I didn't bias the title. I saved that for here. This is Elon Musk's response (delusion du jour?) to the OBBB. Looking at it idealistically, there's a lot to like. Looking at it as the product of...
I didn't bias the title. I saved that for here. This is Elon Musk's response (delusion du jour?) to the OBBB.
Looking at it idealistically, there's a lot to like.
Looking at it as the product of the world's richest tech bro who throws Nazi salutes and doesn't apologize for it, at best I read it as a throwback to early 2000's tech meritocracy ideals. That is to say, it speaks to privileged white men.
For once I'm glad a third (competitive) political party is next to impossible in the US. And honestly if this is where Elon focuses his energy, it's better than most of the alternatives. Plus the...
For once I'm glad a third (competitive) political party is next to impossible in the US. And honestly if this is where Elon focuses his energy, it's better than most of the alternatives.
Plus the demographic for an Elon party is the middle to far right. So yes please, fracture the right!
Whenever Musk has his regularly scheduled crash outs I pray that he doesn't cut his losses and come back to muck up South Africa. Its not going well here by most measures, but Musk isn't an...
Whenever Musk has his regularly scheduled crash outs I pray that he doesn't cut his losses and come back to muck up South Africa. Its not going well here by most measures, but Musk isn't an element that improves situations that his thrown into. He just seems to buy his way into positions of influence and when he trys to show off some display of independent competence, he just falls flat. It's fine for a class project or a lemonade stand. Unacceptable when you're a business leader with peoples livelyhoods in your hands. And criminal when it's in government or the most overvalued companies on earth.
Anyway, it's fun to see him export a post-democracy SA tradition: Incompetent, unqualified people making a fortune from breaking the government, falling out when not getting their way and then starting a break-away party.
I think it speaks volumes when cryptocurrency scams are so endemic to your desired demographic that you have to put a disclaimer at the top saying you haven't issued one. (Yet anyway. I'm reading...
I think it speaks volumes when cryptocurrency scams are so endemic to your desired demographic that you have to put a disclaimer at the top saying you haven't issued one. (Yet anyway. I'm reading that last sentence as there will be a coin announced for this.)
Get me off this fucking ride. I literally just looked up to see if I qualify for citizenship in my parents country of birth and turns out, I do so going to keep that in mind going forward. This...
Exemplary
Get me off this fucking ride. I literally just looked up to see if I qualify for citizenship in my parents country of birth and turns out, I do so going to keep that in mind going forward. This "America Party" is just perfectly summed up in this thread a friend shared with me from David Roberts
Tech bros get frustrated with politics, which involves painstaking, often frustrating communication & compromise with other people who have different backgrounds & perspectives, so their approach is always to wish it away....But it's as true now as ever: the choices are frustrating, slow, unsatisfying democracy ... or tyranny. And no matter how much you think you may have found the perfect tyrant or tyrant class, sorry, we've run this experiment a few times & the results are pretty clear: it doesn't work out.
Like absolutely fuck white nationalist and Nazi salute throwing Elon Musk. Fuck AAPI hate apologist and fucking loser "politician"Andrew Yang. Fuck Mark Cuban and The Mooch.
Maybe America needs to learn that the billionaire class doesn't give a fuck about it and have and always will be in it for their own self interests. Relying on billionaires to 'save us' is fucking insane given how they've always throw us under the bus if it keeps the line going up. Musk isn't some politically homeless centrist, he's a fucking racist / possible white nationalist whose fucking mad his shit cars are now less attractive and desperately wants to be loved. He's a child who's mad he can't eat ice cream before finishing his veggies.
Sure, maybe this will make a dent in the 2026 midterms of 2028, though Trump not being on the ticket for either will likely do more, but the fact that margins are so thin any thing backed by this kind of money and Elon's personality cult has a real chance of making shit a lot worse for a lot of people.
Side note, this whole thing is perfect for the left to seize upon to maybe put aside their stupid fucking internal conflicts and maybe develop a coherent strategy to capitalize on the insanity of the movement we're all living in. Just finished this good opinion piece breaking down the flaws of abundance vs populism. For all this talk of mutual aid, you'd think left populists would put aside their purity tests and you know, FUCKING TRY TO BUILD A COALITION TO ACCUMULATE POWER while the abundance left can start, I don't know, FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGE AND ADDRESS THE INSANE INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THIS SHIT HOLE COUNTRY.
Waleed Shahid is the man and just about every one of his articles is worthy of its own post. Outside of a handful of diehard commies that will never be satisfied, I don't think anyone on the...
Waleed Shahid is the man and just about every one of his articles is worthy of its own post. Outside of a handful of diehard commies that will never be satisfied, I don't think anyone on the populist left would be turned off by abundance-style governance under a populist framework. To me, the bigger problem is that many of the Abundance proponents see it as the path to defeat the populist left, which makes me think they'll never adopt a combination of the two ideas.
Seeing as how Shahid writes for The Nation and not The Atlantic, I think we know who the target audience is. Fortunately, we got a sneak peek at what this marriage could look like. Shortly after that piece was published, Zohran went on Derek Thompson's podcast (here's a link to the transcript) and seemed to channel some of that middle ground in his answers. Of course, it wasn't enough to satisfy the mainstream centrist wing of the party and there's still plenty of tension and skepticism from Thompson and Klein, but it's a start!
Lol, in addition to the crypto scam warning banner up top, the email sign up disclaimer makes me chuckle: "... I understand my email address and related data may be transferred if the site is...
Lol, in addition to the crypto scam warning banner up top, the email sign up disclaimer makes me chuckle:
"... I understand my email address and related data may be transferred if the site is sold.
...
TheAmericaParty.org will not sell or share my address and will keep it only until I unsubscribe or the list shuts down."
Yeah, get that wealth Elon! You don’t have enough yet! This whole planet doesn’t have enough wealth for you, big boy, so take your perpetual search for more of it into spaaaace! Surely there will...
Yeah, get that wealth Elon! You don’t have enough yet! This whole planet doesn’t have enough wealth for you, big boy, so take your perpetual search for more of it into spaaaace! Surely there will be enough wealth for you there! Surely you will find the fulfillment you’ve forever been unable to attain here on earth. Surely that hole in your soul will be filled at last, once you acquire that beautiful space wealth. It’s the only thing that truly matters. You are nothing without your wealth, Elon. Nothing.
Lunar stuff is perfectly realistic - check out the YouTube channel Anthrofuturism, it covers(/speculates) on that sort of stuff, and it's mostly just 1800s-level machines made locally out of lunar...
Lunar stuff is perfectly realistic - check out the YouTube channel Anthrofuturism, it covers(/speculates) on that sort of stuff, and it's mostly just 1800s-level machines made locally out of lunar regolith (I.e. moon dust) and iron (the moon doesn't have any carbon for steel, although carbon could be surprisingly cost-effectively imported), driven by electric motors controlled by computers. The electric motors could be made locally from aluminium wire, the computers would obviously need to be imported but they're so tiny that a single rocketful of computers would cover everything, and the solar panels and (sodium) batteries could be made locally too.
Obviously the initial machines/solar panels/batteries would need to be imported, but it doesn't take much machinery to build enough production to bootstrap more. Some stuff couldn't be done remotely and would need to be done by astronauts on-site, but we've done that decades ago, we "just" need to tackle long-term habitation. That will be hard, but in an "oh no what could go wrong" sort of way, and not Mars's "everyone will definitely all die and changing that would require decades of research" absurdity.
Once you've have built a semi-self-sustaining industry on the moon, you still need to ship the products down to earth. That's ~3km/s Δv, right? You'll need some serious value density to make it...
Once you've have built a semi-self-sustaining industry on the moon, you still need to ship the products down to earth. That's ~3km/s Δv, right? You'll need some serious value density to make it economically worthwhile, on the level of gold or microchips.
I'm not against space exploration for scientific purposes, we definitely need more of that. But it's premature to be talking about economic sustainability of space industry.
Unrelated, but ever watch Moon (2009)? I really enjoyed that movie and its soundtrack, and I suggest watching it without reading the synopsis.
More than shipping things back to Earth, probably the biggest value proposition in lunar manufacturing lies in what it enables for going further out into space. Projects with vastly more ambitious...
More than shipping things back to Earth, probably the biggest value proposition in lunar manufacturing lies in what it enables for going further out into space.
Projects with vastly more ambitious size and scope can be practically attempted then, since you no longer have to worry about getting things off of Earth’s surface and through a thick atmosphere. You’re no longer limited to launching a tiny payload wrapped in a huge aerodynamic body — crafts can be whatever shape they need to be and weight optimization isn’t nearly as important.
That’s huge for automated missions, but maybe even more so for crewed missions with all of the space and mass intensive things that are required to keep humans alive and healthy.
It only allows further exploration if you can manufacture on the moon. You will still need to ship the large amounts of space grade material needed up to the moon. While easier to deal with than...
