These are my friends. :(
"Sources say" this is all just so fucking amazing. So fucking amazing to hear about the inner workings of our space agency through the fucking grapevine.
I'M BULLISH
Bad bad week for federal employees. Entire districts of USFS employees, gone…USDA and USFW employees? Gone. NASA? Gone. Where’s the judicial system and where’s the Democratic Party? Especially, where’s all the people who voted third party or didn’t vote at all.
NASA's not gone yet. But this is the first step in normalizing trying to do that.. And all the cuts to the others, yes. They'll sell it all off for parts. Flood the market with desperate PhD's. Palantir's hiring! My wife's ex-CEO took a job there about 9 months ago. There are other things I can't talk about yet here. Hehe. Teeehee The failed corporatist dems? no dawg YOU'VE devoted YOUR entire bluesky to throwing shade at them for the last three weeks, NOT me, k?? K? (this is a joke b/c that's mah bluesky for the last three weeks :frowny face:) I'm sorry if I've sounded alarmist over the last... ever... I was... well I was, so I.. you see; > furiously gesturing at any physical object, and nothing. OK back to physical objects. Back to nothing. Objects. Nothing
I don’t see a problem with ending NASA. We’re to the point that everything that we can do can easily be done by private companies anyway. And most of the things we wanted NASA for (men in space colonies, and FTL travel) are frankly not going to happen. Why not have SpaceX launch satellites and figure out how to grow space tomatoes in high orbit. That’s all we’ve done with the agency since the moon landing. At least SpaceX launched Kirk into space — it was a stunt, but it’s more than NASA has done since the shuttle program. They managed a few telescopes, which is cool, but I don’t see why we need billions a year to do the space equivalent of building big ships and usining them to dump random things in the harbor to see if they float.
PROBLEM 1: Basic science is hard to budget for. We're a good ten years behind the 8-ball on global warming because all the NASA projects to study the atmosphere got cancelled by the Bush II administration. Counterpoint? We're a good 20 years behind the 8-ball on elementary physics because the Democrats cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider to punish Tom DeLay (and to pay for the space station) BUT PROBLEM 2: Proxy warfare is cheaper than actual warfare. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade" wasn't "science" it was great power competition. It still is - the problem being that nobody has wanted to fight us since Neill Armstrong. Except now China does. And India does. If you think there's no blowback to an Indian moon lander, a Chinese space shuttle and an American Starliner you aren't paying attention. PROBLEM 3: There's a lot of shit hidden in that budget. The Space Shuttle was as big as it was because NASA told the NRO (which was classified at the time) that they would get a shuttle big enough to loft their biggest satellite, the NRO told NASA they didn't want to rely on the Space Shuttle, NASA told the NRO "we want one big enough to loft a school bus, we double-dog-dare you" thinking maybe that would excuse them but it didn't so they had to build a spy satellite the size of a school bus. In the end? 10 out of 135 shuttle missions were entirely classified, more than a handful more were partially classified. The shuttles were originally intended to fly more than 50% classified payloads. That's why they built SLC-6 at Vandenberg. PROBLEM 4: Private advancement requires public advancement. SpaceX exists because Musk went to Roscosmos for his planned Mars missions and they gave him the fuck-you price; Musk then spent himself past bankruptcy emulating the Korolev Design Bureau (before conning investors to save his ass for the fourth or fifth time). Roscosmos, for its part, exists because of the space race. The Russians are still flying the R-7, which put Sputnik in orbit. PROBLEM 5: Grok doesn't know any of this. "ZOMFG NASA is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wasteful" has been the college catchphrase since the Mercury 7 but without NASA there's no Because of 1, 2, 3 and 4. You can't "cancel" NASA because there's a whole bunch of gremlins under her petticoats, and you can't really audit NASA because you don't want anyone to see them. An anecdote: My great uncle was instrumental in developing LORAN, the radio technology that used to keep American civil and military aviation on track. It was all civil aviation had until Flight 007 got plugged over Korea by a skittish Sukhoi. On the one hand, it was sure behaving like a spy mission and the USSR had made its feelings clear about this shit. On the other hand, 269 people died because the plane was off course. We had GPS by then, of course. Reagan released it to civil aviation and now your phone knows where you are to within 100 feet or so. The Soviets, who did not have GPS, continued to fuck up. The general Soviet lack of having-a-clue led to some high comedy. Now - can you tie all that directly to NASA funding? No. Can you tie it all indirectly to NASA funding? hell yes. Starlink is just Iridium with VC funding and Iridium ties directly back to SCORE. Is NASA perfect? No. Is the world a very different place without it? Evidence suggests so, yes.
In two weeks we'll be defending wikipedia, and I'm not joking. I already downloaded the whole thing and have it locally anyway. I like how we don't even touch that this is all illegal. All of it. Every bit that Musk "does". But even the principle isn't sound.
