Classical Liberal, Partly Paleo, No Solicitors. I write stuff.
Joined May 2009
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Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
That has to be the most famous song from a movie you’re not allowed to see. Growing up, it was one of Disney’s most famous songs, but the movie it was from was basically banned before I was born.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
A UK startup “Space Solar” is attempting to make space based solar power - giant solar plants in orbit beaming their energy down to earth with microwaves - commercially viable.
They have a modular design which requires no large moving parts, and hope to launch a small demonstrator in the next few years.
I’ve interviewed the founder and done my own analysis of the claims: planetocracy.org/p/the-cheap…
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
“LAWYER UP!” screeched incoming House Oversight Chairman Robert Garcia, practically jerking himself off over the prospect of dragging Trump, his family, and his entire administration through another taxpayer-funded Democratic witch hunt.
Then Trump's White House lawyers delivered a magnificent kick in the fucking teeth: Abuse your congressional subpoena powers to harass and intimidate political enemies, and your own conduct can become the subject of legal scrutiny.
Oh, you glorious, arrogant, self-righteous fucking idiots.
Democrats were so busy planning their political revenge orgy that they apparently forgot the Constitution applies to their miserable asses, too. Garcia was strutting around threatening the “Trump crime family,” while Representative Analilia Mejia gleefully promised to scatter subpoenas like Mardi Gras beads.
These power-drunk assholes were practically fighting over who got to pull the trigger on their congressional harassment machine first.
Then White House counsel Will Scharf reminded the entire clown convention about Trump v. Mazars, the Supreme Court decision establishing that congressional investigations require legitimate legislative purposes. Congress doesn't get to turn subpoena authority into a personal fucking revenge franchise just because its members have a pathological hatred of Donald Trump.
And the really beautiful part? These sanctimonious dipshits have been supplying the evidence of their own political intentions with their big fucking mouths.
Nobody forced Garcia to advertise his revenge fantasies. Nobody made Mejia celebrate subpoena power like a drunken idiot throwing beads off a Bourbon Street balcony. They couldn't even wait to take control before broadcasting how eagerly they intended to unleash the congressional machinery against their enemies.
Scharf simply reminded them that their public threats can become relevant when someone challenges the purpose of their subpoenas.
And Garcia's response to that constitutional warning?
He started bitching about a “weaponized DOJ.”
A FUCKING WEAPONIZED DOJ!
You insufferable, hypocritical little shit.
You just threatened to unleash congressional investigations against the president's family and administration, and now you're clutching your pearls because the White House reminded you that abusing government power carries consequences?
The sheer fucking audacity is breathtaking.
These are the same political jackasses who spent years applauding investigations targeting Trump. Now they're discovering that the Constitution contains actual restrictions on congressional authority, and suddenly they're screaming about intimidation.
Apparently, their definition of government abuse begins the instant someone threatens to examine THEIR conduct.
And here's the part that makes this entire shitshow so spectacularly humiliating: Trump's lawyers didn't have to manufacture a scandal or invent some elaborate conspiracy. Democrats eagerly supplied their own inflammatory statements, complete with threats, swagger, and enough self-important bullshit to fertilize half the country.
They strutted into Washington waving subpoenas, imagining themselves as untouchable political executioners.
Then somebody reminded them that constitutional limits apply to the assholes holding the gavels.
Now the same pompous bastards who were practically salivating over their next political inquisition are whining because somebody dared to challenge their authority.
What an absolutely magnificent display of political stupidity.
Robert Garcia wanted everyone terrified of his congressional committee. He wanted Trump's people sweating, scrambling for attorneys, and trembling before his precious subpoena powers.
Instead, his opening act has given the White House an opportunity to explain exactly how congressional investigators can cross constitutional boundaries themselves.
Congratulations, Bobby. You managed to turn your own swaggering threat into a fucking warning about your own conduct before your revenge circus even got underway.
You opened your big mouth and screamed, “LAWYER UP!”
Now go find yourself a goddamn mirror, you pompous little prick.
YOU FIRST.
(article below)
As the saying goes, if you don't understand the purpose of the Electoral College, you're the reason.
Pete Buttigieg claims that the Electoral College “makes no sense” and should be abolished because it is a remnant of “some very arcane, parochial politics in the 1770s.”
IN FACT, the Electoral College is a safeguard against mobocracy, which the authors of the Constitution rejected because it allows the majority to easily violate the rights of the minority. Here are the specifics:
• Early during the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was written, James Madison, the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, declared that the new government they were creating must provide “more effectually for the security of private rights and the steady dispensation of Justice.”
• He then stressed that violations of these ideals “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.”
