They've never been "stuck" up there in the sense NASA couldn't get them home asap. NASA just decided to instead use them to do normal ISS duties and put them as part of the standard ISS rotation. It seems they're okay with that.
This is some weird mental gymnastics. They were supposed to be up there 30 days and it’s winding up to be over 280 days due to Boeings failures with starliner. The fact that SpaceX can fill those shoes with a comparatively tiny amount of notice is super embarrassing for Boeing.
Secondly, NASA announced in December that SpaceX will return them in Boeing’s place in late March, which SpaceX is still on-time for. SpaceX is having to shuffle stuff around to accommodate this because they didn’t plan for having to pick up Boeing’s slack. Why don’t you go ask Boeing how long they’d take to get another unscheduled Starliner up there. It’d be literally years.
"Great picture" sounds pretty subjective to me, but Suni Williams served a turn as commander of ISS and performed her eighth (wow) spacewalk while she's been up there. I imagine Wilmore is having fun too.
It sucks for the guys who were scheduled to go up and had their trip postponed (not to mention Boeing shareholders) but otherwise, everything seems cool. You can certainly spin it to look any way you want, but using words like "stranded" and passing political conspiracy theories is lame.
(the difficulty NASA of the Mir-era would have had in adapting to something comparable to this is something to contemplate)
If you planned to visit Antarctica and your return trip got cancelled and your month long trip turned into nearly a year, then yeah I think most anyone would say you were stranded in Antarctica
One would be surprised to find out how many humans live with foreign objects embedded in their body, for removal is riskier than the object left in body as it is.
> Musk responded by calling Mogensen “fully retarded,” adding that “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago”
I'm risking going too off topic with this one, but how did we get to the point where a public (policital?) figure can call someone "fully retarded" in front of the world and not face any backlash? Especially someone with great achievements, that has been to the ISS multiple times, and so on.
A few years ago this would have likely resulted in a defamation lawsuit, public backlash, criticism in news...
I'm glad we're atleast looking at Musk's own actions now, but no, supporting the right isn't evidence of Nazism nor is it Nazism to not feel guilty for actions you didn't do.
That won't happen because they are late on delivering it. The mission was supposed to be Feb but has been pushed back to late March 2025. If SpaceX don't screw it up further that is.
His companies don't have great governance ratings because the board is stuffed with family members, friends and his divorce lawyer as General Counsel (that last one sounds like satire but isn't).
"...It wasn’t just Maron. Musk had a 15-year relationship with Ira Ehrenpreis, who chaired the committee that determined the CEO’s compensation. Antonio Gracias, another member of the compensation committee has a 20-year business relationship with Musk, and they’re such good friends that the two even go on vacation together..."
And why hasn't scarab92 and other obsessive compulsive Musk fan-boys who spend so much of their energy and reputation licking his boots and carrying his water and defending DOGE dropped into this discussion to defend Musk's lies and parrot and amplify his use of the slanderous childish schoolyard bully attacks like "pedo" and "retarded", then gone on to amplify the propaganda and hate speech by personally attacking and demeaning the stranded astronauts and their families themselves with even worse lies and name calling? Is it not yet business hours in St Petersburg?
Elon Musk ridiculed a blind person on X. Then a mob went to work.
Musk’s unparalleled online reach on X has given him a powerful tool to attack individuals who criticize DOGE.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette works at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on reducing bureaucratic waste. He also happens to be blind. So when he criticized Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service in testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Musk unleashed an online attack Hedtler-Gaudette described as “surreal” in its juvenile bigotry.
Edit: Oh look who crawled out from under his rock and replied! It's scarab92, just like clockwork.
Dude, dang already warned you about your misbehavior and how you're just about to be banned, but let me remind you that you're still incoherently foaming at the mouth, obsessive compulsively repeating yourself, factually incorrect, creepily obsessed, and totally off the rails about defending Musk no matter what, and you have an intellectually dishonest track record of ninja-editing your provably false comments to say totally different things than you originally wrote, and running away with your tail between your legs whenever anybody asks you to prove what you lied about. So we all know what you said is a bald faced lie, just like all the other stuff you write. GET. SOME. HELP.
If you're so sure Musk wasn't making a Nazi salute, then post your real name, employer, and a photo of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did, coward.
Yes, you're not the only one who's noticed. He's not the only one in the least -- sociopaths like that are a dime a dozen and there are many more in the pipeline -- but he's a perfect example of the kind of ignorant angry mentally ill hateful people who Musk attracts and inspires to worship and parrot and emulate himself (but without all the money to get away with it).
Imagine how terrible it must be to be his wife or child! I bet he mistreats them just as badly as he behaves in public. They can't just ban him like dang can.
Could you please stop posting flamebait comments and please stop duplicating comments? You've been doing way too much of this and are over the line at which we'd ban an account.
