argumate

Thinking more about the Soviet space program, and one of the several reasons that they fell behind the US after several historic firsts was that they lacked a coherent plan for where to go next, and as a result wound up doing nothing but reacting to American plans in an effort to stay First. The Americans are launching two men in a new spaceship? We'll modify our existing spaceship to hold three people then. Of course, the Gemini program was reasonably well thought out as part of a process to make the technical progress required for Apollo, while the Voskhod program was a dead end that delayed more advanced spaceship designs, rather than advancing them.

That's an easy enough story to tell - Sputnik and Gagarin spurred the US to come up with a cohesive goal (land on the moon) which required decade-long planning, while the USSR, which had a very internally divided space program and was basically making things up year by year, never had a long lasting plan. But I think if you zoom out a bit, the US was making the exact same mistake as the Soviets, just obscured by the longer time scale. "Get to the moon first" is a more impressive goal than "get three people in space first" but neither goal was something that could feasibly be built on. The Soviet space program tumbled back to earth first because their races were shorter than the Americans', but a vision that falls apart after a decade is not *that* much more impressive than one that falls apart in two years.

curious how this is going to compare with the SpaceX plans:

SpaceX is totally different imo. The early American and Soviet space programs were the equivalent of current tech companies investing in NFTs or crypto or GPT - this is the Hot New Thing and therefore we don't want to be left behind/can't be seen as left behind. Will it actually pay out in the longer term? Well, we have some fuzzy ideas (manned spy platforms? manned space bombers?) and anyway it's the Hot New Thing so no need to check if the numbers clear.

SpaceX, on the other hand, has a pretty reasonable business plan with an almost certainly ludicrous space colonization plan stapled to it. I don't know whether Starlink will prove profitable, but the basic idea of a virtuous cycle of cheaper launches -> profitable new space business -> cheaper launches is sensible. Mars colonization funded by hundreds of thousands of people eager to pay to live in Worse Antarctica, however... A cynic might think that the Mars colonization stuff is purely there to get unearned investor dollars and to get idealistic engineers to work longer hours for less pay. I'm sure Elon Musk believes in it, but that's not incompatible with the cynical take.

perhaps the equivalent of that would be if the US used the promise of a moon landing to motivate the development of ICBMs but never actually launched the Apollo project for real...

went to the museum, saw them bones

they big!

they small!

went to the museum, saw them bones

they big!

Thinking more about the Soviet space program, and one of the several reasons that they fell behind the US after several historic firsts was that they lacked a coherent plan for where to go next, and as a result wound up doing nothing but reacting to American plans in an effort to stay First. The Americans are launching two men in a new spaceship? We'll modify our existing spaceship to hold three people then. Of course, the Gemini program was reasonably well thought out as part of a process to make the technical progress required for Apollo, while the Voskhod program was a dead end that delayed more advanced spaceship designs, rather than advancing them.

That's an easy enough story to tell - Sputnik and Gagarin spurred the US to come up with a cohesive goal (land on the moon) which required decade-long planning, while the USSR, which had a very internally divided space program and was basically making things up year by year, never had a long lasting plan. But I think if you zoom out a bit, the US was making the exact same mistake as the Soviets, just obscured by the longer time scale. "Get to the moon first" is a more impressive goal than "get three people in space first" but neither goal was something that could feasibly be built on. The Soviet space program tumbled back to earth first because their races were shorter than the Americans', but a vision that falls apart after a decade is not *that* much more impressive than one that falls apart in two years.

curious how this is going to compare with the SpaceX plans:

a little wordplay in the bedroom, and out of the bedroom, and everywhere actually

it's always important to distinguish between A, ¬A, and ¬(A∨¬A)

"Battles reveal, they dont cause. This is a maxim Ive tried to get across a few times in this war, and in my earlier research. We like to think of the event of battle as causing the outcomes of wars—thus the constant attempt to frame wars it terms of their supposedly decisive battles. This actually normally adds a falsifying (though attractive in terms of book sales) element of drama into a war. To try and combat this notion head on, I started How the War was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge 2015) with the line: ‘There were no decisive battles in World War II.” To summarize the argument I’m attaching the first few paragraphs of the book."" Notably, the attached paragraphs don't explain the argument at all. Given that this is in a free substack post it's a very nice plug for his book

going off on a tangent, one might certainly say that elections reveal rather than causing, although media coverage of elections sometimes obscures that.

music where the audience is expected to clap along but you know they’re gonna do an absolute dogshit job of it, sloppy and off the beat and the orchestra has to gamely play on like it’s not completely ruining the vibe

If you're a soloist, you can just fix that. In this video, the audience is clapping on 1 and 3 (wrong) so Harry Connick Jr. throws in an extra beat at 0:40 to get them clapping on 2 and 4 (correct).

god damn that was smooth

beat bending

Found a,tv show about a south Korean paragliding who accidentally flies over tge DMV abd lands in north Korea and falls in love with a border guard in North Korea I'm gonna see how long I can watch this before it becomes unbearable

@argumate yeah I think that is one of the things the show does fairly well is take a more realistic approach to depicting DPRK in comparison to the ROK and showing how they're more similar than different etc, it's definitely a pro-reunification message the show sends. Like the DPRK isn't shown as some evil totalitarian hellhole, it's shown as being a bit more poor and traditional than South Korea and you just have to be more careful about certain things regarding the government and stuff. But the way they depict power being brokered and used and inherited etc and shown in parallel to the similar way it happens in ROK. Like it doesn't really talk about politics directly that much and just focuses on the corruption in business and political spheres that help to shape alot of the negatuve things that are present I'm both societies

It's not really a very strong argument in either direction tbh lol like it's just a silly cute show mostly but I do appreciate that it actually portrays north Koreans as actual humans who don't robotically repeat Juche slogans for dialogue and actually have like moments of happiness and joy and sadness and they're not starving waifs or in a government concentration camp like they're just people who live in North Korea and make do with what they have and live theyr lives. I appreciate that effort

"most people are just living their lives" is always a sensible starting point for any story about how the world works

reblog with a distinctive characteristic of that species of animal, the squirrel

bushy tail

Him cheeks

Makes nests!

lightning-quick

acorm

Good at climbing

store the nuts