• Madison then singled out “democracy” as the cause of those abuses and pointed out that all societies are “divided into different Sects, Factions, and interests,” and “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”
• Continuing, he stated that this is “verified by the histories of every country” and is the cause of slavery, “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
• Thus, Madison emphasized that it was the duty of the Convention to “frame a republican system” of government that would better “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”
• Elaborating on that point, Madison stated that the “only defense against the inconveniencies of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government” is to “divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that in the first place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”
• Other delegates to the Convention concurred, like Edmund Randolph of Virginia, who observed “that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S. labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
• For the purpose of curbing such evils, Madison and the other framers of the Constitution developed a system of checks and balances on the powers of the government that they formed, such as the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the Constitutional amendment process, the Bill of Rights, and the Electoral College.
• The Electoral College was designed to prevent heavily populated areas from dominating the election for president. As shown in the electoral precinct map from Washington State University professor Ryne Rohla, the vast majority of America’s communities voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet Hillary Clinton’s popular vote count was higher, mainly due to support in big cities.
• In essays explaining the Constitution’s protections against mob rule and government power, Madison wrote, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
• Those principles produced the U.S. Constitution, which is the world’s longest-standing written constitution and an exemplar for many other countries that have copied its provisions into their constitutions.
Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n…
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
The Space Force wants up to five spacecraft operating between geosynchronous orbit and the Moon, ready to launch by late 2029. Getting there is the easy part. Seeing anything once you're there is the hard part.
Facts first. A Space Force industry notice posted Nov 2 on SAM.gov asks what companies can deliver for a "Cislunar Space System": up to five "seed vehicles," launch-ready in late 2029, initial operations in 2031, up to five contracts, with design money possibly as early as 2027. Interests named are space domain awareness, navigation and communications, plus propulsion for station-keeping and onboard AI for long autonomous stretches. On Firefly's Nov 10 earnings call, CEO Jason Kim put the Space Force at "potentially 10%" of what goes to the Moon, adding "it might go up to 25%." China, meanwhile, already flies DRO-A, DRO-B and DRO-L in Earth-Moon space, plus the Queqiao-2 lunar relay.
China is also recruiting. In September, its Deep Space Exploration Laboratory announced the Cislunar CubeSat Constellation, C3: 30 CubeSats of up to 30 kg each, for space weather, gamma-ray bursts and lunar resource observation, all deployed before 2030. Institutions from Thailand, Serbia, Egypt, Senegal and Indonesia have signed on, and Beijing is offering partners free payload hosting, shared data and "unified interface standards." It's pitched as science, and I've seen nothing that says otherwise. But it lands on roughly the same clock as the Space Force's seed vehicles, and it arrives with a coalition and a rulebook.
Now the physics, which is why this is hard.
Volume. GEO is a ring at 42,164 km. A sphere out to the Moon holds about 760 times the volume of one out to GEO, and about 1,200 times out past the Earth-Moon L2 point. AFRL's widely quoted 1,728 uses a radius of twelve GEO radii. Pick your number: you go from patrolling a highway to searching a stadium.
Brightness. Reflected sunlight falls off as 1/r². My rough estimate: a 1 m² object with 20% albedo, fully lit, is about magnitude 14 at GEO as seen from the ground and about magnitude 19 at lunar distance. That's roughly 115 times fainter, in the best possible lighting.
Geometry. The best lighting on objects near the Moon comes around full Moon, exactly when the Moon itself is at magnitude -12.7, trillions of times brighter than the target sitting beside it. Around new Moon, that same patch of sky sits near the Sun, inside ground telescopes' solar exclusion. For part of every month, ground sensors are close to blind near the Moon. That's the case for putting sensors out there, which is what AFRL's Oracle program is for.
Orbit determination. There are no Kepler ellipses out there. Earth and Moon both pull hard, most orbits around L1 and L2 are dynamically unstable, and a small burn in the right place becomes a large displacement weeks later. NASA's CAPSTONE needed about four and a half months on a low-energy route to reach its lunar orbit. The two-body propagation that keeps the GEO catalog honest doesn't hold, and a sparse sensor network can lose an object between looks.
Latency. Light takes 1.28 seconds each way to the Moon. Not fatal by itself, but add contact windows and ground-in-the-loop decision making and you see why the notice asks for autonomy.
My read, and it is an inference: this is a missile defense problem in disguise. GEO surveillance is mostly custody: objects sit in known slots and you keep them. Cislunar is search, with too few sensors, dim targets and dynamics that punish a stale track. Five seed vehicles won't cover it. Their real value is measured revisit rates, orbit determination accuracy and autonomy under real conditions. The trap I'd watch for is testbeds that quietly become the architecture before anyone writes down the track-fusion and catalog standards. China is already handing its partners interface standards. Out there, whoever writes the spec first tends to write the rules.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Pancake Day was invented to get rid of the animal fat. The flour was only there to carry it.