Yeah man, fuck the institution that gave us hubble and james webb, let's give it to checks note the nazi salute guy's company? Uh, no? Like that will obviously not be allowed to symbolize... look are you doing a "usualgerman" bit right now? Right now? Oh shit have you heard the Nazi thing before? Oh shit you're sick of it? Oh shit, I literally do not fucking care. No but if you're seriously like "let's let the american public crowd fund shit or something" or "fuck cosmology" (edit: note: I'm not a cosmologist) or "yeah these private industry guys really seem to have their act together", OK. Stay stupid. Shove it up your LLMs. Are you doing a bit. Are you? Motherfucker I am going to do fusion even faster now, to spite you. You're welcome. I know people in the "private" sector! Hi! Hello. We are all on the juice. We all have contracts. No let's break up NASA, and leave the breakup to the Nazi guy with billions in NASA contracts, just him, and some other known Nazis for henchmen, in the name of transparency and efficiency. I am sorry what the fuck is wrong with everyone? Other than not knowing what NASA does. I'm talking like, how can you examine the fundamental facts of this dynamic with Elon and the US government and say "y'know, Bullish". I'm sorry but that 's like redzone in the "you're gone"-o-meter
We’ve been “ten years away from fusion and abundant energy from fusion” for the better part of a century now. In the last fifty years, we’ve sent hundreds of shuttle missions into space to do … basically nothing. We’re studying growing tomatoes in space at a cost of thousands of dollars a minute. It’s not going anywhere. The most interesting thing we’ve done is space telescopes. Okay cool, we’ve discovered the answers to future jeopardy questions, again, at a cost of thousands of dollars to let some self important astronomers take pictures and write equations that might or might not even mean anything. If you’re going to tax me for space exploration, is it too much to ask that we make some actual progress? We’re still doing the same sorts of make-work experiments that we were in 1975. I just don’t see it. I can get behind the government funding medical research that might well prevent or cure a disease. Or to the FDA and Dept of Agriculture to control how much actual poison and microplastics are in the food supply. Those things benefit actual humans on earth. NASA has done basically fuck all, including building a launch vehicle (the boosters are basically repurposed ICBMs and the moon landing was a missile development and scare-the-USSR program disguised as space exploration). Now the Cold War is over and the Soviets are gone. We aren’t really going to go into space, and it’s past time to stop funding an agency dedicated to totally not being cover for a weapons program.
Thank you for your civil response. Now posting: The Chart (scroll a bit down): Look, uh, some of those things? Do you want colonization or not?? I'm not sure what it looks like, to you. It might look like space tomatoes. Do you think it is easy, getting a NASA grant? Do you think it is frivolous? Are all of your friends on NASA grants? In fact the funding landscape has not grown with complexity of science, just like in every sector of science, basically, and NASA proposal approval rates are now asymptotically approaching about 10% in every single size of mission and instrument development design, down from much higher in the past. Like 25% plus in the 90's. "But it's so bad now!" Why?? Why do you think that?? Because we're all strained economically? Yeah, I know! I know! And there's the richest guy in the world trying to dissolve something that at the very least requires more finesse than "oh can we get the nuclear scientists back that we accidentally fired?" I feel like I'm the only one reading more than a headline or two a day or something? I don't know. OK I'm almost done does anyone else want to? NASA gave you basically your entire smartphone, for starters. I mean what is this even what are we doing here. Here it's now in easily-digestible image form, maybe that will be absorbed?: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-wouldnt-have-without-space-travel/ QUICK, click now before the site is taken down and we can all forget about how NASA has ever done anythingNASA has done basically fuck all,
Totally. But RFK Jr. is just gonna sell you algo pills that boost your SEO for the low, low price of your actual health. Again, with all of this... I absolutely get peoples' frustrations. But they've been clearly lied to, and unfortunately, they really, really love being lied to. The idea that exactly zero people are OK knowingly spreading misinformation is baked into almost every silly little trite sociopolitical study these days, btw, and it's getting funnier
So the answer is to remove all restrictions and caps on pollution?
This would have been me, if I wasn't contracting for NASA and instead worked for them directly. Youngblood "technically postdoc"-level physicist, I'd be on "probationary status". Wife got her two weeks on valentine's day (when your boss asks for your resume...), she's a federal contractor software engineer. My funding sources will shift, but I think I'll probably be OK, for the most part. A lot of my coworkers will disappear. More than half of our department are international scientists on visas and grants, and probably within a year or two, at the most, they'll be gone. Cool. People have pretty much no idea how big this is. I mean the Trump administration's economic people have said that they want to expand the labor supply. That means a recession. I mean I'm not really sure why we have to put this together on hubski for each other, probably because the media are like "hello here is what trump said today and do NOT expect me to add up numbers to calculate wild figures like a running tally of this federal carnage. ...Anyway. Three weeks ago, a small, little-known branch of the government called 'USAID'.." So guys, uhh, it's just me and the other networks of people I got (they're pretty good tho), and you fine folks. And your networks. Institutionally, this is looking like... I dunno, we've just lost the sauce entirely as a nation. Bummer.
Somebody named "rusticgorilla" is on that. My wife might as well moderate https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/. What else is she gonna do but scheme and plot with me, now? (she is already about 10 job applications deep, in all seriousness)and do NOT expect me to add up numbers to calculate wild figures like a running tally of this federal carnage
🫡🙏👌🫦 the llm's outputted that it's all looking really good inside of the market buy! buy