~ Jonathan Swift, demonstrating Horatian satire, characterized by its attempt to raise questions with gentle humor rather than attacking -- that is characteristic of the Juvelian school of satire
I see now the idea is it is further evidence of Great Man theory to question Jewish involvement in this serious problem.
So yes, not antics in your book.
It makes me sad some subset of Congress decided this didn't need solving suddenly, for no apparent reason.
At the moment we put more debris into Earth's orbit, Star Link is nice but not a sustainable solution, same with many other satellites
If you're talking about environmental sustainability.. get over it. Rocketry, even as SpaceX's scale, is a tiny drop in the ocean of throwaway consumer culture.
Building landing rockets was thought to be too expensive not impossible.
Why is Tesla's FSD still not working? Wasn't Musk around?
The Spaceship is also nothing impossible, let's wait for his Mars colony.
Biden, Trump, Elon, etc., depending on what side you are, there's always someone to think of as an example.
I get it that Musk was necessary to get the money but money doesn't build rockets otherwise Bezos company would have succeeded too.
Seems like the actual engineers are the ones to praise.
Musks seems more like the type who has read a sci-fi book or seen a movie and has enough money to pay people to build what he has read or seen.
The problem is that he often underestimates the technical challenges. This sometimes works when the problem only needs an evolutionary step, like landing rockets, but fails when it comes to revolutionary discoveries.
The whole Twitter thing is only accelerating the destruction of his nimbus.
When he makes announcements and promises, I now always hear in my head: "Monorail, monorail"
Or how do you explain his desire for a growing population?
The concept of increasing productivity seems to be foreign to him in this context.
He was always like this. He started SpaceX because he thought putting a dome on Mars within which plants would be grown would be inspiring. The only reason it wasn't on social media was because it wasn't really much of a thing at the time. He didn't care about the optics and tried to buy an ICBM from Russia for this purpose.
To me that sounds like the same person as he is on social media.
So randomly claiming someone's a pedophile is somehow "the same" as wanting to put a dome on Mars because it's inspiring?
I honestly don't see how you can say that sounds like the same person.
> sharing what he finds to be worth sharing?
Are we honestly looking at the same tweets? Just looked and his pinned tweet is about Mexico and asylum seekers, does that sound "inspiring" to you? What about "My pronouns are Proscute/Fauci"?
He's fully lost the plot. He's no longer about grand inspiring endeavors, and is instead knee deep in social wars, posting shitty memes all day. What's the last inspiring thing he's done?
His pinned tweet expresses concern about the border crisis, specifically the risk of undesirable people crossing the border.
He's expressing what he cares about, is the parent's point. Abrasive or animated expression of views, isn't losing the plot.
As for jokes about pronouns and other triggering issues, it can sometimes be defended when the joke is similar to the Gemini jokes. That is, poking fun at things that might deserve a bit of poking fun at, even ridicule in the case of Gemini.
And my point is that he used to care about inspiring stuff, now he spends all his time caring about useless culture wars.
"Useless" is your opinion, not an objective measure. "Culture wars" is a trope designed to broadly smear the target, disregarding specifics.
Do you want Musk to be an inspiration vending machine? Your insistence he tighten his inspiration schedule to meet your expectations, is odd.
Bought twitter and assigned an entire team to work overtime and figure out why his follower count is dropping? And banned the ‘Elon-jet’ account? And called cave diver that rescued children a pedo after Elon’s rescue - submarine failed?
I remind myself that the real genius at the head of SpaceX is Gwynne, and hope that Elon continues to let her be awesome.
For example, Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy when it started to become clearer how tiny its impact would end up being relative to cost (since F9 had improved so much as to eat up most of the demand they had expected FH to take). It was pretty fair reasoning, but Gwynne insisted that they keep FH development going because they had already started trying to sell it to customers and she felt that cancelation would affect how seriously customers take future offerings from SpaceX for rockets which haven't been fully built ahead of time.
And even if she is 'the genius' then Musk is the guy who recruited her, promoted her multiple times and put her in the position she is in now.
But its also just the reality that Shotwell job is made 10x easier because she has a reusable rocket to build, sell and launch, while the others do not.
Shotwell is awesome, no question. But the Musk hater story line of 'she is the real hero while Musk hits himself in the head with a hammer' is just nonsense.
SpaceX has many super smart super talented people, and of course in any company the leader can only do so much, by definition most of the work is not done by the leaders, Musk or Shotwell.
But on the other hand we also no that leadership is incredibly important. And there is no question who is leading and has lead SpaceX since Day 1.
I was with you until this part. The general common sense and MBA consensus is that leadership is important. And I suspect that it is more so with smaller companies. But the data seems mixed with large companies and some research seems to point out that high level leaders don’t have an appreciable impact.
Also there is a difference between short term and longterm. Most companies don't have the same leadership for 20+ years. Musk has been leading SpaceX for 20+ years and SpaceX has been consistently growing and consistently amazing track record of execution and technology development.
I don't really think there are companies like that who have terrible leadership.
