Yeah, Musk could definitely drive the whole thing sideways. I'm afraid he might be getting increasingly detached from reality. I'm not so worried about the lack of focus on the chomper; it seems to me that the real issues facing Starship are all about how to handle re-entry heat. Also engine re-lights, but I have little concern they can solve that; it's been done many times before, including by SpaceX. If they can solve the rapid reuse after reentry problem, something no one else has done, ever, building various form factors will be a simple matter of engineering.

Yes, it was all super entertaining, especially with PJ covering all of it, and rarely missing a trick. Good times for those of us watching from the cheap seats. A huge waste of time and resources for IBM.

That's absolutely not what it means.

"Left the labor force" doesn't mean "they lost their job" it means "they aren't looking for a job". Examples of cases where people "leave the labor force" include (but aren't limited to):

* Retired.
* Had a child and decided to become a stay-at-home parent.
* Decided to spend their time caring for an elderly relative.
* Decided to go back to school.
* Gave up on working after being unable to find a job.
* Had a financial windfall and decided to stop working.

And so on. The "gave up after being unable to find a job" is not particularly likely in a job market where only 4.2% of people who want a job don't have one, though I suppose some may choose not to work rather than work in a less-desirable job than they had before.

Also, it's July 2. June employment numbers are basically worthless at this point. Give them a quarter or so to get more data and correct the numbers. The initial numbers are based on only on employer reporting data, which skews it in various ways. The government uses several other data sources including surveys, but it takes time for that data to come in, which is why these numbers are generally corrected 2-3 months after they come out.

My facebook id has been spaceman375 for over 10 years (tho I haven't logged in again after the 1st 3 months.) I can't get it on my whatsapp account because some guy used it for his instagram account. I have 2 email accounts that are spaceman375, one from last century. It's my login on many websites, and yet somehow somebody else gets to take it. [expletive]

Okay, I'll stop bitching now. Must be the heat...

AI slap generators create code with dubious copyright protections. Open source software relies entirely on copyright to enforce its license agreements so once you start polluting your code it's all downhill from there...

These are people who lost their jobs, spent months sometimes years looking for another one, could not find one, and gave up.

We have 720,000 people who are completely unemployable. Nobody will hire them to do anything except maybe pay them sub minimum wage and abuse them until their bodies break or they run out of money to steal.

That number is going to keep growing on top of the number of full-time working homeless.

In a country with more guns than people sooner or later that's going to be a problem. As automation continues to devour jobs we will eventually hit a tipping point where we can't pay for the services we need to have a even vaguely functional civilization. Police and fire will go first and you'll dial 911 but nobody will come.

A bunch of libertarian numb skulls think this is cool because they think they can just go around shooting people and for a time they are right.

The problem is the horde. Your dipshit libertarian uncle shoots somebody dead because they wandered into their house looking for food. Okay fine whatever. But another guy comes and this one has a baseball bat. So your uncle shoots that guy. The next guy has a machete and the next guy has a gun. He gets a few rounds off but your uncle is a crack shot so again down he goes. Sooner or later two or three of them show up and they have guns and your uncle kills one of them but the other gets a shot off that hits your uncle square in the arm and now he can't hold his rifle.. but damn your uncle is like John wick or some shit he finishes the other guys off. And in comes the next batch of them and this time your uncle has one good arm can't move fast enough and his leg gets taken out. But again your uncle is fucking Superman right so he kills them all. So now with a bum leg and a bum arm the final batch of guys shoots your uncle dead.

That's why you can't let civilization collapse and be okay. Once that happens there's a limitless supply of people who are coming to kill you and you have to kill every single one of them but they only have to kill you once.

But if rationality worked with these numbskulls then they wouldn't be libertarians would they?

Functional unemployment combines people who are underemployed and people who do not make enough money to be functional adults. People in this category who are getting by are either working homeless (we have half a million full-time working homeless) or they are receiving support from friends and family to keep a roof over their heads.

It's become so obvious that the books are cooked I don't think anyone can ignore it anymore and I have seen economists come up with all sorts of fun euphemisms to describe the actual situation.

None of this is sustainable. Here is where all the libertarian twats worried about toaster licenses show up to tell us why it's a good thing that Civilization is collapsing because nobody's going to tell them what to do right?

The average american, about 60%, read as a 6th grade level or the level of a 12-year-old. When you are 12 you get this burning desire to not be told what to do. Some people grow out of it and some people become libertarians or Republicans or some combination thereof.

Like the old joke, There are two novels that can change a bookish kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs

Congratulations on waking up from your coma from 1964. A lot's changed.

Vance literally said Nixon wouldn't have if he did Watergate today.

He also complained about how little coverage Biden's health got... To US troops. In full knowledge of the lie.

Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.

Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.

I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.

Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:

So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."

Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.

The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.

I hope you get the Funny, but on your sig I currently favor Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. R is where their noses are for the orange-nosing cowardice, whereas D is for believing in various stripes of flying elephants, with or without feathers. (There's an old book by Woody Allen from back when he was funny...)

I agree with you, but I had to include the obligatory joke. The word has lost all meaning these days. Children? Graft? Socialism? Federal? Naked? Trust? Slashdot? No meaning anywhere. But let's think of the socialist children!

I've had two of each and I would say that the Oppos have outperformed the Samsungs while costing less. I know someone else who had several Samsungs but then switched to a Pixel of some sort. I could go down the list of problems with Samsung, but there are also problems with Oppo, so I would say it's mostly a matter of degree of satisfaction in this imperfect world. I've owned a bunch of other brands of smartphones over the years with various levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Two Taiwan brands come to mind as near the top for dissatisfaction. There are still improvements, but I feel like most of the big improvements were a long time ago...

In terms of brand-linked satisfaction, I think I would actually have given the prize to Huawei before they were disqualified... I bought about ten Huawei devices of various sorts over the years, but I'm down to one last survivor and do not anticipate searching for or buying another Huawei in the future. In point of fact, I bought this last Huawei in a kind of fire sale and in hopes of higher compatibility with old data.

Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.

Boycotts are \the trick that does not work in this case, though you may not even have the option to boycott any more. Maybe Zuck will have to create shadow profiles for the residual humans who decline to play his game on his turf. How else can he fill in the holes in "the members' profiles" when they refer to people who aren't there in person. As if "in person" still has a meaning?

On the boycott topic, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. The products (books) and services were mostly okay, but I saw what was being done with my personal data and it stank to high heaven and I wanted no part of it. So I stopped using all things Bezos but kept an eye on the development of the new corporate cancer. Can't see that my boycott has hurt Amazon any.

(Maybe I just have to wait longer? My first corporate boycott target was Exxon. Never managed to bankrupt them as I planned so deviously, but it sure feels like Exxon has fallen far from it's glory days. Is an ugly acquisition in Exxon's future? Oh I hope it's Chinese or Brazilian!)

Back to Zuckerland and a sort of disclaimer: My identity on Facebook was assassinated a few years ago. I had already looked at WhatsApp and Instagram and decided not to use them, but I had cured my Facebook problem with a timer. Actually two of them. The first one went off at four minutes and then I had one minute to get off of Facebook before the second one buzzed. That was my daily allotment for the last few years before my Facebook identity was murdered for reasons that Facebook declined to tell me about. I declined to "prove" myself to Facebook's satisfaction, even if that was possible without knowing my hideous crime, but I did exercise the option to download Facebook's dossier on me and I spent a while searching for any reason, but never even found a candidate. I have a theory it was politically motivated, but only Zuck knows. If Zuck has his way "only Zuck knows" may become the law of the land for the entire universe. "Domination!"