Pity he didn't keep going.
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to say nothing of the Carbon footprint
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1414984947362844672?s=20
the amount of people who can afford space flight are about the same as those who can afford an anytime return from London to Liverpool on Virgin Trains
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Not to besmirch your entire profession, but I'm never shocked by anything asserted in a major lawsuit. If you're being paid a lot of money and working long hours to defend the indefensible, you might be frequently tempted to do anything or say anything to help reduce your client's exposure, even if it's blatantly racist or stupid.Originally posted by ursus arctos View PostComment
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The point isn’t that it’s blatantly racist or stupid-it’s the fact that it was the position of the NFLOriginally posted by Hot Pepsi View PostComment
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And one widely used in this country by other representatives of capital against labourComment
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I'm not sure that tweet is quite right. New Mexico has given $220 million to build Spaceport america, which I think is separate to Branson. They've given him large tax breaks, and so has the federal govt, but that $220 million figure is tied to building the actual facility which is fucking massive, and waiting for the commercial space boom to kick in. Virgin galactic is only one of a few tennants there.Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
The Carbon footprint is likely relatively small. but only because they're using hydroxyl-terminated Polybutadene and liquid nitrous oxide. That's massively worse in nearly every respect. Jeff Bezos' 'little stubby' uses hydrogen, which is not ideal, but is relatively harmless. But Branson's thing may as well be burning the ozone layer as fuel. But that's the major problem with Solid fuel rockets in general, and a side effect of countries using their space programmes to keep their ballistic missile manufacturers in business between rounds of upgrades.
This thing by branson is basically 10 years too late. They've developed a version of this rocket plane to use on a regular basis, and it will be interesting to see just how much it costs on a per flight basis. Branson says that they have 600 passengers with tickets bought for this thing, which works out at 100 flights for $1.5 million a pop. Now $150 million might sound like a lot to you or me, but it is the square root of fuck all in the aerospace industry and that money was spent a long time ago. those flights will cost a certain amount to run, and god knows how much they have spent getting to this point. Thank god they got some of that sweet sweet gulf sovereign wealth fund money to back them up. You're not going to be surprised that a couple of books have recently come out detailing what a tremendous mess Virgin Galactic is behind the scenes.
The thing that puzzles me is that this is a real dead end technology. The engine is primitive as all hell. (Essentially it is a tube filled with a waxy fuel with a channel going down the middle, attached to a tank of nitrous oxide. When you want the engine to go, you open a valve, and let the nitrous oxide flow down the middle and it burns from the centre out. When you want to turn the engine off, you close the valve and it stops burning. and then you glide back) it can only do this, and it's not on a path to anywhere. This is essentially just attention seeking nonsense from Branson
This launch was pushed forward because Jeff Bezos announced that he was going to fly on the New Shepard, and branson wanted to be there first, because he's a narcissistic attention seeker. But Bezos brought forward this launch, because some time in september SpaceX are going to be flying some tourists around in space in a dragon capsule.
Now there's a fundamental difference between what Bezos is doing and what Branson is doing.The blue origin New Shepard is actually a useful thing, and essentially was a thing developed to get the hang of landing a rocket, which I think we can all agree is an important pre-requisite to reuse, and they also developed a pretty good hydrogen engine, which is also immensely useful. Even the capsule is a stepping stone on the way to building something that can withstand coming back from space, and the whole thing will give them experience in handling human cargo, which is useful and valuable in their long term plans, but also they've got valuable experience in making something that requires minimal repairs between flights. It's just that this thing flew in 2015, and it's now 2021.
But that speaks to much deeper problems within Blue Origin, namely, everything is so incredibly fucking slow, and because they're funded by Bezos, there is no rush to actually do things. If SpaceX had gone down the new shepard route at some stage, they would have been flying tourists within a year of the first flight, and doing it regularly, in order to make some money to invest in the next thing, and to get experience flying people.. Maybe this will change now that Bezos has stepped down from Amazon, but as it stands, they are years behind their targets to actually build and test and operate things. It's starting to become a real problem. but this could have been a thing for Blue Origin to be doing over the last five years, that would have been beneficial for them in many ways. It's just that it's difficult to know how long this market is going to last for either of them. That fucking massive rocket that SpaceX are building in texas could easily carry hundreds of people to space, and it will cost fuck all to launch.