Blew up the second launch?
Based on your response I won’t go any deeper, it would be time wasting, you appear to have made up your mind already.
Elon delivered when nobody did, now it’s quite a bit easier.
(And it's arguablely a failure, as the Senate is still earthbound, and likely to remain so for the forseeable future.;))
If SpaceX had ask themselves, can we make a Super-Heavy of SLS class and launch it the first time, SpaceX could have almost certainty have done that.
But that not the goal or the ambition of the project.
I have serious doubts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-uk...
Maybe stop looking for reasons to hate on him simply because it’s popular to do so? His works speak for themselves.
As a Ukrainian you ought to be on your knees thanking God that Musk was born. Starlink is that vital to Ukraine, and he had zero obligation to provide it (let alone for free) when the Ukrainian government asked for his help early in the war. The US-funded Starlink subscriptions and Starshield have only increased the value Musk's enterprise provides to Ukraine, of course, but it all began for free.
Let me repeat: Zero obligation. Musk is not Ukrainian. The United States is, contrary to what many subreddits' denizens seem to believe, not actually at war with Russia. Ukraine is not a member of NATO or EU. He can say whatever he wants whenever he wants about anything thanks to freedoms that exist in the US but not in Russia (or Ukraine), and Musk is a lot more entitled to do so than you or me or every bleater on Reddit whose collective actions have saved fewer Ukrainian lives than the results of Musk's capital and innovation and risk-taking.
Suggesting that a civil war will end in a cease fire along battle lines is a very common way for civil wars to end. Even if during those wars both sides absolutely are convinced that they will have total victory.
Ukraine actually managing to retake all of their prewar territory might plausibly cause Russia to go totally insane and start nuking, but the way things are going it seems like a pipe dream for Ukraine to make that much progress. Maybe if some serious changes to the balance of force occurred, like a surprise admission of Ukraine to NATO, but this isn't very realistic.
(Anything more than that, some sort of "Ukrainian forces in Moscow executing Putin for war crimes" is just pure fantasy. So no matter what happens, relative security is the best anybody can hope for.)
Irrelevant to the fact he went on to also blatantly dick the Ukrainians over in late 2023.
Frankly I think the way they treat him is ridiculous. A media discord based on bad and inaccurate information heavily biased reporting somehow making him out to be the bad guy.
Ok got it. Makes total sense. War really makes people lose touch with reality.
During that time of separation the actual elites of the country treated the boarder between the two countries as essentially meaningless. The same group of oligarch took over in both countries for the most part and treaty the sovereignty and democracy as a joke.
I think its totally fair to call it a civil war. You could call it other things as well that wouldn't be incorrect either.
For historical context, the Austro-Prussian War is often called the German Civil War, or in German 'Deutsche Krieg' or 'Deutsche Bruderkrieg'. And those two countries were no where near as close historically as Russia/Ukraine.
Its more like if England and Scotland fought each other, but they are both Anglican and English people believed they origin of the Angles/Saxons was in the Scottish highlands. After 250 years of British history, calling that a civil war would be totally reasonable.
The "national origin story" (unless you mean the 1917 Revolution) is nothing like how the two countries were created.
Mexico and the US have "tons of families and other connections over the (sic) boarder as well."
The reason the elites treated the border between Ukraine and the Russian Federation as meaningless was because ex-Soviet cronies were running Ukraine to plunder its assets. Until the Maiden Revolution, these cronies were basically stooges controlled by Moscow.
The current conflict (2014 to now) is nothing like a civil war. Moscow uses some proxy forces from the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, but the majority of forces are from the Russian Federation. They control everything, supply all the equipment and determine goals and objectives. If you were to remove the Russian forces from these two oblasts (as well as Crimea and Zaporizhzhia) these proxy forces would collapse immediately.
Oh and regarding England and Scotland, well, many Scots would like to leave the UK. That wouldn't be a civil war either, but an independence movement. A civil war would be the more like the Hundred Years war...
As would all of the so-called rebellions in the East from the very start (2014).
While there were indigenous elements - even their own leaders acknowledge they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without support (or at least the hope of support) from the Motherland.
What strange talk is this. They annexed them, period. 17 months ago.
If you were to remove the Russian forces from these two oblasts (as well as Crimea and Zaporizhzhia) these proxy forces would collapse immediately.
In 2024 (which is now) there is precisely one proxy force in this war. That would collapse immediately without support. You can’t spell its name without “rain”.
If we like it or not, national myths are and always have been an integral part to nationalism. So what different countries consider their origin myth does matter. Just as religion and language matter. And of course shared history.
> The reason the elites treated the border between Ukraine and the Russian Federation as meaningless was because ex-Soviet cronies were running Ukraine to plunder its assets.
This was literally my point. So you had the Soviet Union, witch was a country. And now different parts of that Union are fighting one another. Both countries were controlled by the former elites of the previous country.
The collapse of the Soviet Union literally was an Ukrainian/Russian independence movement based on the politics of the elites at the time. And the war now could be described as a independence war again.