It only allows further exploration if you can manufacture on the moon. You will still need to ship the large amounts of space grade material needed up to the moon.
While easier to deal with than say the raw delta v issue we have now it’s still not anywhere NEAR financially viable. Especially if the plan is “go deeper into space where there’s even less useful things. “
And yes I’m aware of asteroid mining which boils down to fundamentally worthless when you look into the reality of getting the material back to earth
Right, that’s the assumption I were my post around. If you can get manufacturing at scale going, it’s helpful because it’s that much less that you have to source from Earth. The financial...
Right, that’s the assumption I were my post around. If you can get manufacturing at scale going, it’s helpful because it’s that much less that you have to source from Earth.
The financial viability mess is a whole rabbit hole on its own, but I’ll just say that if we only ever did financially viable things, many advancements would have never occurred.
I mean, we have throughout history mostly only done things for survival or because there was potential financial benefit. Especially when it’s on the scale of “requiring the GDP of several nations”
I mean, we have throughout history mostly only done things for survival or because there was potential financial benefit.
Especially when it’s on the scale of “requiring the GDP of several nations”
Not exactly whatever size and shape. Pedantic but you're still limited by the stress and strain imposed by lunar gravity. It's weaker than Earth, sure, but the ultimate flexibility for spacecraft...
Not exactly whatever size and shape. Pedantic but you're still limited by the stress and strain imposed by lunar gravity. It's weaker than Earth, sure, but the ultimate flexibility for spacecraft construction is in orbit.
Of course, getting materials up out of a gravity well....
What ever happened to his vague threats posted on his YouTube channel after he got cancelled? You know, the video where he has a glass of whiskey in an armchair by a fireplace? It was very...
What ever happened to his vague threats posted on his YouTube channel after he got cancelled? You know, the video where he has a glass of whiskey in an armchair by a fireplace? It was very reminiscent of the Papa John "There will be a reckoning" moment.
Ditto what ButteredToast said, but you're now talking about profit viability. My point was that the moon is both technologically viable and financially affordable to set up operations on....
Ditto what ButteredToast said, but you're now talking about profit viability. My point was that the moon is both technologically viable and financially affordable to set up operations on. Realistically, the #1 benefit will be a basically infinite scope of scientific experiments possible on the moon - if you have a moonbase, you have area, energy, labor (somewhat), and materials available to perform experiments with (the labor shortage can be somewhat compensated by judicious use of remote-control from earth). Every other economic activity will mainly be useful as a means for making the space-base financially viable.
Also, shipping products off the moon is incredibly cheap once you've built a (solar powered) mass driver, which is made more practical by the moon's atmosphere being near-vacuum. And lunar regolith is something like 10% titanium IIRC. And given that there are already things only viable to manufacture in space (a type of fibre optic), there might be things only viable to manufacture on moon-gravity too.
Ok, but why would we do any of that? We could also do all of that stuff in the middle of the ocean, or in antarctica, or in the Sahara desert way more easily than we could do it on the moon, but...
Ok, but why would we do any of that?
We could also do all of that stuff in the middle of the ocean, or in antarctica, or in the Sahara desert way more easily than we could do it on the moon, but why would we?
There's nothing to gain that would justify the absolutely mind melting expense of setting up a huge factory on the moon.
Δv. Call it fuel, call it energy, you need a lot less of it to get things from Luna to Earth orbit than you do to extract anything from Earth's gravity well. So if you want to be sending things...
Δv. Call it fuel, call it energy, you need a lot less of it to get things from Luna to Earth orbit than you do to extract anything from Earth's gravity well. So if you want to be sending things out into space it can be cheaper in the long run to be manufacturing things outside of Earth's gravity.
Not to ask the obvious question, but why do we want to send things out into space? I can't think of an actual use case for sending things beyond geosynchronous orbit. I just never really...
Not to ask the obvious question, but why do we want to send things out into space?
I can't think of an actual use case for sending things beyond geosynchronous orbit.
I just never really understood the obsession with space. It's interesting from a scientific standpoint, sure, and being able to defend against big asteroids and the like makes sense, but what's with all the proposals to spend trillions of dollars building things in space, or building big space ships, or colonizing other planets. What's the benefit to the average person, or anyone really to doing any of that that would justify spending many times the GDP of most countries to do?
In short: with the exception of things like selective breeding leading to hardier grains, almost every material gain in quality of life of the past hundred years has been built entirely upon...
In short: with the exception of things like selective breeding leading to hardier grains, almost every material gain in quality of life of the past hundred years has been built entirely upon either immense population booms, which themselves drive economic stratification and devalue impoverished labor, or industrial mechanization made out of and fueled with extremely limited resources. The former implies, to those with the most power, that eventually they'll need more land to escape the clamoring masses and/or continue to obscure their plundering, but I think that's neither here nor there in terms of the average person's concerns.
Those limited materials though, are a big issue. Every electronic device is either extremely large and inefficient (vacuum tubes and wires) or fundamentally need rare earth minerals to produce. Those minerals aren't strictly so rare that we couldn't just find more for the foreseeable future, but the only viable mining methods for them are incredibly ecologically destructive and politically problematic, to say the least. Recycling them is hypothetically the right course of action, but if the entire planet met "developed nations' standards of living", that would probably not be sufficient, and the process of scavenging discarded electronics would involve multiple industries by itself.
Either we'll need extraterrestrial materials, or we'll need an enormous reconfiguration of societies and economies, or we'll need to essentially strip mine what's left of noncivilized land, some time in the relatively near future. For the people in charge of industries and governments, the second option is inconceivable, and the third is only inconvenient.
Additionally, the scope of possibilities for a humanity that has mastered off-planet manufacturing, habitation, etc is incomprehensibly larger than that of one that never does, and the knowledge...
Additionally, the scope of possibilities for a humanity that has mastered off-planet manufacturing, habitation, etc is incomprehensibly larger than that of one that never does, and the knowledge and technology required to accomplish that doesn't just fall out of a tree — they develop only when we try to do things in space.
It's a zero sum game though. Effort, labor, and energy dedicated to going to space (which is incomprehensibly huge) is effort not spent elsewhere. Namely, it's effort not spent improving life here...
It's a zero sum game though. Effort, labor, and energy dedicated to going to space (which is incomprehensibly huge) is effort not spent elsewhere. Namely, it's effort not spent improving life here on earth.
We're never going to find a place better suited to living a healthy, happy human life than this planet. We evolved to be perfectly suited to the conditions here, so life anywhere else will virtually always be more difficult, and usually far more difficult.
So if the options are a humanity solely on earth where people have their needs met, live long, content, happy healthy lives, or trillions of people living in space, barely hanging on to survival enabled by hundreds of trillion dollars of technology and infrastructure, the first one sounds a lot more appealing.
What potential amazing future is unlocked by being in space? I don't think the idea of colonizing places for colonization's sake really makes a whole lot of sense, personally.
I don’t think it’s quite zero sum simply due to the human element. There are people who’ve dedicated their lives to specializing in crewed spaceflight and adjacent because that’s what their...
I don’t think it’s quite zero sum simply due to the human element. There are people who’ve dedicated their lives to specializing in crewed spaceflight and adjacent because that’s what their calling was. I don’t think we should be telling them, “no, we’ve decided you need to go work on this other thing instead,” not just because it infringes on self-determination and personal freedoms but also robs society of the benefits that would’ve come about thanks to the work of these smart, motivated individuals.
Yes, nothing will beat Earth… in the short term. On a long enough timescale as our technology and capabilities improves, the gap will grow ever more narrow until eventually living off world will be as mundane as life on Earth, and it’ll probably happen quicker than we could ever imagine precisely because of the hostility of those environments — for the first century or two at minimum the primary activity most people living off-world will be sinking their energy into is making their situation less precarious.
Off-world population won’t balloon until long afterward that high level of technology is achieved. Until then, going out there will remain somewhat niche and mostly something that frontier seekers and scientists do. By the time it’s multiplied to trillions, tech will have developed so far that living somewhere other than Earth will be quite comfortable.
That survival-driven development of technology combined with the sheer population (more people means more scientific and cultural breakthroughs) is what makes for a vastly increased scope of possibilities. That version of humanity will almost inevitably come to climb the rungs of the Kardashev scale and will outlast the Sol system in some form, while an Earth-bound humanity is unlikely to move the needle of progress too much further from where it stands today and probably disappears along with the sun’s demise.
Based on everything we know, we're not going to get to a population of trillions, unless society significantly regresses. Higher levels of education in women is directly correlated with reduced...
Based on everything we know, we're not going to get to a population of trillions, unless society significantly regresses. Higher levels of education in women is directly correlated with reduced birth rates, to the extent that virtually every wealthy country on earth has a birth rate below replacement. The global population will likely stop growing, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later, like within the next 50 years. At that point, it's more likely that it shrinks, not grows.
