Closer to Mars

[Belligerent Savant]

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* Pretty sure it's impossible to be a billionaire and still be a decent person. Even if you try to do good your footprint is so massive you inevitably end up stepping on people.

Precisely. The markets demand it. Such mindsets start at the mid-6 figure comp range, well before the approach of billionaire status. But that's how things get done. That's how the U.S. was built: unscrupulous enterprising ventures, mini-empire building, acquisitions, and monopolies, all on the backs of slave/workforce labor.

See Rockefeller and Morgan for the early 20th Century variant.

Today we have Gates, Bezos, the Alphabet goons, Zuck, and of course, Musk. Most of these captains of industry have a little help from their friends in letter agencies.

Musk has been propped up by them for some time, doing his part in the long con of space exploration.

[Cordelia]

DrEvil » Sat Jul 11, 2020 3:53 pm wrote:

* Pretty sure it's impossible to be a billionaire and still be a decent person. Even if you try to do good your footprint is so massive you inevitably end up stepping on people.

"One small step for Man"...One giant footprint for Musk.

[Cordelia]

It took a village to move out, but potential planet-hoppers may not have to wait long to start one on Mars.

From February:

SpaceX Is Taking Over the Tiny Village of Boca Chica
..........
Friction between next-door neighbors is quite different when one of them is a rocket company. Instead of an ugly fence, there might be an ugly fence with massive tanks of cryogenic liquid behind it. When residents find papers stuck in their front door, the notes don’t ask them to keep the noise down or clean up after their dogs; they warn them that their windows could shatter.

Boca Chica’s residents have learned to live with a rocket company, or at least tolerate it, over more than five years. But SpaceX’s work is about to become even more disruptive. (The explosion certainly made that clear.) So the company has offered to buy their homes. Some have taken the offer. Others, such as McConnaughey, have rejected it, even as Musk prepares to launch a giant rocketship just a short hop from their houses. SpaceX is already hard at work on the next Starship prototype, and Musk says the company might launch it into orbit as soon as this year. “We love Texas,” James Gleeson, a SpaceX spokesperson, said in a statement, “and believe we are entering a new and exciting era in space exploration.”

Few people in this part of South Texas could have predicted the recent trajectory of their life when SpaceX moved in. They have become space fanatics and legal experts, Musk supporters and thorns in his side, trying to make sense of their place in a strange story that could someday end millions of miles away from Earth. All because they got new neighbors.

“They’re here to stay,” McConnaughey told me, “and they want us to leave.”

Continued..https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ca/606382/

From Friday's Business Insider:

Aerial photos of SpaceX's Starship site reveal the stunning evolution of its Mars-rocket facility amid a South Texas beach community

Dave Mosher

Jul 10, 2020, 12:37 PM

Elon Musk is, by all accounts, racing to reach Mars.

To that end, the founder of SpaceX has mustered about 1,000 workers to a remote, beachy, and muddy strip of land at the southeastern tip of Texas called Boca Chica. His staff there is frenetically constructing a growing and evolving complex of tents, buildings, cranes, launch pads, and even employee residences to support around-the-clock work.

SpaceX's goal is to rapidly develop a fully reusable steel rocket system called Starship that — if the idea pans out as Musk envisions — could slash the cost of sending anything to space, including people, by 100- to 10,000-fold. Such a system could routinize access to space, to the point passengers may be able to fly from New York City to Shanghai in under an hour, as well as attempt to populate the red planet starting in 2024.

Providing a stark contrast to the next-generation rocket facility, however, is a small community of retiree-age people who live or overwinter adjacent to SpaceX, some of whom bought homes in the area decades before the aerospace company existed (and they don't much care for the occasional explosion of prototypes).

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex- ... y-occurs-7

^^^

SpaceX's emerging Starship rocket factory

Yesterday's tour from NASA:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t17Ld2z7Sg

[DrEvil]

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* Pretty sure it's impossible to be a billionaire and still be a decent person. Even if you try to do good your footprint is so massive you inevitably end up stepping on people.

Precisely. The markets demand it. Such mindsets start at the mid-6 figure comp range, well before the approach of billionaire status. But that's how things get done. That's how the U.S. was built: unscrupulous enterprising ventures, mini-empire building, acquisitions, and monopolies, all on the backs of slave/workforce labor.

