I don't think that's true. When I was in Italy in 2003, I saw plenty of anti-American and anti-Bush sentiment. eg: Rainbow flags with "pace" on them and "Yankee go home" graffiti.
Yeah, but I can hate my neighbor for his reckless business behavior but fully trust him in saving my house if the yard burns. Trust and liking someone are very different things.
Doesn't that prove too much? For example, North Korea treats their citizens horribly, but since it's not a threat to westerners, would that mean that trade deals with them are acceptable?
It's hard for me to come up with a standard that encourages trade with China but discourages trade with North Korea. I'm not saying that trade with the US is therefore a good idea. There are many reasonable moral standards that would forbid trade with both the US & China.
Honestly, the reason that North Korea is embargoed probably has less to do with the way they treat their own citizens, and more to do with them constantly threatening to turn South Korea into a "sea of fire" while lobbing ever-longer-range ballistic missiles over Japan.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. You can't even leave North Korea without special permission, which only certain workers get.
I've been to China, and I'm going again this year, I'm from the EU. The funniest thing is that China's Tier 1 cities are more developed than EU cities and offer a better quality of life.
nobody equated china to north korea. the post you are replying to applied equivalent logic to an extreme example (north korea) to show more easily that the logic cannot be correct.
An extreme example changes the logic here, which basically means it's a bad example. And if we're talking about the logic of this argument, there's no such thing as morality in foreign relations. I don't see any morality when everyone buys oil from Saudi Arabia or Qatar, knowing how they treat their own citizens and who they sponsor.
States use the "morality" argument when they need to build a narrative and portray someone as bad/evil to justify actions against them, while the real reason is almost always geopolitical interests or money/resources.
NK and China are not at the same level lol - NK is almost an inescapable dictatorship, with routine mistreatment and indoctrination. If that were true, you can claim the current US is 1930s Nazi Germany, with a right wing government using media manipulation and “othering”, in a pseudo dictatorship.
Not to mention the US and China use similar “low level” indoctrination strategies (like swearing allegiance to the flag in schools)
I never said that North Korea was similar to China. I was simply applying your argument to another country to show how it isn't a good argument for whether or not to trade.
SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.
Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.
But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
That's one person claiming an update bricked their car, but it's unclear if that was due to a bad software update or a hardware failure that coincided with the update. Tesla usually explains what they fixed, so it's odd that the poster never replied with more details.
Even if every software update was perfect, you would see individual stories like the one you linked to. There are millions of Teslas in the world, and they all get updates frequently, so a hardware failure will sometimes coincide with a software update. If a bad update were shipped to customers, it would be a story similar to this Jeep issue: thousands of cars affected at once, lots of furious customers, and news articles about the failure.
In general that's true, but it's because on Bluesky, blocking causes the blocked person's replies to be hidden from everyone who views the original post. It's much easier to block than to engage with a contradictory reply (especially if the reply is correct and you're wrong), so disagreement tends to result in a block.
This behavior is common enough that it creates a chilling effect for anyone who disagrees. Why take the time to craft a reply correcting the poster if it will likely be hidden from everyone? And so you end up with echo chambers.
The effect is quite stunning on some topics. For example: Quite a few people on Bluesky believe the Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was staged[1], that the Charlie Kirk assassin's text messages are fake[2][3], and that the recent ICE shooter was a false flag.[4][5][6] Notice the amount of engagement these posts have. Thousands of likes, with little to no disagreement in the replies. The lack of feuding is what allows people to believe these falsehoods.
And the issue is bigger than it looks since blocking is public, so blocking gets you on lists of users to block so you'll be blocked by people you never interacted with for blocking/disagreeing with someone.
I don't know that I really want to interact with anyone who uses a block list like that, but it definitely would make echo chambers worse.
I've seen the same thing happen in smaller discussions among experts on Bluesky, but I didn't link to those because: 1. It's harder for non-experts in that field to judge whether my claims are true. 2. It might reveal my identity.
The incentive structure is the same as larger discussions. If anything, a smaller community makes it easier to create echo chambers, as you need to block fewer people before reaching epistemic closure.
Essentially an internet personality. While they sometimes make interesting points, mostly on X, Twitch, and YouTube, he often seems to interject himself into a lot of things needlessly. Before this Material thing, it was that Wordpress incident.
This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity.
One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists.
> the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people
I live in the Bay. Maybe that is true, but in absolute terms the level of acceptance is still very low.
Like, if Denver is 10% accepting, the Bay might be 15%. Or something like that.
And Vallejo, while part of the Bay Area is a very different place than, say, the Castro. Culturally, it’s probably more like Detroit than San Francisco.
So I’m not sure if you can really draw any conclusions from your premise.
