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.

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.

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.

I think satellite data centers are colossally stupid, but I suspect the larger problem is the public's gullibility for big lies.

Now, which things ARE lies and which aren't has been delightfully co-opted by politics; what one puts on that list is *instantly* translated into political affiliation.

I can think of 3 big lies that would immediately get me labeled "stupid maga fuck".
I can think of 3 others that would likewise get me labeled "woke fag".
Amusingly, putting all 6 in a list would be cognitively negatively filtered; each "side" would only see and respond to the ones they DISagree with, in most cases as if the others weren't even present.

I think data centers in space will be inevitable WHEN WE LIVE THERE and some research to address the (large) physics challenges the context poses are a good idea. Anything above research trial scale today is dumb. But that's all noise compared to the bigger problems, this argument is only a symptom.

I have a home full of expensive electronics and live in a rural county in the US Midwest where weather is an issue. I'd much rather have the external feed trickle-charging batteries that steady-supply my home, than be vulnerable to the spiky local power during weather events.

I sort if wonder in a complete amateur sense if this might herald a "ac for distribution, dc microgrid in homes" evolution.

Are we doing that great with the process ourselves?

Our children are deeply despondent, increasingly suicidal, and from the latest surveys evolution seems to have decided higher thinking abilities are to some degree a waste of energy better used for other things.

Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.

I wonder what other nuc-u-lar powered devices we can chuck up there?

Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.

We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

... sadly for the Americans, the rest of the world now knows they can't count on a US based provider for this kind of thing any more.

It was uncomfortable enough relying so heavily on American software back when it couldn't be switched off remotely on the say so of an idiot. Today it's an intolerable risk.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.