See Rockefeller and Morgan for the early 20th Century variant.

Today we have Gates, Bezos, the Alphabet goons, Zuck, and of course, Musk. Most of these captains of industry have a little help from their friends in letter agencies.

Musk has been propped up by them for some time, doing his part in the long con of space exploration.

Agree with everything except space exploration being a long con. I think Musk is completely sincere when he says he wants to colonize Mars. I also think he's an asshole and would probably score higher than most on a sociopath test.

[Belligerent Savant]

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You may be right Re: Musk's interest in space. He may well have sincere interest in colonizing Mars/space exploration. This sincerity isn't necessarily mutually exclusive of a long con theory, though*.

Perhaps:

- As far as he knows, [space colonization is] legit, but unbeknownst to him he is merely on a 'need to know' basis, unaware of the 'above top secret' operations, unknowingly doing his part as the outwardly facing presentation of outer space reality as orchestrated/crafted for plebe consumption (in this regard, he'd be one of many, historically). Or;

- He's aware of the long con, at least in part, and is a witting participant. Or;

- There's no 'long con'. Space exploration is a legit enterprise; indeed, all ventures in space presented to us since the ~mid-50s (NASA, etc) are legit. Musk is a space frontiersman, a necessary asshole we can all root for vicariously in spite of his flaws. Or;

- Some amalgamation of the above, among other factors not considered here.




*was tempted to appropriate the Gen-Z 'tho', which I've done before, mostly as a tongue in cheek gesture/tip of the cap to the incremental devolution of the written form. Decided against it.
(I do enough damage as it is).

[DrEvil]

^^Depends what the 'need to know' things are, really. I lean towards the simpler explanation of space just being hard (and expensive), has some military uses (navigation, guidance, surveillance, kinetic weapons), but is otherwise the domain of scientists and rich nerds.

The reason I'm certain Musk is genuine in his plans is simply that he's been talking about it forever, has built and launched a ton of rockets that have been developed specifically with an eye towards landing on Mars, and is now building the actual rockets that will land on Mars. That's a lot of effort to go to for something he doesn't really mean.

[Belligerent Savant]

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Difficult for me to use the term 'genuine' for a billionaire relying heavily on govt money to keep his companies afloat.

Your commentary takes all you've read about Musk, in available media, at face value. I'm simply incapable of doing the same right now (indeed, it's practically impossible in the current era of social media-based 'reporting/journalism' - misdirections/disinfo are part of everyone's daily intake).

As i've mentioned before, perhaps my stance will change in time.. or become more emboldened.


(My work in the corporate white collar space has taught me much over the years on the difference between overt optics and covert machinations.. RI has offered similar illumination WRT politics/woo)


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[DrEvil]

^^I hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure what exactly it is you're saying.

Don't trust the mainstream - check, all aboard with that one, but I've been following the guy since he started out, and he's been saying the exact same thing all the time: he wants to go to Mars. He's also been doing all the things he needs to do to one day get there. I'm not sure what the alternative take on that would be...

And sure, he's been subsidized by the government with tax breaks and low interest loans and contracts, just like every other large business out there, and along the way he's put electric cars firmly in the mainstream, reduced the cost of going to space by orders of magnitude and helped solar power along the way with battery storage. I'd say that's a pretty good return on investment.

The number I've seen bandied about is five billion. That's about 1/4 of what they've spent on the Senate Launch System so far, and that thing hasn't even launched yet. If it ever gets off the pad five billion will get you anywhere from two to ten launches of the SLS (read: two, the lowest estimate of half a billion per launch will never pan out), compared to 80 launches of the Falcon 9 or 33-55 launches of the Falcon Heavy (depending on the configuration).

I don't like the guy as a person, but I admire what he's achieved.

[BenDhyan]

I've organized it to get there on my birthday...

[thrulookingglass]

govt money

Is there another kind?

[DrEvil]

Who needs flying saucers when you have flying grain silos.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HA9LlFNM0

[Elvis]

govt money

Is there another kind?

Not really!