The malthusian idea that we need an ever increasing, exponential supply of resources and square footage to feed a human population that will number in the trillions does not seem to hold water with what we're actually seeing.
Thats a good thing, not a bad thing though.
Regarding personal freedoms... I mean, that's kind of a weird argument. I would have liked to dedicate my life to racing cars, but I don't, because I can't make a living racing cars. I'm not good enough at it, and basically no one is a professional race car driver outside of a tiny little population of people that are the right combination of lucky and good at it. My personal freedoms aren't infringed by not being paid to be a racecar driver. I'm still free to do that on my own, with my own money if I'd like to.
People simply being passionate about something isn't an argument for dedicating public resources towards that thing.
I doubt we’re going to convince each other of anything at this point, but I’ll just say that our data on population dynamics was observed specifically under a scarcity-based capitalistic system in...
I doubt we’re going to convince each other of anything at this point, but I’ll just say that our data on population dynamics was observed specifically under a scarcity-based capitalistic system in which desirable places to live are among the scarcities. We have no idea how they might work in a far flung future where desirable living places can simply be made and many resources are too plentiful for capitalism to be pervasive.
Sure, but the first space-based industries will almost definitionally be the low-hanging fruit; if someone sets up a moonbase for industry with a grand total of 10 people stationed there, that's...
It's a zero sum game though. Effort, labor, and energy dedicated to going to space (which is incomprehensibly huge) is effort not spent elsewhere. Namely, it's effort not spent improving life here on earth.
Sure, but the first space-based industries will almost definitionally be the low-hanging fruit; if someone sets up a moonbase for industry with a grand total of 10 people stationed there, that's still a moonbase, even though that'll be only a billionth of the human population.
The main benefit of being in space, IMO, is the lack of gravity - it unlocks various manufacturing techniques that are not possible on earth. And a local human presence will likely be required for un-fucking any industrial machinery - while most of the machines might be remote-controllable, the lag will be unbearable (the moon is 2 light-seconds away from earth, have you ever played Counterstrike with 2000 ping? and Mars is several minutes' delay, and it only gets worse) and makes remote-operation quite inferior (for manual handling tasks, maybe impossible) compared to an actual local human. The reality of manufacturing is that machines fail, and when they fail they fail in new and interesting ways, so you need a generalist machine (i.e. a human) to fix them.
A better analogy than colonialism here might be an offshore oil rig: an unhospitable and dangerous environment that nobody sane wants to live on, long hours and cramped conditions to save resources, automate everything possible because humans are expensive for reasons aforementioned, but we keep building more of them because they provide resources that are impractically expensive and/or impossible to attain elsewhere.
We can already get some of the benefits of no/low-gravity using just orbit, but 1) that's only zero-gravity, not low-gravity (which might have all sorts of uses) and 2) transporting material up there is incredibly expensive.
In fact, maybe it would make sense to put manufacturing in earth's orbit (for easy remote-control) but ship in the input materials from the moon - a solar-powered mass driver on the moon would be quite cheap and reusable compared to shipping e.g. iron up from near sea-level via rocket.
The problem is one of diminishing returns though. This space stuff doesn't have to just be technologically viable, it needs to be economically viable too. Bootstrapping a whole automated space...
The problem is one of diminishing returns though. This space stuff doesn't have to just be technologically viable, it needs to be economically viable too.
Bootstrapping a whole automated space manufacturing pipeline would be so obscenely expensive that it would dwarf any collective human effort that has ever been undertaken in all of history. More than WW2, the space race, and the entire Roman empire combined. We're talking about billions of man-lives worth of labor to make something like that happen. The amount of energy you'd need to extend to get any desirable material in a format you can actually use from deep space back to earth would be so gargantuan that it would almost never justify the cost.
If you compare that amount of effort to just recycling, it's not even close.
Regarding population booms, that's just not going to happen unless a majority of societies regress drastically.
It seems likely that we're going to hit a negative global birth rate within the next 50 years and the human population will reach some sort of rough equilibrium at some point afterwards.
Most regular people don't really see a need to have 3+ kids if they really have a say in the matter. Like yeah, resources are scarce and will continue to be scarce, but going out to space to get them will always be insanely expensive from an energy standpoint, and if we have the technology and energy to do that, we also have the technology and energy to just re use the stuff we already have far more cheaply.
Content warning: irony tarpit You selected option 'B': reconfigure human institutions to enable sustainable justice. Here's what I could find about that: Have you considered how new technologies...
Content warning: irony tarpit
You selected option 'B': reconfigure human institutions to enable sustainable justice. Here's what I could find about that:
Have you considered how new technologies open new economic frontiers? Before the breakthroughs in phrenology that proved the inferior capacity for responsibility in the lesser races, it was seen as economical to allow Africans to pretend they were capable of self-governance! Before the Knocking Gasoline Engine, we had no use for our enormous tetraethyl lead reserves, and without that breakthrough we never would have discovered the Green Technology of ethanol!
Look at how sad the retirement class is! We wouldn't want our next generations to go without the life-validation exclusively found through hard work in service to A Greater Good, now, would we?
It's terrible to see how prevalent mental illness is! Poor little girls all around the world are being raised to hate their biological purpose, and the boys are just as confused. Why would anyone in their right mind refuse the Gift of Parenthood and the chance to Help Make A Better Tomorrow through Precious Children?
Why do you want to Pull the Ladder Up Behind You? We in the first world are so fortunate to live in our air-conditioning and to never have to Think About Where Our Next Meal Is Coming From, how would it be fair not to Allow our fellow humans to enjoy the Comfort and Convenience of Modern Society?
Don't you care about Progress? Why don't you Trust The Science? Why would an engine for efficiency ever do anything to hurt the people who built it? That doesn't sound very economically efficient to me.
It's Just Human Nature to need a Frontier! How could we ever have any sense of value if we have to share our values with Those People? That's not fair to us, or them! Don't Those Ones deserve Their Own?
I think it’s a mix of drive for exploration and a drive born from the lack of land left to conquer. There is a lot of economic potential in space mining and zero G manufacturing.
I think it’s a mix of drive for exploration and a drive born from the lack of land left to conquer.
There is a lot of economic potential in space mining and zero G manufacturing.
I wonder how hard it would be to make solar panels from lunar material? I dont mean getting the material, I mean fabrication. My basic understanding is that you need a pretty sophisticated setup...
I wonder how hard it would be to make solar panels from lunar material?
I dont mean getting the material, I mean fabrication. My basic understanding is that you need a pretty sophisticated setup to make quality semiconductors, which is why Taiwan has such a valuable semiconductor industry.
I figure it wouldnt be that difficult to make a clean room in space, but what would be involved in creating a foundry that could produce high quality silicon? I think foundries here burn coal or gas or something else that takes advantage of all the free air in the atmosphere, but do you need to import air to do the same on the moon?
Semiconductors are small and light, though. 100% lunar fabrication isn't a good inital goal; The lighter and more complex the component, the longer it'll be until it makes sense to fabricate on...
Semiconductors are small and light, though. 100% lunar fabrication isn't a good inital goal; The lighter and more complex the component, the longer it'll be until it makes sense to fabricate on the Moon. (And the longer before Lunar self-sufficiency makes them start to think about independence.)
Absolutely. I imagine that some things will need to be done differently in space. Glass is a great example. Float glass is made in giant sheets by floating the cooling glass on a tub of molten...
Absolutely. I imagine that some things will need to be done differently in space. Glass is a great example. Float glass is made in giant sheets by floating the cooling glass on a tub of molten tin. Will that work the same in lower gravity? Who knows?
The short answer is that you make the easy-to-make stuff (amorphous silicon panels), because the high-tier stuff degrades rapidly in space anyway (UV) and is only useful if you're mass-constrained...
The short answer is that you make the easy-to-make stuff (amorphous silicon panels), because the high-tier stuff degrades rapidly in space anyway (UV) and is only useful if you're mass-constrained in the first place.
A lunar foundry would obviously use mirrors - no atmosphere means everything is amazingly well insulated, so you can just have a field of mirrors focused on your crucible, limited only by the number of mirrors and radiative cooling (and sunlight/time of day).
There's no carbon on the moon, and definitely no coal. Oxygen is the second most abundant element of lunar soil (#1 is silicon), but extracting it from the oxides will take energy. Once you do, though, you could make thermite. Realistically, if you imported carbon, the main reason would be turning your iron into steel (and also carbon is a necessary part of the human diet).
I just realized that if a member of the Republican Party is called a Republican, and a member of the Democratic Party is called a Democrat… then members of this will be called Americans and that...
I just realized that if a member of the Republican Party is called a Republican, and a member of the Democratic Party is called a Democrat… then members of this will be called Americans and that branding really doesn’t sit well with me.
