Theo of internet drama fame interjecting himself into the middle of it as always.
Could you elaborate? I have no idea who “Theo of internet drama fame” is.
Readit Newschroma commented on Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace github.com/material-theme... · Posted by u/Inityx
chroma commented on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians' sfgate.com/bayarea/articl... · Posted by u/davikr
(deleted incorrect claim)
I don’t know where you heard that. According to every article I could find, Borhanian was shot by Lind in self-defense[1]:
> Court records show that Lind shot two of his attackers, injuring one person and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian.
Back in 2019, Borhanian was arrested and charged with felony child endangerment and false imprisonment in a protest against a rationalist group.[2]
1. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/27/man-killed-in-vallejo-was...
2. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mystery-in-Sonom...
chroma commented on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians' sfgate.com/bayarea/articl... · Posted by u/davikr
> 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.
chroma commented on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians' sfgate.com/bayarea/articl... · Posted by u/davikr
Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing.
I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again and eventually someone asked and their theory all but seemed to imply that nobody else could possibly have ... feelings and that lack of understanding made those people lesser and them greater.
It seemed to come from some concept that their experience imparted some unique understanding that nobody else could have, and that just lead down a path that lead to zero empathy / understanding with anyone outside.
Reddit encounters are always hard to understand IMO so I don't want to read too much into it, but that isolation that some people / groups feel seem to potentially lead to dark places very easily / quickly.
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.
1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
chroma commented on HD Hyundai set to debut production 14 ton hydrogen wheeled excavator electrek.co/2025/01/27/hd... · Posted by u/zfg
The author concluding this, doesn't make it so. And his conclusions are linking to another article, claiming current h2 cost and production means the future will be the same.
Which is the same as claiming we'd never have solar now, because solar was expensive years ago.
The article also says South Korea is full bore on h2, so this will have a market, and thrive there.
BEV doesn't have the capacity to do this. These units cannot be charged for 1hr 4 times a day. H2 is an instant recharge.
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.
> That's at least a billion people
a) Based on what we've seen in China, India etc many of those will shift towards densely populated cities or will stay and those locations will become industrialised, densely populated cities.
b) In densely populated cities it doesn't make sense to use Starlink when fibre is far cheaper, has limited congestion issues and can provide gigabit speeds at a minimum.
c) It's great that you're writing this in rural Peru but that is a declining use case and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the world.
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.
> The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference
There's an interesting post[1] on r/enoughmuskspam drawing some conclusions (based on well documented history) that SpaceX is just an extension of the 80s Star Wars/SDI program. Little easter eggs like the fact that the Falcon rockets are named after the DARPA FALCON Project, Musk's ties to directors of the SDI program, etc.
If the real goals of the SDI program are to be realized, i.e. winning WWIII by knocking down all the enemy ballistic nukes, the US would have to put a lot of mass into orbit. You'd need some kind of cheap heavy launch system to put Brilliant Pebbles[2] up there, or as we're calling it these days, Starshield[3].
I think this is 100% the plan, and Musk has gone so hard right because the Heritage Foundation was the original proponent of SDI/"Let's start and win WWIII" and they're still the power players behind the republican party. (Fun fact, SDI and Brilliant Pebbles were heavily pushed by Dr. Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.) The stuff about populating Mars is just an exciting story to tell the rubes so they don't go asking questions about your massive space-based weapons platform.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elo...
Your claims are simply incorrect.
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.
What's a database going to do for you when your craft runs into debris? Nothing.
These databases (which include collision risks) are public. Satellite owners use them to make maneuvers so they can avoid getting too close to debris or other satellites. Since these collision risks can be predicted days in advance, it takes very little thrust to prevent them. Even cubesats without propulsion systems can change their orbits, as their orientation affects how much drag they experience.
More satellites == more space debris pollution, not really something I'm interested in supporting. Eventually we won't be able to safely get off this rock if there's too much space trash orbiting.
I was addressing the comment about the economics of lower launch costs, not space debris. Similar to past pollution issues, I think it will be a problem but not a show stopper. There are already global standards for satellite end of life procedures. Most governments require that satellites be able to passivate themselves so that pressure vessels or batteries don't explode and create more debris. Geosynchronous satellites are required to have extra propellant so they can move to a graveyard orbit. Many satellites are put into low orbits so that atmospheric drag will cause them to deorbit within a known time frame. And lower launch costs will make it easier to launch spacecraft that can clean up debris.
Also, reusable spacecraft such as Starship actually reduce the amount of debris created per launch, as most space debris comes from spent upper stages. Of the 25 recent debris producing events listed on Wikipedia[1], 16 were caused by debris that would not be created by a reusable spacecraft (either an upper stage, a payload adapter, or a fairing).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...
What do you figure is worse for chemical changes to materials, being engulfed in a big call of plasma, or being dunked in the ocean?
I don’t know any chemistry but there seem to be a lot of smart people round here. What say you?
A lot of the damage happens as soon as the spacecraft enters the water, because it's extremely hot, causing more chemical reactions than you might think. Even jet engines have trouble with corrosion from ingesting small amounts of aerosolized salt water.[1]
1. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19690007944/downloads/19...