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He was coherent in the past?

I’ll yank your units

When did Al-Qaeda become a military? It’s a terrorist organization.

And when did it become a war. Congress hasn’t declared a war since World War 2. Legally, all of killing in the Middle East has been done under the guise of military policing actions.

Are we going to drone strike proud boy leaders now? They did try to overthrow the US government a few years ago. Oh wait, they just got slaps on the wrist.

So do we only blow up US citizens and deny them their rights when it would be difficult to get them? I guess the FBI can stop spending so much money on training agents to apprehend suspects, if they’re running or have already fled the country, we’ll just assassinate them because that’s way easier and safer.

The fact that this guy, regardless of what he did, was assassinated on the orders of a US president, and nothing happened, should be deeply disturbing. You don’t have rights if someone can just blow you up from out of nowhere for any reason. You just have privileges that can be revoked at any time.

He had the right to a trial. Not a privilege to have one, a right. An attempt to apprehend him should have at least been made.

He was a US citizen.

The military should not be drone striking its own citizens, no matter what they’re suspected of. He had the right to a trial.

That’s why they made it a pin.

Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.

If it really did, then nasa would not have committed to this hare brained scheme of musk’s.

The fact that the SpaceX proposal was accepted by an interim director who then went to work at SpaceX 6 months later, and no one has investigated this or challenged the acceptance of this contract tells me that safety is clearly not the priority. If safety was the priority, the new director would have looked at the current proposal and demanded a renegotiation or reconsideration.

If only that philosophy existed today.

NASA landed on the moon with 1960’s technology, not because it was easy in the 60’s, but because every single aspect of the mission was planned, tested, rehearsed, and made as simple as possible where it couldn’t have a redundancy. The only time something went really wrong was when a faulty tank exploded on Apollo 13, but due to having an entirely separate craft in the form of the lander attached, the astronauts were able to ride out the failure all the way around the moon and back to earth. Oh yeah, even the orbit they picked would let the whole spacecraft fly around the moon and come back to earth without having to do any engine burns.

Look at planned missions today. Launch the Human Landing system. Have it sit in space for an unknown amount of time while anywhere from 6 to 12 refueling rockets are launched to refuel the lander. Relight lander engines in earth orbit, go to moon, relight engines again to orbit the moon. Launch the Orion spacecraft with crew on board, this also must burns its engines once at the moon to enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous and dock with the HLS, transfer crew and supplies over. Undock Orion, relight HLS engines for a 4th time to deorbit and land HLS. Use an elevator to get from HLS to the lunar surface for the next week or so. Board the HLS, which needed at least 6 refueling tankers full of cryogenic fuel to get to the moon and has now been sitting on the 200 degree lunar surface for a week, and light the engines a 5th time to take off and enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous with Orion, and return home. NASA has demonstrated that Orion can do the mission. But HLS has not even shown the technical capability of doing this. Its engines have never been relit in space, it has never sat in space for a week to see what happens to the engines. The entire interior isn’t even built yet and NASA is just using a 9 meter steel circle to train astronauts on the airlock section because no one knows what it will look like.

This mission couldn’t be more complicated if you tried. Apollo needed a total of 1 engine relight on the transfer stage, and 2 engine relights on the command module: one to enter lunar orbit, and one to leave and return to earth. The lander used pressure fed engines that only needed to work once each. One engine got them from orbit to the surface, one got them from the surface to orbit. If the Ascent engine didn’t work, NASA had plans for everything from literally jump starting it with the descent module’s batteries like it’s a dead car, to having an astronaut use bolt cutters to cut the safety pins on the engine so the valves can be manually opened.

If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you might call off work and get it towed to a mechanic. What do you do when you’re trying to leave the moon, and your rocket engines won’t light because they’ve been sitting in space for almost 2 weeks? The nearest rocket engineer is 240,000 miles away back on earth, and so are all the spare parts. And what do you do if only some of those engines light, and the others either don’t or explode while you’re on a suborbital trajectory. Complexity kills on harsh environments. Space is one of the harshest environment we’ve ever been in, so things need to be as simple as possible and known to work.

The fact that this was your take away is concerning.

No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.

Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.

You want to know a better system?

What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?

We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.

As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.

DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.

To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.

That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.

While completely empty.

An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.

Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”

It is a significant difference. When it comes to orbit, there is no close enough, either you’re going fast enough or you’re not. They have not shown this thing can do what they say it can.

IFT-3 was completely empty and the tanks were full. Where is the weight of the crew decks, the solar panels and batteries, life support equipment, docking mechanism, food, water, and cargo? These are not trivial things, and they weigh a lot. Proving an empty shell can achieve a suborbital flight and be just barely not be in orbit is not proof of anything useful.

If they had shown there was a significant amount of delta-v left with this empty test article, then that’s one thing. But those tanks had a whisper of fuel left in them. I don’t believe for a second that it would have gotten that close when it was full of over a hundred tons of additional equipment.

Making it to space and making it to orbit are 2 different things.

It has not made orbit.

It has done a suborbital flight.

The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.

Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.

Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.

If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.

And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.

I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.

Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.

I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.

We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.

You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.

A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.

ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.

You’re the one who made this philosophical.

I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”

ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.

All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.

Magic number on screen must go up

Magic number only goes up if more people buy more stuff

Need more people to buy more stuff

They make it to five seconds?

My wife maybe watches the first 700 milliseconds before deciding if she’s going to watch a video.

TikTok has melted her already short attention span. We’re working on cutting down on it, but she’s truly addicted to social media in general.

I would take a PT cruiser over the cyber truck any day.