I've always disliked that term for two reasons. One, it's uncomfortably reminiscent for me of a certain slur for homosexual men that, to my lasting shame, I used all too often as a child; and two,...
I've always disliked that term for two reasons. One, it's uncomfortably reminiscent for me of a certain slur for homosexual men that, to my lasting shame, I used all too often as a child; and two, referring to groups of people with a term for vermin is one of those warning signs that shit has really gotten off-track.
While I empathize with your personal discomfort with the term in its similar sound to the gay slur, I see the relationship one a matter of similar sounds and not relevance. I can't apologize for...
While I empathize with your personal discomfort with the term in its similar sound to the gay slur, I see the relationship one a matter of similar sounds and not relevance.
I can't apologize for having an extremely dim view of right wing extremists. Name calling? ... We're dealing with people who won't disavow actual Nazis. Please don't ever let that be far from your mind.
Civility for Nazi apologists is an ask too great for me.
I'm not asking you to apologize. I'm not even asking you to stop doing it. Be as uncivil to all the bigots you please with my blessing. I'm only saying why I try to avoid talking and thinking like...
I'm not asking you to apologize. I'm not even asking you to stop doing it. Be as uncivil to all the bigots you please with my blessing.
I'm only saying why I try to avoid talking and thinking like that. My gut tells me that shit is habit-forming, and leads nowhere good.
My experience has been one of lifelong trauma at the hands of these kinds of people. I'm well past "[avoiding] ... thinking like that." These kinds of people see "difference" as "bad". They...
My experience has been one of lifelong trauma at the hands of these kinds of people. I'm well past "[avoiding] ... thinking like that."
These kinds of people see "difference" as "bad". They ostracize as a matter of course and dehumanize as the next step.
They don't want people like me to be happy.
They don't want people like me.
There's a place for MLK. There's also a place for Malcolm X.
These days, I think we need more Malcolm X.
This shit? This shit is not going to get better without more people realizing that we're already in it.
I share your general distaste. Dehumanizing them only serves to separate "us" from "them" and mostly make us feel better that we could never end up being "them" I think it's never the answer, not...
I share your general distaste. Dehumanizing them only serves to separate "us" from "them" and mostly make us feel better that we could never end up being "them"
I think it's never the answer, not out of kindness but out of the necessity of facing the truth - every atrocity came from hands as human as our own. Every hatred comes from hearts as human as ours.
If they're monsters we're only absolving ourselves, not holding them more accountable
My thoughts exactly. I sure as hell don't refrain from using dehumanizing language to speak of bigots to preserve their feelings, I do it to hold onto what precious little sanity is left in my skull.
My thoughts exactly. I sure as hell don't refrain from using dehumanizing language to speak of bigots to preserve their feelings, I do it to hold onto what precious little sanity is left in my skull.
Sanity. I don't know that anyone can lay claim to that these days. "Insane" is what they would call people like me, 50 or more years ago. And that's where they want to take us—or worse. The...
Sanity. I don't know that anyone can lay claim to that these days.
"Insane" is what they would call people like me, 50 or more years ago. And that's where they want to take us—or worse.
The separation is already there. They (yes, "they") made it about "us" and "them". They have only escalated, making it more so. I don't see us healing our way out of this by being kinder than them. We've tried that. Tolerating intolerance gives it air to burn.
Dehumanizing? Calling them bugs would be, yes. "Deplorables" seems too kind.
No, they'll be called Americas. As in North America, South America, and Elon Musk. We're talking about the America Party, not the American Party. A member of the Democratic Party is called a...
then members of this will be called Americans
No, they'll be called Americas. As in North America, South America, and Elon Musk. We're talking about the America Party, not the American Party. A member of the Democratic Party is called a Democrat, not a Democratican.
This feels like Elon wanted to make a libertarian party without having to deal with a bunch of Libertarians. And even if you just consider the two main parties, I'm not sure there's enough of a...
This feels like Elon wanted to make a libertarian party without having to deal with a bunch of Libertarians. And even if you just consider the two main parties, I'm not sure there's enough of a base for a new party as I don't see the techbros and Roganites willing to give an inch on immigration, let alone anybody willing to give Elon the time of day. If it's not a money laundering scheme, it pivots into a lobbying group in six months.
Elon still has a very large and dedicated following and there’s very much a niche of a party focused on handling the budget better. Mixed with Elon having money and connections I wouldn’t be...
Elon still has a very large and dedicated following and there’s very much a niche of a party focused on handling the budget better.
Mixed with Elon having money and connections I wouldn’t be totally surprised if this has some impact. That said I of course feel it’s the scam of the week or whatever.
I’m not sure that the budget wonks were ever the ones winning elections for the GOP, and Elon lost the MAGA base in the divorce. Elon may have better luck holding a boombox at the DNC national...
Elon still has a very large and dedicated following and there’s very much a niche of a party focused on handling the budget better.
I’m not sure that the budget wonks were ever the ones winning elections for the GOP, and Elon lost the MAGA base in the divorce. Elon may have better luck holding a boombox at the DNC national headquarters with all the other Republican expats, because if an internet following could move the needle, we would have had our third term of Bernie Sanders. (/vent)
The budget not being an priority has been a complaint of people for a long time, and yes they often weren't the ones winning in the GOP, which is why it's a long running issue. Elon still has a...
The budget not being an priority has been a complaint of people for a long time, and yes they often weren't the ones winning in the GOP, which is why it's a long running issue.
Elon still has a base. Hell it's many of the same people as before, and it's some of the uh...different..maga supporters who want a chance to jump ship.
I think underplaying this based on vibes is foolish. Elon still does well in the US, his European nosedive doesn't affect him nearly as much there.
This party is only centrist insofar that Elon considers himself the center of the universe. More seriously: Setting the stated ideals of the "America Party" aside, I don't see how it will...
This party is only centrist insofar that Elon considers himself the center of the universe.
More seriously: Setting the stated ideals of the "America Party" aside, I don't see how it will distinguish itself from the Republican party. Other than their disagreement over the budget, Musk has been a vocal supporter of nearly all of Trump's policies; indeed, Musk himself was personally responsible for perhaps this administration's least popular initiative so far, the so-called "Department" of Government Efficiency. So what's the appeal here? It's a copycat populist party but without the strongman.
I think in many ways it's positioning itself as the successor to this administration. A lot of folks have felt somewhat reassured by the fact that Vance doesn't hold nearly the same popular sway...
I think in many ways it's positioning itself as the successor to this administration. A lot of folks have felt somewhat reassured by the fact that Vance doesn't hold nearly the same popular sway as Trump, Musk sways a different but overlapping group of people. So while they compete now, whenever they don't have to compete in the future, it continues the bad times for us.
This is great for anyone that doesn't align with Trump's nonsense. As smart as musk pretends to be, he apparently doesn't understand game theory. A 3rd party in a first past the post system not...
This is great for anyone that doesn't align with Trump's nonsense. As smart as musk pretends to be, he apparently doesn't understand game theory.
A 3rd party in a first past the post system not only has no chance of winning, the more "successful" they are, the more they hurt the party that they're most closely ideologically aligned with. The best thing possible for Democrats is this party to gain steam. It virtually guarantees them a victory if it does.
If he only pulled people away from Trump that would be one thing. I'm not so convinced of that, the "technocrat" advocates have not been so clearly blue/red (hence their whole "gray" thing") But I...
If he only pulled people away from Trump that would be one thing. I'm not so convinced of that, the "technocrat" advocates have not been so clearly blue/red (hence their whole "gray" thing")
But I think it's more likely to position itself as the successor of the current head of the GOP, whether they rebrand or primary folks or not, I doubt they commit to the full 3rd party. But if they do, I guess we'll see.
I don't support the existence of more racist political parties just because they might fuck up the guys I don't like. Actual people are being harmed horribly right now, and I can't play political sports over it.
That may have been true 8 years ago, but the Republicans have done a good job of capitalizing on the areas where Democrats are unpopular with that group; namely by jumping on criticism of identity...
the "technocrat" advocates have not been so clearly blue/red (hence their whole "gray" thing"
That may have been true 8 years ago, but the Republicans have done a good job of capitalizing on the areas where Democrats are unpopular with that group; namely by jumping on criticism of identity politics and putting forward a sham philosophy centered around so called "meritocracy". Since that time, the overwhelming majority of the tech bro types have gone red. A lot of that is thanks to musk himself.
At this point, I can't imagine a tech bro party being made up of any less than 70% Republican refugees.
Sure, but I watch the trends of young men and white men voting and that is still 30 percent too high and a party with more money than god. I have no doubt where their ideology lies; I also have no...
Sure, but I watch the trends of young men and white men voting and that is still 30 percent too high and a party with more money than god. I have no doubt where their ideology lies; I also have no doubt about how appealing that ideology can be when you're disgruntled part of the nominal majority and would rather believe in bootstraps but maybe without all the Jesus stuff.