My point here is that its simply isn't a strict defined what all these different things are. You can call it a civil war, and independence war or an imperial war. All of them are correct depending on how you look at it.
> The current conflict (2014 to now) is nothing like a civil war.
What we call things depends on how you look at it.
Consider the situation in Yemen for the past 35 years (the same amount of time as the Ukraine exists). You can call it a civil war, an independence war and many other things.
You seem to be attached to perfectly rigidly designed categories of what everything is. The real world just isn't that simple and fits nice into those categories. You seem to be against calling it a civil war between you interpreted what I sad as it being a 'Ukrainian Civil War' but you don't like that because the 'Ukrainian rebels' are outside supported and would normally not actually have a chance. Guess what, that is true in many civil wars.
But whatever, I wasn't even saying 'Ukrainian Civil War' anyway. I was just calling it a Civil War because of the extreme close historical connect, simply put for the last 400+ years what is now Ukraine and what is now Russia were one country. That to me is by far enough to consider it a civil war.
During the Soviet period, 'in theory' the different members were independent and just part of a voluntary union. But we know this wasn't the case because the communist elites really controlled both governments and the party was really in control of the whole thing. And while the Soviet Union went away formally, 'in theory' the two countries are now fully separated and independent, but in actual reality this was never really the case.
A civil war is not just a situation where you have a international recognized country as defined by the UN at the current moment, splitting into two groups fighting each other (with nobody from outside involved) until one wins and then are are reunified the same way.
> Oh and regarding England and Scotland, well, many Scots would like to leave the UK. That wouldn't be a civil war either, but an independence movement.
Speaking in actual realist terms England and Scotland don't actually exist, its one country called the UK who had a unified foreign policy for many 100s of years. If different parts of the UK fight each other for whatever reason, calling that a civil war is totally reasonable.
The Southern States were also an independence movement but yet somehow its called a Civil War. Independence movements often lead to civil wars. Literally a leading cause of Civil War. To say 'it wouldn't be Civil War but an Independence movement' makes no sense what so ever. Its would obviously be both.
An empire, not a country.
Which dissolved itself peacefully enough and with no outside prodding of any kind on 26 December 1991. In the process, fully and unequivocally recognizing the complete sovereign independence of all of its constituent members at the time -- along with their inviolable borders -- including Ukraine.
End of story, full stop.
This idea you have that it's basically "still one country, hashing things out" is seriously misinformed nonsense.
Kievan Rus
And the idea that anyone, anywhere should be fighting a full-scale war in 2024 based on (or "explained" by) events of the 9th-13th centuries is, by all objective standards -- batshit crazy.
If you've been studying the topic for "decades", and then you say things like "they speak essentially the same language" (in reference to Russians and Ukrainians) -- then I don't know what to tell you.
Second, I am Swiss and Swiss German is quite different then High German with somewhat different historical routes. When I was in Ukraine we were talking about languages and how they differ from each other and came to the conclusion that Swiss German <-> High German was a reasonable comparison. In some way Swiss German is more different to German then Ukrainian to Russian.
I do consider Swiss German and High German 'essentially the same language' as well. Now if Germany invaded Switzerland I would likely also argue against the notion but that's just politics.
You can of course be nitpick and quibble with the term 'essentially', the fact is they are extremely close related languages.
There is a lot of interesting history of both nationalist movement trying to influence the language. Imperial Russian tried to make Ukrainian more Russian (generally promoting Pan-Slavic policy with Russia as the leader). Specially in the Pre-WW1 period when it became increasingly clear that Ukrainian nationalism was a potential disaster for Imperial Russia. Ukrainian nationalist did the opposite, tried to remove Russian influence and promote the differences. Language unification and dis-unification is an interesting aspect of all modern nationalist development and its always political.
Yikes - you definitely lost me there, man. I'm going to have to let you hash this stuff out on your own.
The same Empire, you mean. Are you saying that all empires that ever existed need to be maintained into perpetuity?
They speak essentially the same language
Absolutely not the case. Are Spanish and Portuguese "essentially the same language?"
And use the same national origin story
Nope.
I think its totally fair to call it a civil war.
You really are very misinformed.
After 250 years of British history, calling that a civil war would be totally reasonable.
And if you tried walking into a bar, and telling an Irish person that the whole situation with England has been just a "civil war" and that they really ought to get over this idea of Irish independence -- I think you know what would happen.
..
I love "Stokes Space" design for example... https://youtu.be/EY8nbSwjtEY?feature=shared
I cant wait to see that progress.. Imo the upper stage / re-entry design so much more elegant and practical than Starship. It re-enters just like an Apollo capsule, not like the space shuttle or starship's weird bellyflop. Also it doesnt rely on ceramic tiles, which were a big problem with the space shuttle. Even forgetting about Columbia, maintaining and replacing the tiles after each mission was incredibly expensive and time consuming. Imo re-entry is the biggest hurdle to a re-usable upper stage and Stokes Space have based their design around nailing that issue first and foremost.