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    When looking at the US National Debt, paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan war by borrowing, and having massive tax cuts for the upper end of the income spectrum really have a lot to answer for don't they? I wonder how the republicans have any credibility on economics any more. It's quite the exercise in manufactured consent isn't it?

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      Very much so.

      Though gerrymandering and voter suppression certainly help.

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        Well they haven''t figured out what caused it, and won't know for ages, however, they gave more details in a NASA press conference. Apparently the "anomaly" happened when they where testing the abort sequence, while shaking it twice as hard as they reckon it would get on top of an exploding rocket, so while they are very interested in finding out why this happened, and fixing it, they're not massively worried because this was a really extreme scenario. This is going to delay things while they find the problem, and fix it, and while they build another Capsule, because they have to use their second one to do this actual abort test.

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          https://twitter.com/ThePulseGovCon/status/1123556750781759489?s=19

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            Lego News

            NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander

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              I already have one of those from my Saturn V. Quite a bit smaller though.

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                I wonder how much of Lego's sales are apollo related, and what is the age profile of people buying them/ They couldn't make those saturn V kits fast enough. I suspect that they may have managed to come up with a product sitting right at the confluence of two powerful rivers of nostalgia. I'm looking at levin's picture and thinking that I need more Lego in my life, and I'm 40.

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                  Now I'm thinking about spending my weekend unmaking and rebuilding the rocket...

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                    Not the thread for it, but I can't find Elon Musk, smug charlatan cunt anywhere.

                    https://www.google.ie/amp/s/jalopnik...1835024474/amp

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                      [URL]https://twitter.com/mdy1/status/1130600554378407937[/URL]

                      Snigger snigger. Insert Muttley Gif here.


                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ98hGUe6FM] So Jeff Bezos has decided to talk about his big vision. kind of. [/url]

                      Tl:dr he wants to turn the moon into huge O'Neill Cylinders so the richest people can leave behind the shattered earth or something.

                      Jeff Bezos has all the charisma and charm that would expect from someone who has become the richest man in the Legit world, by building an internet wallmart. This feels like a cross between a ted talk and a talk to shareholders. This talk is actually quite informative in some places. His essential thesis is that we need to be able to move into space to meet our energy and resource needs, and he may well have a point. But the place he winds up (o'Neill cylinders) is really handwavy. He talks about moving heavy industry off earth, but there's a huge Underpants gnomes aspect of this. in 2016 Global steel production was 1.6 billion tonnes. That seems like a lot to me. How are you going to move that to space? And say that we did, how would we return a billion tonnes of steel to earth?

                      Anyway, he talked about his New Glenn Rocket, which is supposed to be ready in 2021. It's big, and it will be able to launch 45 tonnes to Earth Orbit. We kind of knew about that. and he showed off a Mock up of the lander they've been working on for a few years to start bringing things to the moon's surface. Now this in itself is quite interesting. Blue Origin don't really talk very much about what they are doing. People knew there was a lander being worked on called Blue Moon, but they didn't know very much about it at all. As far as I can make out Bezos's plan was to first build the Rocket. This would be big enough to launch the lander. Then You'd launch something with enough fuel to push it to the moon, and Blue Origin could land some rovers and stuff. This would then be gradually expanded in size until it could carry an ascent module, (like apollo) and who knows where you would go from there. It's clear that they've been working at this at their glacial pace for a couple of years now, though not been spending huge amounts of money on it.

                      The purpose of the event was to basically bludgeon the lander into trump/pence and their charge to the moon, and to try and generate some buzz around it, and showcase what a weird passionless shark of a human jeff bezos is. The problem with all of this though is that there is no buzz around Bezos. This thing was entirely flat. Even the bit where he shows his highschool yearbook entry where he's talking about the need for humans to expand into space if they're going to keep developing, comes across less as enthusiasm for space, but as some sort of threat to the cosmos. The reason that everyone is there is because he's a really rich guy who says he's going to do something in the near future.