As you said, those areas are incredibly appealing, including to Dems who would potentially vote against Republicans, but are easily swayed away from equality and social justice
I do not find it a positive thing that there is a brand new white supremacist lead party. I do not see any good coming out of those ideas being even more loudly espoused And more socially acceptable.
So what you’re saying is, we ought to be collectively sharing and retweeting and retruthing and liking and subscribing and registering as members of the America Party just to inflate the bubble as...
So what you’re saying is, we ought to be collectively sharing and retweeting and retruthing and liking and subscribing and registering as members of the America Party just to inflate the bubble as much as possible? The thought of millions of fake supporters pumping it up just to spoil elections in the eleventh hour is… delicious.
I mean I think that convinces real people to support even if only in a bandwagon way. There's so many other things one could do with that energy rather than le epic troll.
I mean I think that convinces real people to support even if only in a bandwagon way.
There's so many other things one could do with that energy rather than le epic troll.
That’s the point! Drum up as much real people’s support as possible with the deliberate goal of fracturing the right. I mean, it’s kind of a troll, which is rather fitting as an implement against...
That’s the point! Drum up as much real people’s support as possible with the deliberate goal of fracturing the right.
I mean, it’s kind of a troll, which is rather fitting as an implement against Musk. But it’s also a legitimate strategy to poison the two-party system by bolstering a third party to turn the opposition against itself.
I just signed up for the mailing list. Use a burner email and keep an eye on it.
What they might do is try to avoid campaigning on hot button issues in effort to capture both voters who’d previously sided with the incumbent parties as well as potential voters who previously...
What they might do is try to avoid campaigning on hot button issues in effort to capture both voters who’d previously sided with the incumbent parties as well as potential voters who previously didn’t vote. That may be a surprisingly effective strategy depending on how many people have become fatigued with the various talking points that’ve become beyond worn out in the past couple of cycles.
It also depends on what’s viewed as “success”. If that’s just stealing enough seats to prevent either of the two major parties from taking total control, that’s a much lower bar to clear.
Who knows if the people involved in this are that strategically smart, though. I’d wager not.
It's almost like someone who knows nothing about U.S. politics, history, and law, or economics, ecology, public health, sociology, geography, biology, chemistry, philosophy, etc. is trying to...
It's almost like someone who knows nothing about U.S. politics, history, and law, or economics, ecology, public health, sociology, geography, biology, chemistry, philosophy, etc. is trying to start a technocratic political party that specifically benefits his businesses.
It's uncanny how oblivious Elon is to the impacts of anything outside his areas of (somewhat questionable) expertise. Ne supra crepidam, and leave the rest of us alone.
Oh hells, not this again. Platitudes and big ideas without any of the how explained. This is a joke, right? When you have real policies with concrete steps and well defined solutions that I can...
Oh hells, not this again. Platitudes and big ideas without any of the how explained. This is a joke, right? When you have real policies with concrete steps and well defined solutions that I can read and critique rather than hand-waving I'll start to care. Until then enjoy wasting your money in the black hole of politics. It does not work unless you bring a lamp with you into the darkness, and this ain't it.
Look, Elon, if you're stuck without anything intelligent to use for party planks, just steal all of this (or in json if you prefer) because the work has already been done by smarter people better educated in societal engineering than you or the kids you employ. Then I might start to take you seriously.
Or, well, just give Yang a lot of money and otherwise fuck off? I remember liking some things about Yang's platform. I'd be fine seeing that platform get a proper hearing. I just don't want Elon...
Or, well, just give Yang a lot of money and otherwise fuck off? I remember liking some things about Yang's
platform. I'd be fine seeing that platform get a proper hearing. I just don't want Elon getting any of his Nazi bullshit into it.
You joke, but I know of at least two people that voted for the New Blue Party in our provincial elections not too long ago, solely because of the name/colour.
You joke, but I know of at least two people that voted for the New Blue Party in our provincial elections not too long ago, solely because of the name/colour.
Ok everybody, get used to the idea of "there is no good guy side, just multiple bad guy sides". Sorry for the total disregard of nuance, I'm sleepy and headed to bed, but the core of what I'm...
Ok everybody, get used to the idea of "there is no good guy side, just multiple bad guy sides". Sorry for the total disregard of nuance, I'm sleepy and headed to bed, but the core of what I'm seeing more and more around the world and here in the US is summed up in that sentence.
If this party is meant as a confrontational alternative to Trumpism, why is the homepage of the affiliated PAC full of tweets glazing Trump administration actions?
Obviously the double dash — is used outside of LLMs generated text but I don't see it very often. The entire website is full of double dashes. I had a look around but I cannot find any discussion...
Obviously the double dash — is used outside of LLMs generated text but I don't see it very often. The entire website is full of double dashes.
I had a look around but I cannot find any discussion of this. Is the website content AI generated?
Professional editor here. There seems to be a "thing" going around that em dashes are commonly produced by LLMs, but the punctuation is extremely popular and always has been. Please, do not...
Professional editor here. There seems to be a "thing" going around that em dashes are commonly produced by LLMs, but the punctuation is extremely popular and always has been.
Please, do not encourage me to get up on my grammar pedant soapbox again.
The various dashes are also easily produced on Apple platforms. By default, iOS and macOS turn two and three consecutive minus signs into long dashes, so a lot of people are probably using them...
The various dashes are also easily produced on Apple platforms. By default, iOS and macOS turn two and three consecutive minus signs into long dashes, so a lot of people are probably using them without even realizing it or started actively using them after noticing the subtitution. Consider then the proportion of people hailing from the US (in which iOS is the dominant mobile platform) in the English speaking internet, which likely made for increased long dash frequency in online posts since 2007, which then fueled use of these dashes by the LLMs that were trained on those posts.
It’s going to be so good to read some history articles ten years later on the history of em dashes in an LLM world. On one hand they are a marker of AI assisted writing — on the other, when you...
It’s going to be so good to read some history articles ten years later on the history of em dashes in an LLM world. On one hand they are a marker of AI assisted writing — on the other, when you start reading text with them everywhere it’s tempting to take them for a spin.
Damn good call out. While casting shade on Elon, this is the same guy who had the AI he funded identify him as the single largest spreader of misinformation online. The richest man in the world...
Damn good call out.
While casting shade on Elon, this is the same guy who had the AI he funded identify him as the single largest spreader of misinformation online. The richest man in the world can't even buy a machine to lie for him.
Early in Trump II (wait, that started this year!) I thought Musk and Trump were fighting for headlines. They both want to be the center of attention and know how to drive the media into giving it...
Early in Trump II (wait, that started this year!) I thought Musk and Trump were fighting for headlines. They both want to be the center of attention and know how to drive the media into giving it to them.
Actually in theory this is how democracy is supposed to work: exploit the narcissistic tendencies of the elites, and direct their efforts towards improving life for everyone else. You know instead of building armies to fight each other. Obviously the improving part isn’t working so well these days, though I guess the majority of voters disagree. But in principle I am in favor of their feud.
I keep counting backwards. We're 1/8th of the way through this hell—and that's assuming that an all out coup doesn't happen or the equivalent by way of the swap-a-veep bullshit they've tossed...
I keep counting backwards. We're 1/8th of the way through this hell—and that's assuming that an all out coup doesn't happen or the equivalent by way of the swap-a-veep bullshit they've tossed around publicly.
Musk, if you're reading this: Don't run for president! Instead, focus on winning smaller elections first; mayorships, state congress seats, and the House of Representatives seats with...
Musk, if you're reading this: Don't run for president! Instead, focus on winning smaller elections first; mayorships, state congress seats, and the House of Representatives seats with ranked-choice voting. The UK has proved that it's possible for a country with single-representative winner-takes-all-districts to support more than two parties, but you have to start small. To quote your own party program: Smart growth. Running for president is just a giant waste of money that ends in embarrassment.
(Same goes for members of the Green Party, Libertarian Party, and members of any other US political parties who happen to be reading this. Stop wasting money and resources on the presidential election!)
There's no world in which I want a third party run by a guy throwing Nazi salutes and supporting false claims of white genocide to be even the slightest bit "successful" He's got enough money he...
There's no world in which I want a third party run by a guy throwing Nazi salutes and supporting false claims of white genocide to be even the slightest bit "successful"
He's got enough money he doesn't need any of our advice and shouldn't be offered it. (And if you think the Green Party as led by Jill Stein cares about winning elections, I think you are lying to yourself.)
He's a naturalized citizen, so it makes more sense to call him a South-African-American rather than just South African. He's ineligible for that one office either way, so might as well be more...
He's a naturalized citizen, so it makes more sense to call him a South-African-American rather than just South African. He's ineligible for that one office either way, so might as well be more accurate about it.
I don't like that he's an American any more than you do, but that horse has long ago left the barn.