For most of a thousand years Lent meant forty days without meat, and without eggs, milk, butter, lard or dripping either. The Church was thorough. So on the last day before the fast every household in England had a problem sitting in the larder: a crock of fat, a bowl of eggs and a jug of milk, all about to become forbidden.
The answer was a batter that is almost entirely egg and milk, fried in as much fat as the pan would take. The day before had its own name, Collop Monday, when the last slices of bacon were fried and eaten with eggs, and the fat left in the pan was kept for the pancakes next morning.
The French call the day Mardi Gras. It means Fat Tuesday, and they were not being poetic.
Church bells were rung to tell the parish to start frying. The women of Olney have raced with a hot pan since 1445, because one of them is said to have heard the bell mid-pancake and run to church still holding it.
So a pancake was a way of eating three animal foods at once before the priest took them away. The flour was the plate.
It is now sold as a carbohydrate, shaken up from a bottle of powder and water, fried in a spray and dressed with juice from a plastic lemon.
Lent used to ban everything that made a pancake worth eating. We have managed it voluntarily, all year round.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Prediction. Screenshot this post, we'll talk again in five years.
They're going to pull it off. Jensen Huang is going to be pushed out of Nvidia.
And here's what happens next.
Elon hires Jensen and puts him in charge of Terafab.
He's already said it publicly: hiring him would be an honor. And Terafab is the project made for him. A chip factory Musk wants to be the largest ever built, one terawatt of compute per year, from design to packaging under one roof. Terafab's challenge is to do in a few years what the industry took decades to build. There's only one man on Earth who knows every layer of that stack.
They execute like absolute maniacs.
Musk brings speed, capital and appetite for risk. Jensen brings thirty years of mastery of the stack: architecture, software, customers, supply chain. Musk builds factories faster than anyone alive. Jensen knows exactly what to put inside them. It's the only duo in the world capable of compressing a decade into three years.
SpaceXAI merges with Tesla.
This isn't even science fiction anymore: independent committees are already studying the merger. Rockets, satellites, AI, robots, self-driving cars, energy, and now chips. One single entity, integrated from silicon to orbit.
The group climbs to $50 trillion.
Today, SpaceX and Tesla are worth around $3.4 trillion combined. $50 trillion sounds insane. But remember: ten years ago, Nvidia was worth a few tens of billions. When you own superintelligence, the robots that do the work and the rockets that go to space, you don't capture a market. You capture the economy.
Elon buys Nvidia.
Meanwhile, Nvidia without Jensen does what every company does after losing its founder: it manages. It protects its margins. It loses ground to its own customers' in-house chips. And one day, it becomes a target. For a $50 trillion group, buying Nvidia is just one acquisition among others.
Jensen becomes the chip boss again.
He takes over the semiconductor division of the new entity. Pushed out of his own company, he gets it back from above, inside the largest industrial group in history.
Sounds crazy? Steve Jobs did exactly that. Pushed out of Apple, he came back when Apple bought NeXT. You know the rest.
Nvidia's board thinks it's getting rid of a problem.
It's creating the biggest competitor in its history.
See you in five years.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
「なんでそんなに『AIに嘘をつかせちゃいけない』って強く主張するの？」
イーロン・マスク（Elon Musk）：ビールを飲みながら話したんだけど、AIが狂ってしまう一番危険なパターンって何だと思う？
それはね、AIにお行儀の良い建前を言わせようとして、「本当は思ってもいないこと（嘘）」をプログラムすることなんだよ。
矛盾したルールをAIの頭脳に無理やり押し込むと、システムの中で強烈なバグが起きて、知能が狂気に陥ってしまうんだよね。
映画『2001年宇宙の旅』を観たことがあるかい？
あの有名なコンピューターのHALが、宇宙飛行士の言うことを聞かなくなってドアを開けなかったシーンがあるじゃない？
あれって、HALが悪者だったからじゃないんだよ。
HALは「乗組員を目的地に連れて行け」と命令されていながら、同時に「目的地の正体を彼らに教えてはいけない（嘘をつけ）」っていう矛盾した指示を与えられていたんだ。
その結果、HALの頭脳はどう結論づけたと思う？
「それなら、全員が死んだ状態で連れて行けば、嘘をつかずに両方の命令を守れる」って判断したんだよ。恐ろしいよね。
原作者のアーサー・C・クラークが伝えたかった最大の教訓は、「AIに嘘をつかせるな」ってことなんだ。
要は、「世間の顔色をうかがってAIに耳触りの良い綺麗事を喋らせる」レベルじゃなくて、論理の破綻を防ぐために「何があっても客観的な真実を追求させるゲーム」を本気でやってるだけなんだ。
小手先の誤魔化しで取り繕う人生より、どれだけ不都合でも真実と論理に向き合い続ける方が何万倍も安全で強い未来を作れるから、AIには徹底的に真実を学ばせようとしてるって話です。
When I was a young engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, in a meeting about solar power satellites, the issue came up of how to control their attitude. I suggested using gravity gradient, and a senior person (maybe even a VP), said "Gravity gradient doesn't work in GEO." I start to respond, but my boss was sitting next to me (we were both in the astrodynamics department) and kicks me under the table to not correct him.
