @04:23PM (2 children)
I agree, and have used that term many times.
How do you fix that? Educate? How do you educate without bias?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @04:55PM
(Score: 1) by arubaro on Sunday June 08, @02:08PM
You educate to have critical thinking. It would be easy done, if the lackeys of the system in government of (choose your prefered country) promoted it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @04:52PM
As an aside, this is a self-fixing problem. Child labor creates useful stuff now. And the families of those kids grow wealthier directly from that labor so that future generations won't have to rely on child labor. Please recall that the developed world went through its child labor phase and emerged from it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Friday June 06, @01:52PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday June 06, @04:44PM
As you can see, divorces are extra rough on the kids.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 06, @03:21PM
Trump has gleefully used whatever power he's allowed to have (whether legally or not) to go after any person or institution that doesn't declare, publicly, that they will do whatever he tells them to do, whether or not "whatever he tells them to do" is legal or not. Among the powers that he has claimed for this include unilaterally overriding the decisions of Congress and the courts, as well as encouraging and supporting acts of vigilante violence. Previous targets of this behavior in the past few months have included Columbia University, the state of Maine, Harvard University, a few members of Congress, a significant percentage of federal prosecutors, and businesses he's decided are "woke".
Yes, it's disgusting, open, corruption. Just like he's been doing since noon on January 20.
I believe Elon Musk is getting a lot less sympathy than most of Trump's targets because:
1. He helped Donald Trump get into the position where his declarations were more than "some old man rants on his website".
2. As the richest person on the planet he has the power to defend himself in a way that, say, innocent people shipped off to El Salvador aren't.
3. This fight is fundamentally about Elon wanting more free government cash than he's likely to get out of Donald, namely in the form of EV subsidies.
4. The guy's public ideology is at least friendly to Nazis and Nazi ideas, including supporting the neo-Nazi party in Germany, who he promotes on X, and of course his "my heart goes out to you" gesture.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gnuman on Friday June 06, @09:44AM (30 children)
That escalated...
I guess the main lesson here is *never* elect fucking populists. EVER. Their personalities are not fit for to govern -- they are impulsive and never plan ahead. And planning is what this world actually needs most. We need plan for next 10 and 20 and 50 years as we have *major* issues facing us,
1. global warming
2. plastic and chemical pollution pollution -- think forever chemicals and plastics in oceans
3. political instability, mostly thanks to lack of planning and impulsive idiots making decisions
and now we add additional problems brought to us by populists... worked well for South America. Argentina is definitely a main economy in the world ... or was until populists got at it in the 1930s.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @10:42AM (9 children)
Devil's advocate: didn't help them much [wikipedia.org].
I'd suggest responsibility instead.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @12:01PM (3 children)
There's plans, then there's sham plans published to distract from the graft and corruption.
Those five year plans worked for the people publishing them, they kept the common people distracted while the planners were living the high life.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @01:01PM (2 children)
Exactly my point: plans aren't the silver bullet. A single mean to purpose, not enough and not even mandatory required.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @04:15PM (1 child)
Well, actual plans are pretty good. Not that things always "go as planned," but at least with a plan you have a metric to judge progress by. Are we ahead of plan or behind? That's a good indicator for resource allocation, if the object of the plan is important (like preventing the flooding of hundreds of coastal cities), then being behind plan is a great reason to allocate more resources toward the goal. Maybe the plan is for evacuation of those low lying areas, and if sea level is un-controllable at least we might try to predict its rate of rise and monitor evacuation progress against actual observed sea level rise, again: allocating more or less resources as the situation develops.
Of course, if you're a populist politician, plans are a great whipping boy: working to this plan getting you down? Elect me, I'll burn the plan.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @11:00PM
My devil's advocate didn't say "planning is wrong" or "the world today is better w/o planning", it was just a case where planning wasn't the solution. More on the line of a "Beware how you use planning" warning
Planning is not inherently good or bad, it's just a tool - the way one uses it makes a whole lot of a difference.
What is bad is using irrelevant or toxic metrics [wikipedia.org] for defining objectives/tracking progress (do tell how you measure me and I tell you how I'll behave).