I was also excited when I heard of this announcement for one very specific reason that either commenters here haven't thought up or just haven't said out loud: It splits the right wing vote....
I was also excited when I heard of this announcement for one very specific reason that either commenters here haven't thought up or just haven't said out loud: It splits the right wing vote.
Muskrat is a nazi piece of shit.
He attracts other extreme nazi pieces of shit.
Turns out there are quite a few nazi pieces of shit out there.
None of them are leftists and they undoubtedly voted for El Cheeto.
If this party takes off, it's the end for, primarily extreme, right wing candidates.
If the Republican party wants to recover voters they lose to this neo-nazi party they will have no choice but to move back towards the center.
It's beautiful and I wish Muskrat all the best in this endeavor.
It has been mentioned up above, I'm personally just not as convinced it will only poach off the right wing nor that it won't end up functioning much in the same way as the tea party did. At "best"...
It has been mentioned up above, I'm personally just not as convinced it will only poach off the right wing nor that it won't end up functioning much in the same way as the tea party did. At "best" it replaces the Republican party after a bunch of turmoil in the short term like any other successful third party has done. Meanwhile the rhetoric gets even more violent/extreme/supremacist.
I'm not optimistic enough that the "best" outcome will happen, much less that it results in "good." There's just too much money in the hands of a Nazi wannabe involved for me to think it goes well
Yeah. I remember people joking about/memeing Trump when he entered the 2016 presidential race. I remember when r/TheDonald was a meme subreddit. I remember the DNC propping up Trump's primary...
Yeah. I remember people joking about/memeing Trump when he entered the 2016 presidential race. I remember when r/TheDonald was a meme subreddit. I remember the DNC propping up Trump's primary campaign because they thought he would be easy to beat. And I've seen a few of the friends who were memeing trump in 2016 just turn into genuine MAGA in the intervening time.
I don't think political games are what we need, right now. If Musk splits the conservative vote and causes a reckoning on the right then sure, maybe that could ultimately be a good thing, but it's certainly not a sure thing. And I've been feeling for a while now that we are who we pretend to be. Doing stuff ironically or boosting nazis because it might split the vote just gives real nazis cover and pulls in people who are on the fence or vulnerable to radicalization.
The American left have been playing semantic games and strategically fucking around for decades and it's gotten us nowhere. Maybe we should just find a vision for making people's lives better and then just...fucking say it with our chest? Quit with the focus groups and just be moral people with a strong vision on right and wrong and how we can improve everyone's lives. I dunno, maybe I'm naive.
I really want to see more third-parties in general. I don't trust Elon Musk, but even a third party launched by him could have good outcomes. Both the Democrat and Republican parties are widely...
I really want to see more third-parties in general. I don't trust Elon Musk, but even a third party launched by him could have good outcomes.
Both the Democrat and Republican parties are widely seen as out-of-touch. Politicians don't accurately represent their voters, but get re-elected anyways because they're better than the other party's candidate. Even if they get zero seats, just by running, AP candidates pressure the Democrat and Republican candidates to align closer with their voters. Plus, one third-party getting any success will inspire others.
I didn't bias the title. I saved that for here. This is Elon Musk's response (delusion du jour?) to the OBBB.
Looking at it idealistically, there's a lot to like.
Looking at it as the product of the world's richest tech bro who throws Nazi salutes and doesn't apologize for it, at best I read it as a throwback to early 2000's tech meritocracy ideals. That is to say, it speaks to privileged white men.
EDIT: You know what? Just read what this fella has to say on it
For once I'm glad a third (competitive) political party is next to impossible in the US. And honestly if this is where Elon focuses his energy, it's better than most of the alternatives.
Plus the demographic for an Elon party is the middle to far right. So yes please, fracture the right!
Whenever Musk has his regularly scheduled crash outs I pray that he doesn't cut his losses and come back to muck up South Africa. Its not going well here by most measures, but Musk isn't an element that improves situations that his thrown into. He just seems to buy his way into positions of influence and when he trys to show off some display of independent competence, he just falls flat. It's fine for a class project or a lemonade stand. Unacceptable when you're a business leader with peoples livelyhoods in your hands. And criminal when it's in government or the most overvalued companies on earth.
Anyway, it's fun to see him export a post-democracy SA tradition: Incompetent, unqualified people making a fortune from breaking the government, falling out when not getting their way and then starting a break-away party.
I think it speaks volumes when cryptocurrency scams are so endemic to your desired demographic that you have to put a disclaimer at the top saying you haven't issued one. (Yet anyway. I'm reading that last sentence as there will be a coin announced for this.)
Get me off this fucking ride. I literally just looked up to see if I qualify for citizenship in my parents country of birth and turns out, I do so going to keep that in mind going forward. This "America Party" is just perfectly summed up in this thread a friend shared with me from David Roberts
Like absolutely fuck white nationalist and Nazi salute throwing Elon Musk. Fuck AAPI hate apologist and fucking loser "politician"Andrew Yang. Fuck Mark Cuban and The Mooch.
Maybe America needs to learn that the billionaire class doesn't give a fuck about it and have and always will be in it for their own self interests. Relying on billionaires to 'save us' is fucking insane given how they've always throw us under the bus if it keeps the line going up. Musk isn't some politically homeless centrist, he's a fucking racist / possible white nationalist whose fucking mad his shit cars are now less attractive and desperately wants to be loved. He's a child who's mad he can't eat ice cream before finishing his veggies.
Sure, maybe this will make a dent in the 2026 midterms of 2028, though Trump not being on the ticket for either will likely do more, but the fact that margins are so thin any thing backed by this kind of money and Elon's personality cult has a real chance of making shit a lot worse for a lot of people.
Side note, this whole thing is perfect for the left to seize upon to maybe put aside their stupid fucking internal conflicts and maybe develop a coherent strategy to capitalize on the insanity of the movement we're all living in. Just finished this good opinion piece breaking down the flaws of abundance vs populism. For all this talk of mutual aid, you'd think left populists would put aside their purity tests and you know, FUCKING TRY TO BUILD A COALITION TO ACCUMULATE POWER while the abundance left can start, I don't know, FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGE AND ADDRESS THE INSANE INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THIS SHIT HOLE COUNTRY.
Waleed Shahid is the man and just about every one of his articles is worthy of its own post. Outside of a handful of diehard commies that will never be satisfied, I don't think anyone on the populist left would be turned off by abundance-style governance under a populist framework. To me, the bigger problem is that many of the Abundance proponents see it as the path to defeat the populist left, which makes me think they'll never adopt a combination of the two ideas.
Seeing as how Shahid writes for The Nation and not The Atlantic, I think we know who the target audience is. Fortunately, we got a sneak peek at what this marriage could look like. Shortly after that piece was published, Zohran went on Derek Thompson's podcast (here's a link to the transcript) and seemed to channel some of that middle ground in his answers. Of course, it wasn't enough to satisfy the mainstream centrist wing of the party and there's still plenty of tension and skepticism from Thompson and Klein, but it's a start!
Lol, in addition to the crypto scam warning banner up top, the email sign up disclaimer makes me chuckle:
"... I understand my email address and related data may be transferred if the site is sold.
...
TheAmericaParty.org will not sell or share my address and will keep it only until I unsubscribe or the list shuts down."
WHICH IS IT ELON?
I think this the first time a significant right-leaning politician in the USA has expressed support for a revenue-neutral carbon fee.
Also:
lol
Yeah, get that wealth Elon! You don’t have enough yet! This whole planet doesn’t have enough wealth for you, big boy, so take your perpetual search for more of it into spaaaace! Surely there will be enough wealth for you there! Surely you will find the fulfillment you’ve forever been unable to attain here on earth. Surely that hole in your soul will be filled at last, once you acquire that beautiful space wealth. It’s the only thing that truly matters. You are nothing without your wealth, Elon. Nothing.
Lunar stuff is perfectly realistic - check out the YouTube channel Anthrofuturism, it covers(/speculates) on that sort of stuff, and it's mostly just 1800s-level machines made locally out of lunar regolith (I.e. moon dust) and iron (the moon doesn't have any carbon for steel, although carbon could be surprisingly cost-effectively imported), driven by electric motors controlled by computers. The electric motors could be made locally from aluminium wire, the computers would obviously need to be imported but they're so tiny that a single rocketful of computers would cover everything, and the solar panels and (sodium) batteries could be made locally too.
Obviously the initial machines/solar panels/batteries would need to be imported, but it doesn't take much machinery to build enough production to bootstrap more. Some stuff couldn't be done remotely and would need to be done by astronauts on-site, but we've done that decades ago, we "just" need to tackle long-term habitation. That will be hard, but in an "oh no what could go wrong" sort of way, and not Mars's "everyone will definitely all die and changing that would require decades of research" absurdity.
Once you've have built a semi-self-sustaining industry on the moon, you still need to ship the products down to earth. That's ~3km/s Δv, right? You'll need some serious value density to make it economically worthwhile, on the level of gold or microchips.