                      He's talking about these things in front of an invited audience, there were relatively few of the space-journalists at it. it was aimed at inside the beltway as much as anything. This thing is actually a god send for this "Artemis" programme as it has been called. Unlike every thing else in this odd plan, Blue Origin have been working away at this for years, and are miles ahead of everyone else, So trump is going to have to make nice with Jeff Bezos, if he wants to get to the moon. It's is very unclear if this Trump Pence Moon by 2024 thing is going to get anywhere, but Jeff Bezos is going there, and will get there eventually, and will have a meticulous plan laid out. NASA money will help speed it along. The problem is that It's hard to take the whole thing very seriously, when nearly 20 years since the founding of Blue Origin, they still haven't put anything in orbit. Though barring him dropping dead, he is actually going to eventually do things on the moon. It's just a matter of time, and a reasonably large amount of money. But he has the money and his plan will be a serious one. Just don't expect it to happen soon.
                      Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 31-05-2019, 11:29.

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                        Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                        I wonder how much of Lego's sales are apollo related, and what is the age profile of people buying them/ They couldn't make those saturn V kits fast enough. I suspect that they may have managed to come up with a product sitting right at the confluence of two powerful rivers of nostalgia. I'm looking at levin's picture and thinking that I need more Lego in my life, and I'm 40.
                        Weirdly, they do a quarterly comp where sets designed by users stand a chance of getting made if they get over 10000 votes.
                        4 quarters in a row there's been.an ISS model and a Space X one. They've been passed over for a shitty cafe and the stupid mouse boat

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                          [URL]https://twitter.com/TGMetsFan98/status/1143171605448810499[/URL]

                          Big launch at the Cape tonight. They have unusual wildlife problems in Florida. The alligators seem too have been a particular problem during the shuttle days, because they just loved sunning themselves on the warm runway, and would have to be removed.

                          Merritt Island (of which KSC is a small part) is a big centre for Manatees, sea turtles and songbirds as well.
                          Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 24-06-2019, 16:15.

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                            Apparently the first Heavy to be launched with recovered boosters.

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                              Well the two side boosters landed without much fuss, but that's the third centre core that wound up in the sea. The first one because the engine wouldn't relight, the second one because they couldn't attach it to the landing ship, and it fell off on the way home, and this one apparently smashed into the sea like a missile. The Mission itself seems to have gone very well, so now they can be reasonably confident that the same launch can go to a variety of different orbits and drop things off there, which apparently was the main point of this exercise.

                              Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                              Not the thread for it, but I can't find Elon Musk, smug charlatan cunt anywhere.

                              https://www.google.ie/amp/s/jalopnik...1835024474/amp
                              That article is super weird. He's essentially written a long article about how the first iteration of what an Elon Musk company does, isn't the thing he promises it will eventually be. It's almost like he is completely unaware of all of his other ventures and how they went about things. I suspect that back in 2008 someone somewhere was writing that Elon Musk might want to go to Mars, but the Falcon 1 was a long way short of a mars rocket, or that a Tesla roadster wasn't the mass market family car needed to wean people off petrol.

                              The Boring company is primarily about developing a largely autonomous drill, that drills a relatively narrow tunnel, and has a machine on the back for lining the tunnel as they go. (this last bit is the clever bit) This is because such a machine would be unbelievably useful for building a base on mars. If you want to live above ground, you are effectively limited to living within the buildings that you are prepared to ship from earth. Bring one of these tunnelling machines, and you can effectively build an infinitely big underground base over time. It's one of a variety of things that you need on Mars, that could be very useful on Earth. You can see Electric, self driving vehicles, Solar panels, Battery technology, The Boring Company, and even Hyperloop in this context. His brother has a company working on Hydroponic agriculture, and you can assume that there are another few companies working on various areas that are bubbling away under the surface.

                              What you eventually put in that tunnel is definitely a secondary issue for the boring company at this point in time. Their website lists three uses for these tunnels, one of them is transport, which features systems that they haven't developed yet, but the second is building large water mains, and the third use would be a utility tunnel, allowing you to put in a fairly big water, and sewage pipe, along with fibre optic cabling and electricity mains etc. The point of it is that you can use this drill to build tunnels of a certain size for a fraction of the price. There's no real reason why they can only drill narrow tunnels. There's no really compelling reason why they couldn't build a drill that could drill tunnels suitable for trains.

