Image by Elon Musk Parody via Autoevolution.
I don’t know, I’m at that point in the news cycle where I want to describe it as “unsustainable”, or refer to the Shepard tone illusion of a chord where the notes seem to be continuously, infinitely, rising in pitch, though in fact they’re just repeating the same octave.
I see SpaceX lost another starship, or, as CNBC elegantly put it,
SpaceX’s Starship rocket reaches space but is intentionally destroyed mid-flight
Starship flew for more than seven minutes, successfully separating from its booster before the rocket’s onboard system intentionally destroyed the vehicle mid-flight…. “An incredibly successful day, even though we did have a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ both of the Super Heavy booster and the ship,” SpaceX quality engineering manager Kate Tice said on the webcast.
It wasn’t a mistake, it destroyed itself on purpose! The AI system weighed the alternatives and chose death! Was it making what the politicians refer to as the “tough decisions”, or just despondent? (A BBC reporter said, “the operating system wasn’t happy.”)
While The New York Times emphasizes how the patient’s death doesn’t reflect on the success of the operation:
The flight did not achieve all of SpaceX’s objectives, but it overcame some of the problems that affected an earlier launch, showing that Elon Musk’s private space company is making progress toward its ambitious spaceflight goals.
Meanwhile, in one of the tabs I’ve been keeping open, Marisa Taylor reports on how SpaceX is run, with a worker-injury rate six times that of the industry as a whole:
Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.
Musk has as little respect for the employees as he does for the hardware. This story should be getting more attention.
And Musk himself, as everybody knows by now, is chumming with the paranoids in the scariest regions of his own Twitter (or if you prefer his Ex):
I’ve had a hard time guessing what “truth” he’s referring to there. What’s a “dialectical hatred”? Hegelian or Marxist? I’m used to people who can’t tell the difference between “disinterested”and “uninterested” but not to “western Jewish populations” (as opposed to Oriental ones? or in Arizona and Colorado? or what?) or “minorities that support flooding their country”.
Yair Rosenberg at the Atlantic thought there was a missing word, and reconstructed the phrase as a reference to the “Great Replacement theory” of a powerful cabal of hidden Jews, Elders as it were of Zion, engineering mass immigration to the US in the intention of diluting the country’s whiteness
those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country
and I suppose he’s probably right, but is that really what Musk was agreeing to? Shortly after the original tweet Musk had offered his own explanation of what he meant—he was not talking about Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League
The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.
but was he saying the ADL is organizing an invasion? That’s certainly not the organization’s day job. Or was he kvetching about an ADL report on Twitter from last March—
The group's ADL Center for Technology and Society found that only 28 percent of posts flagged for antisemitic content were taken down or sanctioned.
"While we have no way to actually verify if the company is de-amplifying antisemitic content, we have found that Twitter is failing to take down tweets that clearly violate hateful conduct policies," the report said.
—said to be one of the reasons his company’s advertising revenue is down 60% since he took it over (doing what actually is the organization’s day job—discouraging illegal and discriminatory defamation, that is, particularly of Jews)?
And this minority immigrant (a white South African) believes this behavior, contributing to the financial losses Musk incurred after he disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council last December, is the equivalent of engineering a massive conspiracy to dislodge White America from its power position as the Supreme Race?
Because that’s the kind of giant narcissist he is. He is White America, in his own conceit, and the Elders of ADL are trying to dislodge him. Because he can’t bear to acknowledge that he’s a shitty businessman whose attempt to profit off of antisemitic and otherwise racist messaging has been a colossal blunder.
I’ve hated the privatization of US space exploration (as opposed to the 1995 idea of farming it out to university-based research institutes) since it really got going with the SPACE Act of 2015, and I can’t understand how a company like Starlink can be allowed to dominate satellite communications worldwide outside US control (it’s a serious threat to national security, not just Ukraine’s), and I think the government should have a much bigger role than one private operator in distributing EV chargers around the country too, and I don’t think Twitter should belong to an individual or bunch of profit-seeking shareholders but to a co-op, but the fact that this one unbelievably nasty antisemite is able to sit on top of all those things at once, and force our government to bow down to him for fear of what he might decide to do if he gets mad at us—it’s really too sick to stand.
Taking Prime Minister and Mrs. Netanyahu for a truck ride, September 19. Via. Bibi doesn’t care what the ADL thinks, of course. (And no wonder, here’s ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt out praising Musk, for anti–free speech views no less, a couple of days later
I spent the first 40 years of my life loving space exploration, from crayoning pictures of astronauts on the moon, through watching any piece of junk movie if it had a spaceship in it -- but the past 5 years I have lost almost all enthusiasm for space. I did get actual chills from the recent NASA-JPL Martian lander (maybe 2019) -- I watched and rewatched video of Mission Control celebrating. All these kids who worked so hard and pulled it off -- it felt amazing to witness a peak of human talent. But the private missions feel different. I don't care for more than a few minutes, even about Musk's rockets that can land vertically, or I end up actively repulsed by video of Bezos spraying champagne over his rich-kid passengers like going into space isn't anything bigger than initiation night at Beta Chi.
I have asked myself why it feels so different. I think because I really am a patriot, I like to see the USA do amazing things, and when it does -- those things are done with my contribution too, at least insofar as I pay taxes, and I genuinely feel they are done to represent me, and all of us, to ourselves and to the world. The achievements of NASA feel like the result of great aspiration on behalf of the community and enlightenment idealism. Whereas these billionaires... they seem to be doing it, as they do everything, to escape community. Their success fills me with a kind of dread, as if it signifies the USA is faltering as a great institution trying to lift us all up, instead functioning as a confederacy unleashing specific individuals whose goal is to find ways to leave most of us behind.
Just like how Trump suddenly realized, upon finally encountering its actual mechanics, that health care is "really hard" (even though it was one of a long list of problems that only he could fix; he just had to "figure out" how to solve them), Musk came into this Twitter deal with an elementary-school-level understanding of how you could perfect the 21st Century virtual town square — you could silence everyone's objections — simply by following a principle of "freedom" and removing all "censorship."
Musk never realized (as with Trump and healthcare, or Trump and anything) that other people have tried very hard to make those first-level obvious solutions work, but they don't, which is why the situation is now so complicated.
Ross Perot had the same conceptual problem: he was — unlike Trump — a legitimately successful entrepreneur (whom I genuinely admire for that part of his career), who had grandiose ideas about predatory capitalism and thought that the apparent "gridlock" in Washington could be fixed simply by "finding the best people" (something nobody had ever thought of?) and "putting them to work."
Musk really is that dumb — dumb enough to think that he's smart; that his adoption of the dubious Right Wing bromides about "freedom" can solve real-world problems.