I'm not against space exploration for scientific purposes, we definitely need more of that. But it's premature to be talking about economic sustainability of space industry.
Unrelated, but ever watch Moon (2009)? I really enjoyed that movie and its soundtrack, and I suggest watching it without reading the synopsis.
More than shipping things back to Earth, probably the biggest value proposition in lunar manufacturing lies in what it enables for going further out into space.
Projects with vastly more ambitious size and scope can be practically attempted then, since you no longer have to worry about getting things off of Earth’s surface and through a thick atmosphere. You’re no longer limited to launching a tiny payload wrapped in a huge aerodynamic body — crafts can be whatever shape they need to be and weight optimization isn’t nearly as important.
That’s huge for automated missions, but maybe even more so for crewed missions with all of the space and mass intensive things that are required to keep humans alive and healthy.
It only allows further exploration if you can manufacture on the moon. You will still need to ship the large amounts of space grade material needed up to the moon.
While easier to deal with than say the raw delta v issue we have now it’s still not anywhere NEAR financially viable. Especially if the plan is “go deeper into space where there’s even less useful things. “
And yes I’m aware of asteroid mining which boils down to fundamentally worthless when you look into the reality of getting the material back to earth
Right, that’s the assumption I were my post around. If you can get manufacturing at scale going, it’s helpful because it’s that much less that you have to source from Earth.
The financial viability mess is a whole rabbit hole on its own, but I’ll just say that if we only ever did financially viable things, many advancements would have never occurred.
I mean, we have throughout history mostly only done things for survival or because there was potential financial benefit.
Especially when it’s on the scale of “requiring the GDP of several nations”
Not exactly whatever size and shape. Pedantic but you're still limited by the stress and strain imposed by lunar gravity. It's weaker than Earth, sure, but the ultimate flexibility for spacecraft construction is in orbit.
Of course, getting materials up out of a gravity well....
Hard agree on Moon. It's a very enjoyable movie and even better when you go in blind.
Yes! Such a good movie! Sam Rockwell is brilliant in it, and I love the AI played by (unfortunately) Kevin Spacey.
I think we should all just collectively agree to change the man's name to Unfortunately Kevin Spacey when referring to his great performances.
What ever happened to his vague threats posted on his YouTube channel after he got cancelled? You know, the video where he has a glass of whiskey in an armchair by a fireplace? It was very reminiscent of the Papa John "There will be a reckoning" moment.
Whaaaa…? Somehow I missed that. Sounds like he was channeling John McAfee.
Ditto what ButteredToast said, but you're now talking about profit viability. My point was that the moon is both technologically viable and financially affordable to set up operations on. Realistically, the #1 benefit will be a basically infinite scope of scientific experiments possible on the moon - if you have a moonbase, you have area, energy, labor (somewhat), and materials available to perform experiments with (the labor shortage can be somewhat compensated by judicious use of remote-control from earth). Every other economic activity will mainly be useful as a means for making the space-base financially viable.
Also, shipping products off the moon is incredibly cheap once you've built a (solar powered) mass driver, which is made more practical by the moon's atmosphere being near-vacuum. And lunar regolith is something like 10% titanium IIRC. And given that there are already things only viable to manufacture in space (a type of fibre optic), there might be things only viable to manufacture on moon-gravity too.
Ok, but why would we do any of that?
We could also do all of that stuff in the middle of the ocean, or in antarctica, or in the Sahara desert way more easily than we could do it on the moon, but why would we?
There's nothing to gain that would justify the absolutely mind melting expense of setting up a huge factory on the moon.
Δv. Call it fuel, call it energy, you need a lot less of it to get things from Luna to Earth orbit than you do to extract anything from Earth's gravity well. So if you want to be sending things out into space it can be cheaper in the long run to be manufacturing things outside of Earth's gravity.
Not to ask the obvious question, but why do we want to send things out into space?
I can't think of an actual use case for sending things beyond geosynchronous orbit.
I just never really understood the obsession with space. It's interesting from a scientific standpoint, sure, and being able to defend against big asteroids and the like makes sense, but what's with all the proposals to spend trillions of dollars building things in space, or building big space ships, or colonizing other planets. What's the benefit to the average person, or anyone really to doing any of that that would justify spending many times the GDP of most countries to do?
In short: with the exception of things like selective breeding leading to hardier grains, almost every material gain in quality of life of the past hundred years has been built entirely upon either immense population booms, which themselves drive economic stratification and devalue impoverished labor, or industrial mechanization made out of and fueled with extremely limited resources. The former implies, to those with the most power, that eventually they'll need more land to escape the clamoring masses and/or continue to obscure their plundering, but I think that's neither here nor there in terms of the average person's concerns.
Those limited materials though, are a big issue. Every electronic device is either extremely large and inefficient (vacuum tubes and wires) or fundamentally need rare earth minerals to produce. Those minerals aren't strictly so rare that we couldn't just find more for the foreseeable future, but the only viable mining methods for them are incredibly ecologically destructive and politically problematic, to say the least. Recycling them is hypothetically the right course of action, but if the entire planet met "developed nations' standards of living", that would probably not be sufficient, and the process of scavenging discarded electronics would involve multiple industries by itself.
Either we'll need extraterrestrial materials, or we'll need an enormous reconfiguration of societies and economies, or we'll need to essentially strip mine what's left of noncivilized land, some time in the relatively near future. For the people in charge of industries and governments, the second option is inconceivable, and the third is only inconvenient.
Additionally, the scope of possibilities for a humanity that has mastered off-planet manufacturing, habitation, etc is incomprehensibly larger than that of one that never does, and the knowledge and technology required to accomplish that doesn't just fall out of a tree — they develop only when we try to do things in space.
It's a zero sum game though. Effort, labor, and energy dedicated to going to space (which is incomprehensibly huge) is effort not spent elsewhere. Namely, it's effort not spent improving life here on earth.
We're never going to find a place better suited to living a healthy, happy human life than this planet. We evolved to be perfectly suited to the conditions here, so life anywhere else will virtually always be more difficult, and usually far more difficult.
So if the options are a humanity solely on earth where people have their needs met, live long, content, happy healthy lives, or trillions of people living in space, barely hanging on to survival enabled by hundreds of trillion dollars of technology and infrastructure, the first one sounds a lot more appealing.
What potential amazing future is unlocked by being in space? I don't think the idea of colonizing places for colonization's sake really makes a whole lot of sense, personally.
I don’t think it’s quite zero sum simply due to the human element. There are people who’ve dedicated their lives to specializing in crewed spaceflight and adjacent because that’s what their calling was. I don’t think we should be telling them, “no, we’ve decided you need to go work on this other thing instead,” not just because it infringes on self-determination and personal freedoms but also robs society of the benefits that would’ve come about thanks to the work of these smart, motivated individuals.
Yes, nothing will beat Earth… in the short term. On a long enough timescale as our technology and capabilities improves, the gap will grow ever more narrow until eventually living off world will be as mundane as life on Earth, and it’ll probably happen quicker than we could ever imagine precisely because of the hostility of those environments — for the first century or two at minimum the primary activity most people living off-world will be sinking their energy into is making their situation less precarious.
Off-world population won’t balloon until long afterward that high level of technology is achieved. Until then, going out there will remain somewhat niche and mostly something that frontier seekers and scientists do. By the time it’s multiplied to trillions, tech will have developed so far that living somewhere other than Earth will be quite comfortable.
That survival-driven development of technology combined with the sheer population (more people means more scientific and cultural breakthroughs) is what makes for a vastly increased scope of possibilities. That version of humanity will almost inevitably come to climb the rungs of the Kardashev scale and will outlast the Sol system in some form, while an Earth-bound humanity is unlikely to move the needle of progress too much further from where it stands today and probably disappears along with the sun’s demise.
Based on everything we know, we're not going to get to a population of trillions, unless society significantly regresses. Higher levels of education in women is directly correlated with reduced birth rates, to the extent that virtually every wealthy country on earth has a birth rate below replacement. The global population will likely stop growing, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later, like within the next 50 years. At that point, it's more likely that it shrinks, not grows.
The malthusian idea that we need an ever increasing, exponential supply of resources and square footage to feed a human population that will number in the trillions does not seem to hold water with what we're actually seeing.
Thats a good thing, not a bad thing though.
Regarding personal freedoms... I mean, that's kind of a weird argument. I would have liked to dedicate my life to racing cars, but I don't, because I can't make a living racing cars. I'm not good enough at it, and basically no one is a professional race car driver outside of a tiny little population of people that are the right combination of lucky and good at it. My personal freedoms aren't infringed by not being paid to be a racecar driver. I'm still free to do that on my own, with my own money if I'd like to.
People simply being passionate about something isn't an argument for dedicating public resources towards that thing.
