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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. I’ll support any model that enables those principles. They paved the way in the 60s and that’s enabled others to succeed. Isn’t that the highest form of achievement? Look at what SpaceX has done with their massively reusable Falcon 9. The space shuttle flew 135 missions over 40 years; that’s about 3 a year. There’s been 453 Falcon 9 flights (134 in 2024 alone) and a single Falcon 9 stack has been reused 26 times… all of those achievements happened within a span of 15 years. I think it’s safe to say that they’ve mastered the rocket. You’re just seeing the R&D phase of their new one …which has the added spectacle of some rapid unscheduled disassemblies that we get to witness 😉


  • The world’s a pretty crazy place right now. If we put aside personalities and politics for a moment and focus on the engineering achievements, SpaceX is doing groundbreaking work. A few explosions here and there are part of the R&D process — they’re just big and obvious enough that they’re easy for us to spectate. Given the success of their Falcon 9 platform, that’s a cost they can easily eat and a risk enticing enough to take. NASA engineers a generation ago were similarly breaking ground on their frontier, be it orbiting the moon or preventing fires in space by avoiding free floating graphite particles 😉







  • There’s actually legal reasons why publications would pay special care to their word choice like this. The difference between seeming violation and violation comes down to hard proof. Whether we like Elon’s sideshow or not, if there is a defendable claim that his post didn’t violate (e.g. new policy that allows it was approved internally but not yet published publicly), NYT could land themselves in a lawsuit that they have a chance of losing. Then ask yourself how many stories do they publish a day? The risk starts to add up quick.

    So the word seeming is doing some heavy lifting there. If you ignore the ass covering, they did still report truth on something important.



  • And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.

    All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.