I don't want to ban you because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please stop now.
krapp 11 hours ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]
You've posted this same comment verbatim or nearly verbatim at least five times in this thread. You keep getting flagged and you keep pasting it in.
You're the one who has devolved into incurious and uninformed ranting here, not the people criticizing Musk.
Go touch grass or something.
9283409232 13 hours ago | unvote | parent | next [–]
I notice you very actively defending Musk in threads but typically leave the conversation when someone ask you to defend the indefensible.
moron4hire 1 day ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
This is either woefully naive or active disinformation.
Edit: OP dramatically edited their post. It originally made all kinds of claims of process and propriety that just aren't happening. This was the original that I was replying to:
”Most of the animosity comes from misunderstanding. Trump tasked "DOGE" with reviewing government spending across it's 400+ agencies, and coming up with recommendations on how to reduce wasteful spending. They have 1 year to complete this task. To make sensible recommendations, DOGE needs data about the major programs within each agency. They can't tackle each agency consecutively, since there are more agencies than days until the deadline, so they are parallelising the work.
The access is read only, and they are not linking personal data between agencies, but rather doing a bunch of separate audits in parallel.
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in with the review in agencies where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).”
My father was a big Musk fan and a notorious abusive asshole. He blindly followed the loudest authority figure of the hour because there wasn't an ounce of rational thinking in his head. There are a lot of people like that in society. It becomes their personality and identity which means any defence even if rational becomes a personal attack. End game is defensive measures are rolled out and even the person is brought up in normal conversation so that they can defend them.
He is dead now. That is probably better for the world.
I actually had little to no opinion of Musk until he started meddling in politics. An asshole CEO is expected. The market should kill them if they go over the line. An asshole politician is a very very big issue. More than stocks can be harmed.
Another facet of the same fallacy: "A difficult choice is one that helps some while hurting others, but someone wise has to make them. Therefore, if I make a choice that helps some while hurting others, I must be wise."
I see this often when people declare "you can't help everyone!" as an axiom. This is also strongly connected with, though I'd argue slightly separate from, "suffering builds character, therefore it's good if I make someone suffer".
I think it's more about using the language that is close to people. When you listen to Trump's speeches, he's virtually the only high-rank politician who speaks in a way that voters can understand. Politicians created their own lingo that only themselves and those actively interested in politics can understand, and using phrases like "he's a retard" solves this problem.
It’s a disgrace this is flagged, and more so if this gets buried by the admin. This is a clear cut case really. The astronaut is correct and Musk is on a tirade.
More than astronaut. Aerospace engineer and ESA astronaut, Master’s in Aeronautical Engineering, Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, ESA astronaut since 2009, First non-American to pilot a U.S. spacecraft, ISS Expedition 70 commander and Honorary professor.
One day Musk will learn how to run that Python script....
Because "owning the libs" is basically the entirety of the right's ideology. It doesn't matter if it's calling people names, firing park rangers or cheering on Putins war, if it pisses off the libs, it must be great.
Garry Tan (CEO of YC) has also been calling people retarded on Twitter since the election. What's "retarded" in the actual sense of the word is behaving like a poorly socialized child when you're in your forties and running global companies. I mean, honestly, what the fuck? I can't believe these are our leaders.
(Worse yet, I get the sense this filth has just been welling up inside them for the last few years, and they are positively giddy at the prospect of turning public discourse into Call of Duty voice chat.)
As I feel like having to point out every single time this is mentioned because I know exactly how people try to relativize this:
Yes, he tried to use plausible deniability by talking about how "his heart goes out" to people right before doing this gesture, but you know exactly what this looks like and you know that this is not a gesture commonly used to express that sentiment anywhere in any cultural context that would explain this.
This means there are exactly two scenarios in which this is not intended to be a Nazi salute:
1) Elon Musk is incredibly unaware and despite Twitter (including his replies) being overrun by people blatantly Nazi-posting (as in, literally posting videos of the Third Reich or Adolf Hitler and expressing admiration for that era and its sentiments) and him himself having made "jokes" before that suggest sufficient awareness to recognize this gesture for what it looks like - SOMEHOW he is gormless enough to have come up with a gesture that completely by accident unintentionally looks like a Nazi salute and used it multiple times without realizing what it looked like.
2) He's just as gormless as in the first scenario but did realize what it looked like and didn't think that's worth apologizing for and instead doubled down by making fun of those calling him out for it.
But even in those two scenarios he is clearly okay with people (especially the far right) thinking that's what he did and doesn't feel like it's worth distancing himself from those who think that's a good thing.
So in other words, either he did a Nazi salute or he is okay with people thinking he did a Nazi salute. Those are functionally and consequentially identical outside the brain of Elon Musk himself.
