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Starbase, LA

spacex.com

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Re: Starbase, LA

#261

Post by WalterBright »

mthoms wrote: post #243
thegrim33 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doomerism has two primary sources: 1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them. 2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitud…

3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.

[flagged]

Re: Starbase, LA

#262

Post by dgellow »

ricardobeat wrote: post #237
utopiah wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm is it though? Quite a few articles like https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-stiffing-contr... make me think they better ask to be paid upfront.

Why would a contractor continue working for two years racking up a $136M dollar bill?

Because they believe the lies from Musk?

Re: Starbase, LA

#264

Post by YetAnotherNick »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #135

I wonder how coastal they intend to be. They make a lot of claims about repairing the wetlands and coastal regions, but a lot of it is likely going to be underwater in the next 25 years because of rising sea levels [0], regardless of how many wetlands are repaired. And I suspect infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff. Maybe they're actually going to build inland, whe…

> infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff

I don't think so. Likely the pad with last 10 years max.

In any case, I highly doubt that but in any case sea level is almost certainly going to rise below a meter. Filling a meter higher with sand is a pocket change for this project.

Re: Starbase, LA

#265

Post by bodge5000 »

ralfd wrote: post #244
jubilanti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have. Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.

That is a modern phenomena though. Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian. But today even Star Trek has to be bleak/gritty/depressing.

Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.

But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.

Re: Starbase, LA

#266

Post by zzrrt »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #218
miltonlost wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And the AMAZING hyperloop Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure! > And FSD is coming next year now It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities. And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I…

> Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that?

The Boring Company. Are you saying if Musk or his company essentially gives up on building something he hyped for years, it's not a failure?

Re: Starbase, LA

#268

Post by gchamonlive »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
gchamonlive wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs? Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.

Inflation is caused by deficit money creation. It is not caused by taxes, tariffs, corporate greed, union greed, oligarchs, or anything else.

That's a very narrow view of inflation. If you increase wages, there's more demand for goods, more demand means higher prices which means higher inflation. Same with tariffs, they are paid when importing goods, which is passed onto the consumer, resulting in higher prices and thus inflation.

Re: Starbase, LA

#269

Post by dgellow »

ralfd wrote: post #244
jubilanti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have. Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.

That is a modern phenomena though. Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian. But today even Star Trek has to be bleak/gritty/depressing.

You mean like Dune, the Neuromancer, Bladerunner, the Time Machine?

Re: Starbase, LA

#270

Post by ralfd »

fatal94 wrote: post #156
guywithahat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This sums up my and many others timeline of his understanding of engineering diciplines: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958

That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
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