Most of the Zizians who lived in Vallejo moved there from the Berkeley area. The reason they moved was because Curtis Lind felt empathetic and offered them extremely cheap rent. After not paying rent for years (despite at least one of them being an engineer at Google), they ambushed Lind, then tried to behead him and dissolve his body in a vat. Fortunately he was carrying a concealed firearm, so he shot them in self-defense, killing one. Three years later, Lind was murdered by another member before he could testify at the trial for his other attackers.
If there's any sort of marginalization by Lind in that story, I'm having a hard time finding it.
"Invest in residential rental property!" they said. "It will provide a great income stream for your retirement."
We need to keep in mind that Lind was forced by law to give them free rent for two years. He was not allowed to evict them for virtually any reason AFAIK, including nonpayment. Yes, he was supportive and generous, but at some point we all reach our limits, especially when dealing with sociopaths who are bent on taking every possible advantage.
I think they're crazy first, trans second. They were marginalised for being crazy. Then they found each other because they're trans. Many cults have random attributes shared by the members, whether it be race or sexual preferences. Their race or sexual preference didn't cause them to join a cult, they had other things going on that drove that. But when it came time to join one, they gravitated towards the one that identified with them.
As rachofsunshine suggested, there are quite a few factions and splinter groups within the larger "rationalist" subculture, not just people who happen to be trans and were recruited because of it. My takeaway after spending a few hours down the rabbit hole is that they all seem to be composed of very smart people who have a screw or three loose.
I'm afraid that at some point, some of these people are likely to talk themselves into doing something seriously fucked up. If I worked on AI at OpenAI or Google or Meta, I think I'd prefer to work from home... and if I occupied a visible position on the org chart, I'd hire a damned good private security company to keep an eye on my family.
Or more of them live there because it's one of the most accepting environments on the planet, but still not accepting enough to prevent them from being a marginalized outgroup that is quite easy to radicalize by those that would accept them?
"Even the most accepting environment on the planet is still not accepting enough" is not a very flattering description of trans-identifying folks. In fact, I'd call it rather sobering at the very least. It suggests that the ongoing perceived marginalization of trans folks is a nearly unsolvable problem, that can't be addressed simply by advocating for "doing the right thing".
That's probably true, but the larger issue is that we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better. The US has struggled for centuries with the question of how to better treat far more number minorities, such as black people... and women.
At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.
> we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better
Believe it or not, there are actually many popular, far-reaching political ideologies centered around helping "the least of us." It's not such a foreign concept.
Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better but a dissolution of the bonds which torment us all. "Nothing to lose but our chains" type shit, yadada?
> Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better
It's worth noting that a number of cis women who associate with the feminist movement would strongly disagree with your assessment.
Those ideologies certainly exist, but I can't say that I've ever heard of one staying in power for very long, at least not while genuinely pursuing that ideology. Far more often "for the least of us" is the pitch that gets you in the door, but no real attempt to deliver is ever made.
So again, I'm not debating the value of pursuing these rights, I'm pointing out that this is view opposed by billions. You can't just declare the rightness of your cause and hope it catches on.
In practice, hydrogen cars take significantly longer than gas cars to fill, and the filling station can’t have a high duty cycle because the nozzle will freeze to the car. (Ideal gas law means the hydrogen cools as it goes from high pressure to low pressure.)
Synthesizing fuels from CO2, water, and electricity seems like a better solution. It works with existing infrastructure and doesn’t have the storage or safety issues of hydrogen.
All those points are true, but it doesn't change the fact that Starlink will be quite profitable for SpaceX.
Currently, each launch of 23 Starlink satellites costs SpaceX around $50 million. To get 1,000 direct to cell satellites in orbit, they'll need to launch 44 times, costing them $2.2 billion. Due to the low orbits, air resistance causes the satellites to reenter within 5-10 years, so to maintain the constellation they'll need to spend $220-440 million per year. These costs will be much lower when they switch from Falcon 9 to Starship.
Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell. That's still 80 million people. If SpaceX charges cell companies $10/month per user for the service, that's almost $10 billion per year. And that's not counting the money they make from selling Starlink Internet, which currently has over 4 million subscribers. At $100/month, that's $4.8 billion per year in revenue.
So Starlink is profitable without direct to cell technology, but since they're launching the satellites anyway, they might as well collect more revenue by adding cell capability. DTC only becomes unprofitable if the cost of the extra hardware and mass is less than DTC subscriber revenue.
If someone is rescued in the wilderness thanks to direct to cell connection; if children can attend online classes despite living in the rural; if science expedition can stay online even in the most remote places, then that’s changing the world.
First, Musk has been talking about Mars since before he founded SpaceX. Other people such as Adeo Ressi, Robert Zubrin, and Reid Hoffman have reported Musk talking about colonizing Mars as early as 2001. It was only after that that he went to Russia to try and buy old rockets, thinking that landing a greenhouse on Mars would excite people about space again.