What is worse is worshiping planning; planning for the sake of planning. A disease many mid-level managers suffer (planning and tracking progress is what they understood as the very definition of their position; it's the perverse incentive brought into the planning exercise itself).
What is the worst is planning as a deceptive mean to manipulate those who are engaged in the plan.
There are cases in which one can get to the objectives w/o planning, not by pure luck but by substituting planning with a set of well chosen behaviours - simple example "don't live beyond your means and you'll be probably alright at retirement age" (with no strong guarantees. But neither planning offers them).
Another example: leader - does the right things, manager - does the things right; a good leader may reach the objective w/o planning.
Of course, in the rest of the cases (which are the majority) one will need planning, but one should use it the right way and in the right amount.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday June 06, @10:29PM (1 child)
You know, planning ahead doesn't mean having a "planned economy".
Planning ahead means things like "liberal world order". To translate this to the LDS (liberal deranged syndrome) crowd, it means international order based on rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order [wikipedia.org]
You know, if you have rules that nations follow, more or less, then you end up with fewer misunderstandings and world wars. The downside and upside is that people then can't steamroll over their neighbour in order to gain market share, but can negotiate so everyone wins. This is what I mean by planning ahead.
WHO is a good example of this planning ahead. You immunize the world, which is major job of WHO, and maybe you have less disease causign harm to your own country as blowback. WHO budget pays back many-times in reduces disease imports to the "donor" countries.
World Bank and IMF are another examples of planning ahead. You end up with few financial crises which means everyone's economies are more stable.
Investment in *institutions* that form national and international stability is how you *plan ahead*.
-- Carl Sagan
That guy can tell you about planning ahead. And these are the types of guys and gals we need that are responsible for decision making. The elected figureheads, their job is to delegate planning to these types of experts. Institutions are cornerstone of pragmatic decision making, not fucking populist idiots. They only know how to break things and leave carnage behind.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @11:37PM
Stop playing with the meaning of words, it's a dangerous game [wikipedia.org]. I can't tell my manager, "Planning what I do in the next quarter is, like, already captured by international order based on rules".
Planning involves choosing the objectives (measurable; as opposed to "goals" which are permitted to be aspirational and/or fuzzy) and picking the means and actions to achieve the objectives.
Anything that picks an objective and projects the future means/actions to achieve it is planning; "liberal world order" and "planned economy" both qualify for the term.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @05:10AM (2 children)
Eisenhower said:
I think it's relevant to note that gnuman speaks of planning not of plans. Plans go wrong. But by planning, you can understand what the issues are and what overall strategies to try. It still requires you to have a good grasp of what's going on and to stick to a consistent, informed approach which is where I think the 5 year plans go wrong. They aren't about planning, but rather just announcing destinations without much thought about how they're going to get there - plans without planning.
Here, I think the excessive concern about climate change will throw any such planning in a similar way, and I gave my reasons for that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 09, @01:20PM (1 child)
Contingent to picking a good set of metrics (and that's quite difficult. esp if planning complex endeavours). Fail that and both the planning and the plan are worse than a waste of time.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 09, @06:56PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @01:30PM (10 children)
Great observation, and I agree. So how do you fix it? Especially in a totally media-influenced world?
I remember being concerned / worried when Reagan won, thinking voting is more about some emotional liking of the person.
I remember thinking Clinton was a shifty lying POS, and he won by women's popular vote. You can't lie and say you've never noticed how women are attracted to assholes. We all know it.
I've always wanted a dynamic businessperson to be president. I never liked Trump, but I'd rather have him than lying politicians. At least with Trump, you know and expect him to be a P. T. Barnum (showman).
I can't help but wonder if Warren Buffet would have made a great president, or many other great business leaders. As much brains and charisma as some of them have (and I've met some), they'd never win a popular election in the US. The US wants more Hollywood and less Wall Street. I'd bet that Harrison Ford would get more votes than Warren Buffet.
So, I don't know how to fix it. People's minds are quite swayed by movies, TV, etc., and that's what they expect.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @01:44PM (3 children)
I love the poorly educated
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @04:29PM (2 children)
You always have an irrational unrealistic pseudo-idealistic view of the world.
And never offering solutions, just ridicule, insults, and condemnation.