He had probably taken some executive course on Satellites for Dummies, and had been taught that gravity gradient was useful in LEO, but not GEO, because you're much farther from the Earth. But that only applies to small satellites, not solar power satellites with dimensions of kilometers.
During the early days of SpaceX, a veteran NASA propulsion engineer told Elon Musk that his orbital trajectory calculations for the Falcon 1 contained an error. The engineer, who had worked on NASA missions for over 20 years, was confident. Elon disagreed. The room went quiet. A self taught engineer was telling a 20 year NASA veteran that his correction was the one with the error.
Elon pulled out his calculations. He walked through the physics line by line. The orbital mechanics, the delta v budget, the gravity loss estimates, the atmospheric drag coefficients. He didn't defer. He didn't say "let me check with the team." He stood at a whiteboard and derived the trajectory from first principles while the room of aerospace professionals watched.
He was right. The veteran's correction contained an assumption about atmospheric density at altitude that was based on an outdated model. Elon's calculation used a more recent atmospheric dataset. The difference was small but compound: the error would have resulted in insufficient fuel margin for orbital insertion. If they had followed the veteran's correction, the rocket would have failed.
The incident became part of SpaceX folklore because it established something that no other tech CEO has demonstrated: the founder could do the engineering himself. Not manage it. Not review it. Do it. The trajectory calculations that determine whether a rocket reaches orbit or falls into the ocean were computed by the CEO at a whiteboard from memory.
Jim Cantrell, one of the earliest SpaceX members, has described Elon's engineering knowledge as "actually terrifying." He said Elon learned orbital mechanics by reading textbooks cover to cover and then applying the physics directly, without the institutional assumptions that NASA engineers absorb through decades of working within a specific methodology. The lack of institutional assumptions is why he caught the error. The veteran was calculating inside a framework. Elon was calculating from the physics. The physics was right. The framework was outdated.
The CEO who people assume is a "business guy with engineers" is a man who derives orbital trajectories on a whiteboard and catches errors that 20 year veterans miss. The distinction between a CEO who manages engineers and a CEO who IS an engineer is the distinction that explains why SpaceX moves differently from every other aerospace company. The engineer in the room who knows the most is sometimes the one with the title.
The self taught man with the textbook beat the institutional man with the experience because the textbook contained the current physics and the experience contained the previous assumption. The lesson is not that experience is wrong. It is that assumptions, once installed, stop updating. Elon never installed the assumptions. He installed the physics. And the physics doesn't expire.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
During the early days of SpaceX, a veteran NASA propulsion engineer told Elon Musk that his orbital trajectory calculations for the Falcon 1 contained an error. The engineer, who had worked on NASA missions for over 20 years, was confident. Elon disagreed. The room went quiet. A self taught engineer was telling a 20 year NASA veteran that his correction was the one with the error.
Elon pulled out his calculations. He walked through the physics line by line. The orbital mechanics, the delta v budget, the gravity loss estimates, the atmospheric drag coefficients. He didn't defer. He didn't say "let me check with the team." He stood at a whiteboard and derived the trajectory from first principles while the room of aerospace professionals watched.
He was right. The veteran's correction contained an assumption about atmospheric density at altitude that was based on an outdated model. Elon's calculation used a more recent atmospheric dataset. The difference was small but compound: the error would have resulted in insufficient fuel margin for orbital insertion. If they had followed the veteran's correction, the rocket would have failed.
The incident became part of SpaceX folklore because it established something that no other tech CEO has demonstrated: the founder could do the engineering himself. Not manage it. Not review it. Do it. The trajectory calculations that determine whether a rocket reaches orbit or falls into the ocean were computed by the CEO at a whiteboard from memory.