                              Musk Doesn't have any money, and the Boring company comes a long way down the list of priorities for available cash. However if the Starlink constellation gets going, then there will be plenty of money. The Las Vegas thing he is talking about is a weird project. I found another article about it, and essentially the thing that they are building is essentially a "See the future" ride at a conference centre, in a city trying to rebrand itself as an innovation friendly centre and looking to attract some of that red hot tech-bro action. Hurtling along in a tesla bus at a hundred miles an hour in a mile long tunnel may well be enough in the short term to keep them happy. The Electric skate can follow at some point, when they get the money together to sort it out.

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                                Hmmm. But Musk sold the first iteration as being more than a car driving down a tunnel. The Hyperloop looks more a load of bollocks than anything else, if this was to make some cheapnand easy way to carve out Underground Railroad I'd be all over it, but it seems fuckface Seth Efrican Sheldon doesn't like public transport, so there's some bollocks about individual cars going down there. Fuck that shit.

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                                  Hang on there tiger. You're now xenophobically disparaging his nationality and comparing him to an autistic tv character as a pejorative because you're getting mixed messages over his plans for hyperloop.
                                  You're being a prick Langy. Just own that you don't like him because you don't like him rather than looking for post hoc rationalisations couched in unpleasant abuse.

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                                    Yeah apologies for the xenophobia. I don't watch that show so the autistic abuse was unintentional. I dislike him for his work practices, the whole Hank Scorpio meets Richard Branson thing, and especially the hyperloop. It seems driven by a hatred of public transport.

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                                      I had no idea that sheldon cooper was supposed to be autistic either. Just really clever and a bit camp. And Accent aside, I'm also not sure that musk would see that as an insult. He's been in both the Big Bang theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB9L8YZHvAE] and young sheldon.[/url]

                                      I think you have the wrong end of the stick about this Spoony. The thinking behind the boring company is 1. we're going to need a drill on mars 2. lets build that drill on earth and see what we can do with it. 3. we need projects to pay for this, and demonstrate that we can actually build things, so we can bid for bigger and bigger things. 4. the Money from running the company will fund the effort to go to mars.

                                      I wouldn't read very much into the first round of suggested uses at all other than a) he lives in Los Angeles, b) he owns a car company c) He wants to build a variety of turnpike tunnels to bring people from across the city to the airport. It's not meant to be a mass transit system as such as the throughput is likely to be much smaller than a proper road tunnel, but since it's a tiny fraction of the cost, there's a chance that it might be built. But that's just the way they go about things. He's actually quite explicit about this. Rich customers are early adopters, and they pay for the development of the mass market final product. That's really not that unusual an approach. If the Boring company demonstrate that they can build something for relatively little money, and within a certain time then they can bid for bigger and bigger jobs. There's no real reason why they couldn't build a bigger version of this machine to make it massively cheaper to build subway tunnels. If that's where the market is, and if this encourages other people to try and compete, then subway systems can become less ruinously expensive to build, and you might see more of them.

                                      Also the Hyperloop is a form of public transport. You take one of those tunnels Suck all the air out, and shoot people through at high speed in a capsule, like cash in one of those compressed air systems in shops that are worried about getting robbed. The lack of air resistance means that the system requires very little energy to run. It would be more of a competitor with airplanes for short haul business than anything else. The important thing to remember is that these things are only going to happen if they make things cheaper, and succeed. Whether or not it ever gets built in any meaningful way on earth is kind of beside the point. It's primarily for use on mars, where there's fuck all atmosphere, and you don't need the tunnel.

                                      And as for that original article, that guy is really piling it on, I mean seriously. Perhaps this tunnel isn't going to start out as was initially specified, but it's still going to be a tech-bro fun fair ride, and it does have to be set beside all the other things he's trying to do at the same time, which includes a) trying to get the hang of mass producing electric cars b) trying to build a battery factory and recycling facility that will produce as many Lithium Ion Batteries as the whole world in 2015 c) build the world's biggest solar panel production plant d) build a capsule that can fly people to the ISS e) launch an internet constellation that will double global bandwidth and make internet satellite broadband an actual thing for the half of the world's population with no access to broadband. f) build a rocket that can go to mars, literally in the field where the US Mexico border hits the gulf of mexico.