You're a constant troll here, far too opinionated about the US and our politics, and you're not a US citizen nor even live here. You're garbage.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @05:53PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 06, @09:59PM
Progressive tax on the rich (the kind you had during WWII), plug the corporate tax avoidance loopholes, balance the budget, reduce the GINI index.
Invest in public education and universal healthcare.
Elect those who promise the above.
In brief, do as the Scandinavians do.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 06, @03:43PM (5 children)
Let me tell you a story about a great business leader who became president. He had started out as a relatively unknown mining engineer, and worked his way up to a senior partner in a gold mining business and eventually formed his own company, which was quite successful. His company was quite innovative in part thanks to his engineering background, developing and employing newer methods to smelt ore into usable metals, including zinc, lead, and copper. He gave lectures and wrote about his mining efforts at major universities, and also became rich in the process. And in his spare time, he organized some major humanitarian relief projects. A genuine success story.
Sounds like the kind of guy you might want as president, right? As you said, a very dynamic business person with a good public image. Exactly the sort of person you'd want managing the economy in a time of crisis. And indeed the Republican Party and the voters of his day agreed with you.
And that's how we wound up with President Herbert Hoover in 1929 when the stock market crashed. Whoopsie.
Running a government is and has always been fundamentally different from running a business in a few key ways:
- Customers choose to interact with businesses, or not, and businesses expend a lot of effort encouraging customers to interact with the business. By contrast, citizens do not get to choose whether or not they interact with the government.
- The purpose of business is to maximize profits. The purpose of government is (ideally) to maximize the satisfaction of the citizens, or barring that to maintain its own coercive power over its citizens.
- Businesses can streamline themselves by making somebody else pay their costs of doing business. Government doesn't really have a "somewhere else" to send their problems to.
- Businesses don't have the power to tax or coerce people with violence. Governments do, it's kind of the whole point.
- Businesses for the most part don't get to set the rules the economy uses. Governments do get to change the rules as they see fit.
So being good at business does not necessarily make you good at government, and vice versa.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, @04:36PM (1 child)
Hoover has always been denigrated for 1929 Stock Market crash, but he wasn't king nor dictator.
Study US economics and politics- you'll see the US financial system was pretty much wild wild west which resulted in Great Depression. Govt. had to institute many strong and mostly smart economic controls after 1929. It took many years for those policies and laws to balance things and result in some pretty good economic times.
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 did much to stabilize things. Hmmm, by whom, when, and where was Glass-Steagall repealed?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 06, @05:36PM
It's true that Hoover wasn't a king or a dictator, but it's also true that his response was not anywhere near as helpful as it could have been. He did respond immediately to the crash, but his goals were, in approximate order:
1. Keep the federal budget balanced.
2. Stabilize the US dollar.
3. Help the stock markets recover.
This matched the advice of many of the leading economists of his day, but it also didn't work. Mostly because none of those were responsive to the underlying problem, namely that the financial economy (banking, stocks, bonds, etc) had outpaced the real economy (making and distributing goods and services).
And you and I are in agreement that Glass-Steagall was a really good move, and that the bipartisan decision to repeal it in 1999 (the congressional sponsors were Republicans but got a lot of Democratic votes, Democrat Bill Clinton also backed it) was really stupid and led directly to the 2008 crash.
Why the aftermath of the 2008 crash wasn't nearly as bad as the 1929 crash of course had a lot more to do with the Federal Reserve Bank having and using independent control over the US dollar than anything the politicians did.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 06, @09:10PM (2 children)
> President Herbert Hoover in 1929 when the stock market crashed. Whoopsie.
And you believe Hoover caused the crash? He certainly was stuck with managing the aftermath.
There's an island in Georgia where the architects of the US banking system met in 1910, secretly. Did they attempt to avert the crash of 1929, or encourage it to happen? Not really possible to say, since over 20 years elapsed between the meeting and any public acknowledgement of it: https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-conference [federalreservehistory.org]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday June 07, @10:49AM (1 child)
For reasons I described above, it's not that I think he caused the crash, it's that I think his response to it was generally ineffective and needlessly cruel. And what numbers we have about what happened to the economy as a whole and especially poorer Americans bear that out.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 07, @11:50AM
>generally ineffective and needlessly cruel.