Second, Falcon 1 was named 18 months before the DARPA FALCON project existed. And the contract that SpaceX was awarded was less than half a million dollars. Nine other companies got similar contracts, including AirLaunch and Orbital Sciences Corp. Only Andrews Space, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman got phase two contracts.
Third, the Starshield program is almost entirely a product of the Biden administration, and its capabilities are nothing like SDI. Current Starshield satellites are similar to that of Starlink, but owned and operated by the US government. They have better encryption and probably some observational capabilities, but they are incapable of intercepting ICBMs. An SDI program would require technologies very different from what SpaceX has been developing. For example: SpaceX uses liquid fuels, while interceptors would have to be solid boosters.
And finally, SDI is unworkable for several reasons. It takes time to launch a satellite constellation, and during that time an adversary would be incentivized to launch their nukes (since it becomes a use it or lose it situation). Or they would build more anti-satellite weapons and ground based lasers, allowing them to take out enough interceptors to launch a devastating nuclear exchange. And even if the system remained intact, it would do nothing to stop hypersonics, bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nukes being smuggled into the country. People realized this long ago, which is why (in addition to cost) SDI was cancelled.
The only way your model of the world could be correct is if Musk was a brilliant con man who has spent the past quarter century risking his fortune to develop reusable rockets for the sole purpose of building a system that everyone knows would not protect the US in a global thermonuclear war. And he's somehow kept this secret from the public this entire time, even though he's leaked many other embarrassing secrets. Musk is far from the sanest person around, but such a claim stretches credulity to the breaking point.
You might think SDI is unworkable but Mike Griffin doesn’t[1], and he’s been working with Musk for decades now. Meanwhile Starshield started launching in 2020 under the Trump administration.
You were right about Falcon though, it wasn’t DARPA but the actual SDI Falcon laser program [2].
I don’t claim to know everything and I could be wrong, but it is very unlikely that we’d know all the details the super secret weapons system if SpaceX is actually building it. The parts they wouldn’t be able to hide, however, are definitely visible.
Mike Griffin is one of the most involved people in US space for many decades. Of course he has some connection to many companies including SpaceX. And of course he wanted to encourage and create a more dynamic space company environment in the US.
But to see all this as some sort of linear story is just a conspiracy.
Yes people in the 80s who were part of Starwars continued to exist and continue in many place in the US government. And they still believe in many of the ideas in the 80s, specially Missile defense.
Many of them are space nerds, and simply want to see more space development in general. And they are not secretive about that, there are plenty of interviews you can look up. The whole OpenStack project came about because somebody from Starwars wanted to bring in young people to NASA. The whole company Plant came out of that too.
Specifically in regards to the early 2000s, the reason for DoD support for launch was that after 2001 they realised that they didn't have enough sat capacity over the middle east, and then they realised it would take far to long to launch new sats. Since then DoD has supported various programs for small and rapid launch. DoD has continued this, most recently with the company Firefly. That was the reason for early support for SpaceX and others, not any great dreams of Starwars ideas.
SpaceX however wasn't really able to get in with DoD much, the whole Starwars grand scale idea had no real power at DoD. NASA and the needs to supply station that made SpaceX able to continue to exist and develop. That built Falcon 9.
SpaceX themselves then pushed for Falcon 9 reusability and cheaper price. That then in turn made many old-heads at DoD dust off old plans that were shelved in the 80s and started to look into what could be done with the new capabilities that SpaceX dropped into their labs.
Remember, SpaceX wasn't the only company talking about reusability. Rocketplane Kistler had far more support from 'the establishment'. So Musk was just one of many people who want to do things in space, and most people thought he was likely gone fail.
Starlink was a natural thing for SpaceX to do. LEO internet, was a thing people had been wanting to do since the 90s. And SpaceX jumped on it with private funding. They for sure knew they would likely be able to sell to the government, but they also knew that it wouldn't be easy or fast, so they designed it as a consumer system primarily.
Now that SpaceX the largest producers of rockets and sats, of course DoD would look to them for various other projects. And SpaceX wants to make money, so if DoD asks for bids on some projects, then SpaceX will likely bid if they think they can make money.
Mike Griffin has worked with Musk, but they have also fought each other quite a bit. Even in the early days. Just recently Mike Griffin was the spearhead in the anti-SpaceX lunar lander campaign.
Basically, there is no real story here. Literally everything in modern US spaceflight was influenced by the money that flowed into the space industry in the 80s under Reagan. Many of the same people and same ideas are still around and as the space industry develops, many old ideas are warmed up, and new ideas are developed.