When a bank makes a loan, it creates a bank deposit for the borrower ('out of thin air'), and the Federal Reserve adds a like amount of reserve dollars ('out of thin air') to the bank's reserve account at the Fed. The reserve dollars are what gets moved to another bank's Fed account when a payment is made. So ultimately, it is all govt money.

That's okay, if only because that single Fed clearinghouse makes our payments go through quick and smoooth every time. Before the central reserve system, the US payment system was a chaotic mess.

There are other kinds; Bitcoin is a kind of money and is privately created. But it doesn't check all the boxes that US dollars do. IMO it's stupid.


Money on Mars. I wonder what that's going to be like?

[DrEvil]

Whatever it is I hope they call it Spacebucks.

My favorite name for Bitcoin is Dunning-Krugerrand. During the latest craze Ponzicoin had to shut down because people were buying it hand over fist.

[Belligerent Savant]

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No need to worry about what they'll call it, as there'll never be money on Mars... because humans will never establish there. Or are we working on an RI sci-fi narrative?

Re: Bitcoin. Don't look now, but it's currently on an upswing, pushing $12k per coin as a hedge against growing volatility and corresponding lack of faith/trust in FIAT currency (see the recent rise in value of precious metals - same sentiment). The last high point of Bitcoin was about $20k back in 2017. Let's see if it touches it again, if at all, before we scoff. Money's being made as we type.

What you or I think of precious metals or Bitcoin as a legit store of value/exchange is irrelevant. It's all about consensus perception and confidence in a given currency.

The question then becomes: who (or which entities) are largely responsible for managing/shaping such perceptions?

Also: we shouldn't assume a move to digital currency isn't part of longer-term plans. Far easier to control transactions. Far less opportunity for 'under the table' transactions, at least when it comes to business, when there's an electronic ledger involved each time a transaction occurs.
As it is, the majority of transactions today, regardless of currency, are performed via highly traceable credit/debit cards, but there remains the option to conduct business, or at least more discrete business, in cash, which is more tedious to trace (or otherwise, easier to launder).

If the objective is more control of a populace, the move away from cash is inevitable. With digital currency, not only can transactions be far more readily traceable, but accounts can also be seized/frozen more easily as well, particularly if cash as a reserve/backup option is no longer viable.

An extreme take, perhaps. 2020 may be the first step towards this future. Destabilization and economic collapse -- a cleansing process -- clearing way for phase II: the new totalitarian frontier.

But back to Mars. I've a suggestion for the face of the Martian $100 bill:

[Elvis]

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Re: Bitcoin. Don't look now, but it's currently on an upswing, pushing $12k per coin as a hedge against growing volatility and corresponding lack of faith/trust in FIAT currency (see the recent rise in value of precious metals - same sentiment). The last high point of Bitcoin was about $20k back in 2017. Let's see if it touches it again, if at all, before we scoff. Money's being made as we type.

What you or I think of precious metals or Bitcoin as a legit store of value/exchange is irrelevant. It's all about consensus perception and confidence in a given currency.

Yes, and what I've noticed is that these dire predictions of imminent, systemic dollar collapse all come from two libertarian-leaning fraternities: the gold bugs and the Bitcoin nuts. The cherished dream of both groups is that the dollar spectacularly fail and be replaced by—gold!—no, Bitcoin!—no, gold!—no, Bitcoin! You can watch them snipe at each other on Twitter, I find it amusing. I don't see serious economists or policymakers of any stripe predicting such a catastrophic currency failure. (WEF talk of a "reset" is vague and I could find no reference to replacing the USD or really anything to do with currency.)

Also: we shouldn't assume a move to digital currency isn't part of longer-term plans. Far easier to control transactions.

There's a proposed instrument called "Central Bank Digital Currency" (CBDC) that would preserve the anonymity of paper cash along with the ease of electronic payments. Don't ask me how it works but I think it involves something like blockchain, and according to all the researchers, it would work as claimed.

The other day I heard a great simile: a monetary instrument (e.g. the dollar) is like a Mr. Potatohead; you can add features at will, but it's still fundamentally a Mr. Potatohead.

there'll never be money on Mars... because humans will never establish there.

Have you previously talked about the reasons why? You see no colonies, outposts or settlements of any kind?

But back to Mars. I've a suggestion for the face of the Martian $100 bill:

He looks upset!