Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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Lex Fridman: "I'm going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts"
I'm doing a podcast episode on the Roman Empire.
It's a deep dive into military conquest, technology, politics, economics, religion... from its rise to its collapse (n the west & the east).
History really does put everything in perspective.
(xcancel)
Elon Musk in the replies:
Have you read Asimov’s Foundation books?
They pose an interesting question: if you knew a dark age was coming, what actions would you take to preserve knowledge and minimize the length of the dark age?
For humanity, a city on Mars. Terminus.
Isaac Asimov:
I'm a New Deal Democrat who believes in soaking the rich, even when I'm the rich.
(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)
Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about "actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn't predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it's all fucked!"
For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don't know that he actually read them.
It also has interplanetary coal trade. (predating the netflix cut of Rebel Moon by decades), which considering the tech levels of interplanetary trade, and the energy density of coal is quite silly, and def not to be taken literally. (This is a little bit important as it shows how much the space civilization(s) in the Foundation series are not really constrained by real life resource constraints, a thing which would be a problem if you were to take the series literally and were to say create a city on Mars intending to reboot civilization)
you'd almost think Foundation was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire In Spaaaace or something
I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter’s use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Twice-on-a-Harsh-Moon.html
Everybody knows the real resource on the moon is whales.. I don't think I have read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress this century yet, so I should give it a reread.
I'd say it's essential Heinlein. Whether you believe Heinlein is essential is another matter :D
Due to the discourse around helldivers, warhammer and the movie I reread starships troopers, and it was interesting how much worse the experience was when I was older.
I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter's use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.
@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you're almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.
TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.
Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!
@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues' idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that's not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)
/1
Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.
this is why I've been thinking about quitting the internet