Personally I think - given how obsessed he is with extremely stale and tired memes and low-effort shitposts - he wanted to do a Nazi salute but also wanted to maintain the thinnest of pretenses that he didn't, just in case it might come back to bite him. He saw that he got away with it and decided to double down in order to mask his insecurity.
And no, those pictures of Democrats holding their hand at a similar angle don't demonstrate anything and anyone who posts them is fully aware of that. This isn't just him deciding to do a weird greeting and ending up in a position that looked awkward, this is him deciding to do a full, forceful motion that could not have looked any other way no matter the angle - and then repeating it to provide a second look from a different angle to eliminate all doubt to what he did. There's only one clip of a US politician or media figure who isn't an open Nazi doing a salute like this I have seen and it's from a Republican who quickly chickens out by waving at an awkward angle - and that's still offering far more plausible deniability because she only did it once.
Again, another flagged article. Moderation on this site is broken. HN is a shadow of what it once was. It’s now Slashdot, full of neckbeards and high school and college incels. And I’m sure I’m breaking some “rule” for pointing that out.
Whenever there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the flood of submissions about it quickly exhausts HN's capacity to host substantive discussions. That goes double when a topic is divisive and enraging, like you-know-who is.
When this happens, the community always splits between one subset of users who feel strongly about the MOT, want a lot more of it, and feel like the topic is being censored and suppressed; and a different subset of users who don't want the repetition and don't want the site to be taken over by flamewars. The first subset is typically a minority, but more vocal; the second subset is typically the majority, but less vocal and more inclined to flag the submissions.
(This split has nothing to do with political sides, btw, because the same pattern shows up about any MOT regardless of its political valence. It's true that partisans flag stories that are bad for their side, but that alone isn't sufficient to create the pattern I'm talking about.)
As far as I can tell, the above is what's going on with the current MOT, just as it has with other MOTs over the years. So no, moderation isn't broken—or at least not in any way that wasn't broken 10 years ago. The problem is simply that the bulk of the community doesn't want as many threads about this as you do. A certain amount is ok, but that "certain amount" is just far lower than the amount that you, and others who feel strongly about the topic, want.
This leads to a seeming paradox where a topic which is by far the most discussed on HN over a period of weeks or months, at the same time feels completely suppressed and censored to users who feel like it's starving for oxygen. That is the "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" dynamic of MOTs.
Considering how awful, nasty, and repetitive these discussions have been getting, I agree with the bulk of the community. We've still been turning off the flags on some of these stories—that's standard practice for MOTs—but only some, and only when there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) that has at least some chance of a substantive conversation.
Politically passionate users tend to want to go after each other. It's fine to want that, but it's not fine here, because name-calling, snark, and rage are not what this particular site is for. There are other places on the internet to do battle. I know that the strong feelings are justified and that these topics are important—far more important than most of what does make HN's front page—but it doesn't follow that we should just switch off HN's rules. The site would burn to a crisp if we did that, and what good would that do? Scorched earth is uninteresting, no matter what one's passions are.
You said "bulk of the community" twice here, what does that mean? Are you claiming that most users don't want to see these threads, and that the flagging system represents it? With how quickly threads get flagged (and seeing how they can even stay on /active for a day or 2 after being flagged) there is clearly not a reasonable quorum of users making these decisions.
I understand that a large number of users choosing to talk about a topic does not mean the topic should remain on HN (which I believe you've said before). But I'd like to see more evidence before you say what the "bulk of the community" wants.
> With how quickly threads get flagged (and seeing how they can even stay on /active for a day or 2 after being flagged) there is clearly not a reasonable quorum of users making these decisions.
Those seem like non sequiturs to me. There are a lot of users flagging the posts. Many (not all) are legit users who flag for the right reasons. I know that because I look at their history and see what else they flag.
If you see threads that you think should not stay flagged, you're welcome to let us know about them at hn@ycombinator.com. As I've explained above and in many other places, we're willing to turn the flags off under certain conditions, such as: the thread isn't disastrous, the article contains significant new information, and there hasn't been too much similar material recently.
The current thread, though, is a good example of when we wouldn't turn flags off. This kind of shallow-indignant discussion is not what HN is for.
It's really very specifically around Musk-stuff; his fans flag anything that makes him look bad. HN's user-driven moderation system seems to have been basically designed assuming good faith.
Hi dang, I am unsure if flagged entries are still being shown, but this one seems like slam dunk where one party is claiming something without proof and the other is kind of an expert, should that not be visible to most visitors.
Of course I am not aware what the implications for you will be, but sometimes these things can be better for the greater good. One side is clearly using propaganda and the other sets the record straight.
Up to you of course, we talked a bit earlier on emotional responses to posts, and my emotional response is this such a clear lie by you-know-who that it feels unjust.
Posts marked [flagged] are still visible. If it said [flagged][dead] then only users with 'showdead' turned on would see it, but that's not the case here.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/science/boeing-starliner-...
reply