Elon's Antics

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That depends on where you sit in the party :D
In capitalism, most anyone can benefit from corruption with those who may narrowing as government intervention increases. In communism, only party members benefit from corruption.
 
In capitalism, most anyone can benefit from corruption with those who may narrowing as government intervention increases. In communism, only party members benefit from corruption.
In both, only those with power can benefit from corruption. If you don't have power and you refuse to play ball, you get stomped by those who do have power. The methods differ and what counts as "power" differs, but the broader structural relationships are remarkably similar.

Which really points to the main problem being not the specific societal structures involved, but the humans and the culture they were raised in. If you have a country full of people that strongly favour individualism and "**** you, got mine", then no matter whether it's capitalist, communist or spaghettist then people are to behave in ways that enrich themselves and those around them at the expense of everyone else. That's the system working as intended.

And in a society where there isn't enough to go around, that might even be somewhat rational. In the modern day, it's psychopathic. It's hurting other people just because they can. We may have smartphones and rockets, but psychologically humans haven't really moved on that much from the Dark Ages.
 
An almost 10-minute summary of the timeline from Musk's "offer" to buy Twitter through all the steps in prosecutes* interference in the 2024 Presidential Election in favour of Trump, projected onto Tesla's Amsterdam offices by Led By Donkeys:



*I forgot that Musk's pronouns are "prosecute/Fauci", so thanks to that video for reminding me I was misusing them
 
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sigh It’s like Die Hard 4.0, but not, but like it. Plus, The Space Program by A Tribe Called Quest. double sigh

All these people that fell for the banana in the tail pipe…. again.
 
I see the Guardian have quit X in so much as they won’t be posting from their official accounts (80 of them) citing “often disturbing content”.

Another thing for him to throw his toys out of the pram about. I wonder if this will trigger other establishments to jump ship?
 
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I'm not going to link to the sweary Jalopnik article, which I think overplays it a scootch but...

... some recent Tweets from Captain Spaceism do seem to suggest he doesn't big physics well. It revolves around the proposed "Marslink" concept, which essentially aims to put communications satellites in orbit around Mars in order to ruin its night sky too provide support for future ground and orbital missions as well as imaging the planet's surface.

One thing he's definitely said is that it will need "petabit/sec" speed (he means bandwidth), which is currently not even a thing commercially on Earth. We're close - about halfway there - and some experimental techniques have resulted in actually more than that, but all require cable and not satellites. I'm assuming he's thinking there's some magical solution with lasers, but the bandwidth record there is three and a half orders of magnitude out...

The other, which Jalopnik has quoted but I can't easily find, is that he's suggested a series of satellites between the two planets to provide a data bridge; Jalopnik says this shows he doesn't understand the fundamental limitation of data speed but he's kicked off at that notion and stated it'd help with bandwidth... which it wouldn't necessarily.

It would help with data integrity, but either way it's an idea he's nicked from Stargate SG-1/Atlantis and the McKay-Carter Intergalactic Gate Bridge which benefitted from being both fictional and taking place at locations spread over significantly larger distances which remain almost stationary with regards to direction relative to one another and not Earth and Mars which can be 35 million miles apart or 250 and have a whole-ass star in the way, and this varies from one extreme to the other every 13 months or so...
 
he's suggested a series of satellites between the two planets to provide a data bridge
Uh...

How? Surely he is aware that Earth and Mars go around the sun at different rates right? Last year around this time, Mars was on the other side of the sun from the Earth. How do we have a series of satellites that span that bridge? A constellation, or multiple constellations, at orbital radii between the Earth and Mars? That's gonna be hella expensive.
 
I'm not going to link to the sweary Jalopnik article, which I think overplays it a scootch but...

... some recent Tweets from Captain Spaceism do seem to suggest he doesn't big physics well. It revolves around the proposed "Marslink" concept, which essentially aims to put communications satellites in orbit around Mars in order to ruin its night sky too provide support for future ground and orbital missions as well as imaging the planet's surface.