I don’t look at it as being a conspiracy but as the DoD doing its job (with different political groups having different ideas about what that job is) and building technologies and systems to win wars. My take on Musk is that he’s hyperfixated on what one political group wants to do with SDI, and that’s why he’s suddenly obsessing over supporting them. Republicans certainly don’t care about any science nonsense happening with taxpayer money. They want weapons.
I don't think Musk cares much about winning wars or these Starwars DoD projects. He wants to get to Mars. If DoD pays SpaceX to build something, he might do it, but that's about it.
His all-in for republicans is partly because he is anti-regulation and because he has always been a free-speech all the way guy, even before he was more directly political.
He really turned more MAGA during the pandemic when in California, the politicians didn't want to allow him to reopen the Tesla factory.
> I don't think Musk cares much about winning wars or these Starwars DoD projects. He wants to get to Mars. If DoD pays SpaceX to build something, he might do it, but that's about it.
If he's involved in a neo-SDI program I would not expect any of his public statements about his motivations to mean anything at all. He most assuredly has a TS-SCI clearance and probably handlers who are watching his every word and ready to haul him to jail for running his mouth. If I were in that position, I too would be a good soldier and frequently monologue about the agreed-upon cover story of settling Mars.
He is involved because DoD asked for people to bid on projects and DoD pays well. SpaceX is part of a contract for missile defense, this is public information. SpaceX delivers the sat bus, as far as I know. But this isn't all that big of a contract. I would have to look up the details again, but this is public, you can go find it.
Why would he since 20+ years talk about Mars? He went to Mars Society conventions long before he wasn't even remotely famous. If he cared about SDI, why not talk about it, its not that controversial. If it was an interest of his, nothing stops him from talking about it. You think he openly talks about Ukraine, trans issues, Israel and almost everything else that's controversial. But mentioning SDI is somehow to controversial? What?
> probably handlers who are watching his every word
You are disagreeing with every journalist who has interacted with Musk. And tons of other people who have interacted with him. In fact its the opposite, its a whole thing that Musk can't shut the fuck up even if he should by any reasonable definition. Have you done literally any research on this topic?
> If I were in that position, I too would be a good soldier and frequently monologue about the agreed-upon cover story of settling Mars.
What the fuck are you even talking about? 'Agreed up on' with who? People from the Starwars days are very open about what they want and thinking that its a good idea to continue that. They talk openly about it.
Musk talking and pushing these ideas publicly that would be a good thing for them. Because the people that need to be convinced are the decision makers at DoD and the congress. If Musk used his lobbying power to push these ideas, people like Griffin would welcome that. But Musk doesn't, because he doesn't really care. And he rather lobbies for Mars.
Of course if he is part of an ongoing DoD project then he would be under NDA for that project and couldn't talk about it. That's not a conspiracy, that just how DoD contracting works. But SpaceX has not started bidding on such contracts until recently.
You just creating a conspiracy where non exists. The whole conspiracy doesn't even make sense. You don't need Mars as a smoke-screen, you can just say 'we build rockets in order to support DoD and NASA and gain commercial contracts as to make money', that is what other rocket companies do. Talking about Mars in 2002 made Musk look like a delusional idiot.
> People from the Starwars days are very open about what they want and thinking that its a good idea to continue that. They talk openly about it.
Big picture yes, but definitely not the actual details. And maybe you're right, maybe Musk is a true believer. I just think that I can't possibly know what's the truth or not when, if this project is real it would be treated like the biggest state secret in history with plenty of efforts to obfuscate what's actually happening. In WWII we intentionally let people die to protect the fact that Enigma had been cracked, and keeping this program secret would be at least as important to national security.
> But SpaceX has not started bidding on such contracts until recently.
Literally the first thing that SpaceX ever tried to launch was for a DoD contract[1]. Maybe not a big one, but they go way back with the DoD, before they had any serious prospects. So they started out with DoD, and the second they got a single solitary atom into orbit they got a 1.6 billion dollar contract with NASA. Who was the NASA administrator when they got that contract? Oh that's right: Michael D. Griffin.
And again, non of this is secret, so I have no idea what you are talking about.
And SpaceX just delivers the sat bus, not any of the other missile related stuff.
This is a minor sideshow for SpaceX.
> Big picture yes, but definitely not the actual details.
People don't talk in detail about national security projects ... shocker.
Everything you are arguing is just typical conspiracy theory 'coincidence I THINK NOT' type of argument. You have absolutely nothing even remotely solid. So Ill show you how its done:
> In 1991, Griffin was the president and CTO of Orbital Sciences
and then
> in December 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX and Orbital Sciences
COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT! Orbital got 300 million $ more then SpaceX for doing LESS!!!!!!
Northrop Grumman has since absorbed Orbital.
> SDA industry partners now include SpaceX, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics.