Agreed, though that was a pretty typical attitude of earthlings in power at the time.
We earthlings occasionally do better than Douglas Adams lizard people "democracy," but not in the early 1900s.
It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bloodnok on Friday June 06, @04:54PM (1 child)
I fear that most of the alternatives, though probably less appalling, are still unsuitable. As Douglas Adams put it:
__
The major
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday June 06, @05:38PM
I'm reminded of another Douglas Adams comment on democracy:
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @06:22AM (6 children)
What do you think a populist is? Ultimately, it's someone with strong appeal to voters particularly against a perceived elite. My view: if your society isn't electing populists, then it isn't electing.
Show the first two are problems that we need to address in the next 50 years. And political instability will get better once we get everyone to near developed world status. It's driven by developed world competition with the developing world. Less developing world and more developed world will naturally fix that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07, @06:31AM (1 child)
The 2 countries that are causing the biggest problems for other countries are the US and Russia. Aren't they 'developed' enough for you?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @06:36AM
In other words, you're ignoring the benefits of these two countries and only considering cost. One-sided accounting doesn't capture reality.
All I can say is that all I can see of you is your dumb post above. Does that mean that you are a problem to the world?
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Saturday June 07, @01:40PM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism [wikipedia.org]
Populism is generally anti-establishment without grounding in reality when it comes to practicality of their policies. Heck, often, they have no policies and just run on emotions. For some examples, you can say that Marxist movement, or Hitler are populists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_populists [wikipedia.org]
Populism has nothing to do with *popularity* of leaders or parties or policies. 20% of the vote used to go to the populists in the 90s. Now, we are up to 35%, at least in Europe.
https://helpfulprofessor.com/examples-of-populism/ [helpfulprofessor.com]
So, maybe you are confused about "populism" vs. "popularity"???
And since our *entire* economy is built around carbon .... it's kind of not easy to switch about from that even in 50 years timescale. And delays here in implementation, mostly due to reactionary populism ideologies and not practical problems, is actually going to drive bad outcomes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @01:59PM (2 children)
And you can say that Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi were populists too. One of the things you learn when studying history is that populism can be used for good and competence as well as their opposites. That's why you have to weasel claim with the use of the word "often".
Sounds like we should have reasons then for doing something that is hard and global. Right? And do these bad outcomes include a better world - such as faster evolution toward developed world status globally? Because that's what I see from my side of the internets.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Saturday June 07, @09:03PM (1 child)
No. They were not. For example,
https://www.forbesindia.com/article/iim-bangalore/gandhis-relevance-in-a-populist-world/63219/1 [forbesindia.com]
Populism is rarely competent at anything. And yes, I don't speak in *absolutes* like you would like me to, because the world is not absolute. Only populists seem to believe in such dogmas. There's a saying "even a blind chicken can sometimes find a seed to eat". But when some idiots are prying on their wedge issues to divide society so they can gain power, it's not for the benefit of anyone in the long term. And grasping at any wedge issue until it sticks is what populist do, everyone of them. And they are not afraid to reverse themselves 180 degrees on an issue while saying "we've *always* had this position!"
Evolution? There's no "evolution" of anything here. And bad outcomes mean *conflict*, *wars* and lack of *cooperation*.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 07, @11:28PM
"Rarely": weasel-wording.
The problem with that is that the world became a better place, due in large part to that carbon economy that you complained about. Seriously, there's a lot of evidence [soylentnews.org] out there if you care to look: (from that link alone) less wars, global improvement in living standards, lower population growth (in absolute terms!). It's frustrating how people with an agenda deliberately look at the world in the worst way possible.
That's what I consider the real problem here. Trump wouldn't have gone anywhere, for example, if he couldn't have sold his MAGA scheme. It relies on a portrayal of US society as far- worse than it really is, combined with a fantasy of what it'll look like under Trump.
Steering it somewhat back on the on topic track, consider the troubles that SpaceX has these days. There's a large group of naysayers who are ideologically driven, reaching for every flimsy excuse they can find. Sure, nine test launches which mostly fall short of stated goals is a sign of problems with the program. But who goes from that to stating [planetearthandbeyond.co] that "Starship is such a moronic project that NASA already whooped its arse 58 years ago!"