One thing he's definitely said is that it will need "petabit/sec" speed (he means bandwidth), which is currently not even a thing commercially on Earth. We're close - about halfway there - and some experimental techniques have resulted in actually more than that, but all require cable and not satellites. I'm assuming he's thinking there's some magical solution with lasers, but the bandwidth record there is three and a half orders of magnitude out...

The other, which Jalopnik has quoted but I can't easily find, is that he's suggested a series of satellites between the two planets to provide a data bridge; Jalopnik says this shows he doesn't understand the fundamental limitation of data speed but he's kicked off at that notion and stated it'd help with bandwidth... which it wouldn't necessarily.

It would help with data integrity, but either way it's an idea he's nicked from Stargate SG-1/Atlantis and the McKay-Carter Intergalactic Gate Bridge which benefitted from being both fictional and taking place at locations spread over significantly larger distances which remain almost stationary with regards to direction relative to one another and not Earth and Mars which can be 35 million miles apart or 250 and have a whole-ass star in the way, and this varies from one extreme to the other every 13 months or so...
I really appreciate the Stargate reference.
 
Surely he is aware that Earth and Mars go around the sun at different rates right?
What do you mean, Earth goes around the sun?

And whatever issue there is, if you just can throw money at it - in the way of just putting a few billion satelites in to form a few orbits in between Earth and Mars so a steady connection can be guaranteed by overlapping line of sights - the taxpayers definitly would be happy helping exploring a planet neither they nor their child and grandchild ever will visit.

Start by putting massive tarifs on the wooden satelites from Japan, because they would be too cheap ...
 
What do you mean, Earth goes around the sun?

And whatever issue there is, if you just can throw money at it - in the way of just putting a few billion satelites in to form a few orbits in between Earth and Mars so a steady connection can be guaranteed by overlapping line of sights - the taxpayers definitly would be happy helping exploring a planet neither they nor their child and grandchild ever will visit.

Start by putting massive tarifs on the wooden satelites from Japan, because they would be too cheap ...
I spent way to much time thinking about the stupidity of the telecom relay between Earth and Mars. It's so absurd. But I'm sure Elon wold love to get a steady stream of insane amounts of tax dollars to make something like that happen (for no reason).

If we're going to pump money into space, at least Elon could get behind an actually good project, like a gravitational lens telescope that would be capable of using the sun's gravitational lensing to allow us to get decent images of planets around other stars. That would be just amazing. And it would cost less than the stupid mars telecom nonsense.


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Think about the difference. "We can talk to nobody on mars more easily" or "We can see what other worlds around other stars look like and evaluate their atmospheric composition" + gobs of money leftover. I know which one I'd pick.
 
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I spent way to much time thinking about the stupidity of the telecom relay between Earth and Mars. It's so absurd. But I'm sure Elon wold love to get a steady stream of insane amounts of tax dollars to make something like that happen (for no reason).

If we're going to pump money into space, at least Elon could get behind an actually good project, like a gravitational lens telescope that would be capable of using the sun's gravitational lensing to allow us to get decent images of planets around other stars. That would be just amazing. And it would cost less than the stupid mars telecom nonsense.


Edit:

Think about the difference. "We can talk to nobody on mars more easily" or "We can see what other worlds around other stars look like and evaluate their atmospheric composition" + gobs of money leftover. I know which one I'd pick.
If we pick the former, we are definitely better off just letting money float away in outer space.
 
I'm surprised he's not asking for money to build a trans-martian monorail, sorry, hyperloop.

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I see the Guardian have quit X in so much as they won’t be posting from their official accounts (80 of them) citing “often disturbing content”.

Another thing for him to throw his toys out of the pram about. I wonder if this will trigger other establishments to jump ship?
Oh they're all going now. Biggest blow yet:

 
My father is an immigrant (1951) but is a legal US citizen. I wonder if I have to be worried about being deported.
 
It's okay. Israel is your country, remember? :)
Technically if I was deported to the country my father came from, I'd be deported to Austria. I say technically because Austria doesn't recognize Jewish children born in DP camps (they listed his nationality as Israelitish).
 
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