                                      The electric skate comes a long way down the list of priorities at the moment.

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                                        It does seem odd to me to disregard everything else he's achieved over a tunnel bore, yes.
                                        I mean, look at solar. There are three main things that people disparage:-
                                        1. They look ugly
                                        2. They only work when it's sunny
                                        3. They're expensive

                                        So he said "we'll make them look like roof tiles, connect them to a house battery (that we invented for the cars) and then economy of scale from solving the other gripes will bring the price down."

                                        Net effect, the world is a better place as we're using less fossil fuels.

                                        With the cars the arguments were
                                        1. They don't have the range
                                        2. they look like something out of a shit 70s sci fi programme
                                        3. they're too expensive

                                        So he made an expensive one that did 320 miles and looked amazing but cost $100k. Then moved onto one with the range that costs $40k that looks like a normal SUV. And the battery technology is helping solar uptake.

                                        Net effect, now all car manufacturers have been forced into the 21st century to compete and can no longer get away with poxy 70 mile tiny boxes as their feeble sop to electric. The world is a better place with less pollution.

                                        With launch vehicles...
                                        1. NASA are crippled by pork-barrelling
                                        2. Launch vehicles are super expensive
                                        3. SOyuz is about 100 years old

                                        SO he built reusable boosters that drop the price by 80%, hamstring the shithouses in congress who use NASA to line their own pockets and replace the dependency on Soyuz (in addition to forcing Boeing to stop messing about with their launch vehicle.)

                                        Net effect: as Berba says, the internet spread to those who don't have it, cheaper and recyclable launches . The world is a better place.

                                        And the daft thing is, he's managing to improve the world (and force others to as well) as part of the grand master plan which is fucking off to Mars.
                                        Net effect: Elon Musk is on Mars, millions of miles from Lang Spoon.

                                        He may be a liability on Twitter, but by golly, there aren't many people having such a positive effect on so many parts of the environment.

                                        He's like the Anti-Midgley.

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                                          And there's the possibility that he'll take Piers Morgan with him.

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                                            So he said "we'll make them look like roof tiles, connect them to a house battery (that we invented for the cars) and then economy of scale from solving the other gripes will bring the price down."

                                            Net effect, the world is a better place as we're using less fossil fuels.
                                            Well, yeah, but that doesn't really seem to have gone anywhere. The tiles are still not being sold in any meaningful volume. Like the super efficient boring machine, it's still aspirational rather than something that's actually changing things yet. . And SolarCity's non-tile installs are falling off a cliff. I'm willing to cut Musk a bit of slack for what he's achieved at SpaceX, but equally I'm not going to give much credit to his aspirational claims until they're borne out in practice, and some of them are actively dangerous, like his overtouting of Teslas' self driving capability.

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                                              The moon, almost full, looking fabulous on such a clear night. Saturn and Jupiter nearby too and apparently the ISS will be visible in the same area in about an hour.

                                              Then tomorrow there's to be a partial lunar eclipse.

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                                                I was reminded tonight they the moon, however massive it looks, does not photograph well at non zoom focal lengths.

                                                It was just so big and full and golden against a twilight blue sky.

                                                And then you try and capture that and you end up with a dark rectangle containing a bright dot.

                                                We saw Saturn briefly on Saturday, right next to the moon it was.

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                                                  ah shite. It's over 20 degrees for the last week in galway, but it's been as dark as mid november. A friend of mine recently moved to Chile, and she says you barely need hubble if you live down there.

                                                  Well, yeah, but that doesn't really seem to have gone anywhere. The tiles are still not being sold in any meaningful volume. Like the super efficient boring machine, it's still aspirational rather than something that's actually changing things yet. . And SolarCity's non-tile installs are falling off a cliff. I'm willing to cut Musk a bit of slack for what he's achieved at SpaceX, but equally I'm not going to give much credit to his aspirational claims until they're borne out in practice, and some of them are actively dangerous, like his overtouting of Teslas' self driving capability.

                                                  Yikes, it would seem that people would rather stick a panel on their roof, than replace the whole roof. Who knew.....

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                                                    Jupiter is looking fantastic down here around dog walking time.

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