But hey. Richard got his attention and that's what matters.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 15-07-2021, 13:32.Comment
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The current social housing situation in the UK is appalling. A friend of mine (single mother with young son, escaped abusive marriage but courts still gave partial custody to ex-husband who she now frequently has to take back to court to get her son back after he's not returned) has been moved to four different council flats in three different towns in the four years I've known her. Each time she has to uproot her son from his nursery or school and build an entirely new network. The fact that she's a survivor who manages this is extraordinary, but she shouldn't have to, it's completely unfair on her and her son. There seems to be no attempt to try and keep anyone in the same home or area for any extended period of time, in fact the opposite so that tenants don't build up any sort of right to buy through being in the same place for X number of years.Comment
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Can't believe right to buy is still a thing in England (and Ireland), its impact is vile.Comment
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People fucking love it. Depending on the price you sell at, you're essentially giving them a couple of hundred grand.
Walk into any council estate and offer it, and you'll have their votes in perpetuity, or at least until they sell up and move to spain.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 16-07-2021, 11:51.Comment
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Folk might love it (my grandparents certainly did, though they still never voted Thatcher) but it fucks the social housing stock. There's a reason Scotland and Wales have banned it.Comment
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Yeah, well lets see how long it takes some populist to offer people what they want, rather than what's good for them and society.Comment
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the people who can afford it have long taken advantage, Most council estates now contain private flats owned by slum landlords charging three times what the families beside them pay and none of them have security of tenureOriginally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostComment
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Tbh Berba, right now there's probably more votes in Scotland from building more social housing than restarting right to buy, for reasons Nef detailed above.Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostComment
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That's because there's lots of people who need a house, and then if you build them, in time a lot of those people are going to demand the right to buy. I'm not arguing that right to buy is anything other than terrible, I'm just saying it's really popular with people who live in council houses.Comment
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Yes necessarily. You've got to assume that many people who want to rent houses are going to want to buy them. And they will want to buy them at a discount, and they will want to sell it at full market value when it suits them.Comment
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Of course people took up the offer when the Tories allowed it for all council stock, but there really wasn't the demand prior to that in Scotland (when above 60% of the population lived in secure rent council housing).Comment
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People would also like to be handed millions of pounds by people they've never met. doesn't meant hat they should have realistic expectations that it should happenOriginally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostComment
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Yep people would very much like not to pay a property/local services tax, but only FF Ireland and Italy were cynical enough to do it.Comment
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No, but someone will offer it to them in exchange for their vote. You have to expect it.Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
A huge part of Thatcher's success came from selling communal assets to boomers, and older middle class people at a knock down price, to disguise that the real money was being made by the big boys, and offering them tax cuts instead of paying for the next generation to have the same system they did. This is something that you've got to always bear in mind and to guard against. What everyone ideally wants from their govt is for them to cut their taxes, increase spending on them, and do magic for them when it comes to housing. Regardless of income, regardless of wealth. Parties differ in who they offer it to. It makes it virtually impossible to maintain and run a functional fair society, because if as a party you offer a sensible workable manifesto that will make everyone's lives better, you will lose.
Labour was unable to respond to this in the late seventies and eighties. All they could offer was a variation on what went before, and In part because in a time of change it was limited by its links to the trade unions, who were primarily interested in representing their members, but not necessarily society as a whole, and were involved in all sorts of toxic class warfare struggles that long predated the industrial revolution. , but also because it was fighting a massive internal war with entryists who instead of working towards finding a common and proper response to the changes to the global economy in the 70's and 80's thought the answer was a mixture of trotskyism and leninism.
So now you have an economy that doesn't really make all that much, and relies on A terrifyingly large property bubble, and consumer spending on credit cards to generate meagre economic growth as the governments spending, and the nations wealth drifts ever upwards and towards the old, at the expense of the young and the future.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 16-07-2021, 19:14.Comment
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Nefertiti2 Wrote: The point isn’t that it’s blatantly racist or stupid-it’s the fact that it was the position of the NFL
The NFL as an organization has no soul or conscience. It's just a bunch of obscenely rich people who want attention who pay an obscene amount of money to a commissioner to be the face of their ineptitude.
The NFL should not be equated with American football as a sport. They both have a lot of problems, but they aren't all the same problems and not everyone involved in one is at all involved with the other.Comment
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You've been asking for a definition of neo-liberalism - perhaps you've come up with one.Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
Council Houses began in the late 19th Century , they could be bought from 1936, but it was only when the GLC began in 1970's and the Right to Buy act was in 1980 that people had a huge subsidy from the government to shrink housing stock.
People were delighted by decent rented housing that were in the main great places to live were repaired for them and offered security of tenure. They could be again.
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