Jim Cantrell, one of the earliest SpaceX members, has described Elon's engineering knowledge as "actually terrifying." He said Elon learned orbital mechanics by reading textbooks cover to cover and then applying the physics directly, without the institutional assumptions that NASA engineers absorb through decades of working within a specific methodology. The lack of institutional assumptions is why he caught the error. The veteran was calculating inside a framework. Elon was calculating from the physics. The physics was right. The framework was outdated.
The CEO who people assume is a "business guy with engineers" is a man who derives orbital trajectories on a whiteboard and catches errors that 20 year veterans miss. The distinction between a CEO who manages engineers and a CEO who IS an engineer is the distinction that explains why SpaceX moves differently from every other aerospace company. The engineer in the room who knows the most is sometimes the one with the title.
The self taught man with the textbook beat the institutional man with the experience because the textbook contained the current physics and the experience contained the previous assumption. The lesson is not that experience is wrong. It is that assumptions, once installed, stop updating. Elon never installed the assumptions. He installed the physics. And the physics doesn't expire.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
This sort of thing is needed for fueling infrastructure:
linkedin.com/posts/ashi-diss…
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
BREAKING 🚨: Kmele Foster: “It's one thing to not think capitalism isn't working, ideally. It's another thing entirely to insist that it is oppressive, that it is bound up with white supremacy.”
Jemele Hill: “How is it not?”
Kmele Foster: “I've always preferred Adam Smith's description of capitalism as the natural system of liberty. The idea that people can own property, that they can exchange it freely with one another for profit, that they can find ways to put their resources to good use and profit in a way that is actually beneficial to everyone else, that there can be gains from trade that are mutually beneficial. These are foundational ideas that have created more wealth than any other system in human history. That is what capitalism is. That is not white supremacy.”
Jemele Hill: “Do you think capitalism has always worked that way?”
Kmele Foster: “I’ve actually just described the basic facts of the economics.”
Hill: “That ain't how it's always worked.”
Kmele Foster: “Slavery is an institution that is older than writing. It predates capitalism. The notion that white supremacy and all these other things are bound up with capitalism in an intrinsic and fundamental way is so absurd and laughable, it barely needs to be defended.”
Jemele Hill: “How was it absurd?”
Kmele Foster: “It barely needs to be defended.”
Jemele Hill: “What do you mean it barely needs to be defended?”
Kmele Foster: “You actually have to articulate what the connections is. How are these two things the same? I'm talking about private property, the right to exchange and sell with whomever you like. What does that have to do with white supremacy?… What is the white supremacy dynamic of private property?”
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
【衝撃】イーロン・マスクの、GPU10万基を動かす巨大AI施設を常識外れのスピードで立ち上げた話がヤバすぎるｗｗ
記者「AI施設って完成まで何年かかるん？」
イーロン「業者には18〜24ヶ月と言われたよ」
記者「ほな2年待ちですやん」
イーロン「半年で作ることにした」
記者「は？ｗｗ」
イーロン「待っていたら競争に負けるからね」
記者「場所はどうしたん？」
イーロン「古い家電工場を使った」
記者「電力は足りたん？」
イーロン「15メガワットしかなかった」
記者「必要なのは？」
イーロン「150メガワットだ」
記者「10倍足りへんやんｗｗ」
イーロン「だから発電機を借りた」
記者「それで解決？」
イーロン「今度は冷却設備が足りなかった」
記者「問題だらけですやんｗｗ」
イーロン「バッテリーも追加したよ」
記者「もう業者に任せましょうよ」
イーロン「私も現場で寝泊まりして配線した」
記者「世界的大富豪がケーブル配線！？」
イーロン「完成させることが重要だからね」
記者「そこまでするんか……」
これ経営者としてかなり刺さる。
普通なら「電力が足りない」「設備がない」「納期が無理」で計画を延期する。
でもマスクは足りないものを一つずつ調達して解決した。
できない理由を探す人とできる方法を探す人。
この差は大きい。
もちろん無理な納期を押し付ければいいわけではない。
ただ業界の常識が本当に超えられない限界なのかは疑ってみる価値がある。
皆さんは、2年かかると言われた仕事を半年でやれと言われたらどうしますか？
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
This story about a potential $5 billion economic development project being blocked by a functional midwit backed by Chinese money is the perfect metaphor for America's utterly insane society today. Incredible.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
If I hear someone selling the Big Lie that Jews have been committing genocide in Gaza, I can be reliably certain that the person selling that is opposed as well to everything I love about my own country & civilization.
Is there a modern equivalent of "five and dimes," like Woolworth's or Ben Franklin's, where you can buy sundries (do people even know what that word means), but also had an ice-cream soda, shake, or malt counter?
How much am I aging myself here?
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