I doubt we’re going to convince each other of anything at this point, but I’ll just say that our data on population dynamics was observed specifically under a scarcity-based capitalistic system in which desirable places to live are among the scarcities. We have no idea how they might work in a far flung future where desirable living places can simply be made and many resources are too plentiful for capitalism to be pervasive.
Sure, but the first space-based industries will almost definitionally be the low-hanging fruit; if someone sets up a moonbase for industry with a grand total of 10 people stationed there, that's still a moonbase, even though that'll be only a billionth of the human population.
The main benefit of being in space, IMO, is the lack of gravity - it unlocks various manufacturing techniques that are not possible on earth. And a local human presence will likely be required for un-fucking any industrial machinery - while most of the machines might be remote-controllable, the lag will be unbearable (the moon is 2 light-seconds away from earth, have you ever played Counterstrike with 2000 ping? and Mars is several minutes' delay, and it only gets worse) and makes remote-operation quite inferior (for manual handling tasks, maybe impossible) compared to an actual local human. The reality of manufacturing is that machines fail, and when they fail they fail in new and interesting ways, so you need a generalist machine (i.e. a human) to fix them.
A better analogy than colonialism here might be an offshore oil rig: an unhospitable and dangerous environment that nobody sane wants to live on, long hours and cramped conditions to save resources, automate everything possible because humans are expensive for reasons aforementioned, but we keep building more of them because they provide resources that are impractically expensive and/or impossible to attain elsewhere.
We can already get some of the benefits of no/low-gravity using just orbit, but 1) that's only zero-gravity, not low-gravity (which might have all sorts of uses) and 2) transporting material up there is incredibly expensive.
In fact, maybe it would make sense to put manufacturing in earth's orbit (for easy remote-control) but ship in the input materials from the moon - a solar-powered mass driver on the moon would be quite cheap and reusable compared to shipping e.g. iron up from near sea-level via rocket.
The problem is one of diminishing returns though. This space stuff doesn't have to just be technologically viable, it needs to be economically viable too.
Bootstrapping a whole automated space manufacturing pipeline would be so obscenely expensive that it would dwarf any collective human effort that has ever been undertaken in all of history. More than WW2, the space race, and the entire Roman empire combined. We're talking about billions of man-lives worth of labor to make something like that happen. The amount of energy you'd need to extend to get any desirable material in a format you can actually use from deep space back to earth would be so gargantuan that it would almost never justify the cost.
If you compare that amount of effort to just recycling, it's not even close.
Regarding population booms, that's just not going to happen unless a majority of societies regress drastically.
It seems likely that we're going to hit a negative global birth rate within the next 50 years and the human population will reach some sort of rough equilibrium at some point afterwards.
Most regular people don't really see a need to have 3+ kids if they really have a say in the matter. Like yeah, resources are scarce and will continue to be scarce, but going out to space to get them will always be insanely expensive from an energy standpoint, and if we have the technology and energy to do that, we also have the technology and energy to just re use the stuff we already have far more cheaply.
Content warning: irony tarpit
You selected option 'B': reconfigure human institutions to enable sustainable justice. Here's what I could find about that:
Have you considered how new technologies open new economic frontiers?
Before the breakthroughs in phrenology that proved the inferior capacity for responsibility in the lesser races, it was seen as economical to allow Africans to pretend they were capable of self-governance!Before the Knocking Gasoline Engine, we had no use for our enormous tetraethyl lead reserves, and without that breakthrough we never would have discovered the Green Technology of ethanol!Look at how sad the retirement class is! We wouldn't want our next generations to go without the life-validation exclusively found through hard work in service to A Greater Good, now, would we?
It's terrible to see how prevalent mental illness is! Poor little girls all around the world are being raised to hate their biological purpose, and the boys are just as confused. Why would anyone in their right mind refuse the Gift of Parenthood and the chance to Help Make A Better Tomorrow through Precious Children?
Why do you want to Pull the Ladder Up Behind You? We in the first world are so fortunate to live in our air-conditioning and to never have to Think About Where Our Next Meal Is Coming From, how would it be fair not to Allow our fellow humans to enjoy the Comfort and Convenience of Modern Society?
Don't you care about Progress? Why don't you Trust The Science? Why would an engine for efficiency ever do anything to hurt the people who built it? That doesn't sound very economically efficient to me.
It's Just Human Nature to need a Frontier! How could we ever have any sense of value if we have to share our values with Those People? That's not fair to us, or them! Don't Those Ones deserve Their Own?
I think it’s a mix of drive for exploration and a drive born from the lack of land left to conquer.
There is a lot of economic potential in space mining and zero G manufacturing.
I wonder how hard it would be to make solar panels from lunar material?
I dont mean getting the material, I mean fabrication. My basic understanding is that you need a pretty sophisticated setup to make quality semiconductors, which is why Taiwan has such a valuable semiconductor industry.
I figure it wouldnt be that difficult to make a clean room in space, but what would be involved in creating a foundry that could produce high quality silicon? I think foundries here burn coal or gas or something else that takes advantage of all the free air in the atmosphere, but do you need to import air to do the same on the moon?
Semiconductors are small and light, though. 100% lunar fabrication isn't a good inital goal; The lighter and more complex the component, the longer it'll be until it makes sense to fabricate on the Moon. (And the longer before Lunar self-sufficiency makes them start to think about independence.)
Long term though, if you wanted the colony to eventually be self sustaining it would be worth thibking about.
Absolutely. I imagine that some things will need to be done differently in space. Glass is a great example. Float glass is made in giant sheets by floating the cooling glass on a tub of molten tin. Will that work the same in lower gravity? Who knows?
The short answer is that you make the easy-to-make stuff (amorphous silicon panels), because the high-tier stuff degrades rapidly in space anyway (UV) and is only useful if you're mass-constrained in the first place.
A lunar foundry would obviously use mirrors - no atmosphere means everything is amazingly well insulated, so you can just have a field of mirrors focused on your crucible, limited only by the number of mirrors and radiative cooling (and sunlight/time of day).
There's no carbon on the moon, and definitely no coal. Oxygen is the second most abundant element of lunar soil (#1 is silicon), but extracting it from the oxides will take energy. Once you do, though, you could make thermite. Realistically, if you imported carbon, the main reason would be turning your iron into steel (and also carbon is a necessary part of the human diet).
I just realized that if a member of the Republican Party is called a Republican, and a member of the Democratic Party is called a Democrat… then members of this will be called Americans and that branding really doesn’t sit well with me.
Well, it's the AP, right? Why don't we just agree to call them APes?
:snort:
Isn't that more the MAGAts though?
I've always disliked that term for two reasons. One, it's uncomfortably reminiscent for me of a certain slur for homosexual men that, to my lasting shame, I used all too often as a child; and two, referring to groups of people with a term for vermin is one of those warning signs that shit has really gotten off-track.
While I empathize with your personal discomfort with the term in its similar sound to the gay slur, I see the relationship one a matter of similar sounds and not relevance.
I can't apologize for having an extremely dim view of right wing extremists. Name calling? ... We're dealing with people who won't disavow actual Nazis. Please don't ever let that be far from your mind.
Civility for Nazi apologists is an ask too great for me.
I'm not asking you to apologize. I'm not even asking you to stop doing it. Be as uncivil to all the bigots you please with my blessing.
I'm only saying why I try to avoid talking and thinking like that. My gut tells me that shit is habit-forming, and leads nowhere good.
My experience has been one of lifelong trauma at the hands of these kinds of people. I'm well past "[avoiding] ... thinking like that."
These kinds of people see "difference" as "bad". They ostracize as a matter of course and dehumanize as the next step.
They don't want people like me to be happy.
They don't want people like me.
There's a place for MLK. There's also a place for Malcolm X.
These days, I think we need more Malcolm X.
This shit? This shit is not going to get better without more people realizing that we're already in it.
I share your general distaste. Dehumanizing them only serves to separate "us" from "them" and mostly make us feel better that we could never end up being "them"
I think it's never the answer, not out of kindness but out of the necessity of facing the truth - every atrocity came from hands as human as our own. Every hatred comes from hearts as human as ours.
If they're monsters we're only absolving ourselves, not holding them more accountable
My thoughts exactly. I sure as hell don't refrain from using dehumanizing language to speak of bigots to preserve their feelings, I do it to hold onto what precious little sanity is left in my skull.
Sanity. I don't know that anyone can lay claim to that these days.
"Insane" is what they would call people like me, 50 or more years ago. And that's where they want to take us—or worse.
The separation is already there. They (yes, "they") made it about "us" and "them". They have only escalated, making it more so. I don't see us healing our way out of this by being kinder than them. We've tried that. Tolerating intolerance gives it air to burn.
Dehumanizing? Calling them bugs would be, yes. "Deplorables" seems too kind.
Regardless, I'm out of spoons for this. 🖖
Agreed. Just because you support Musk’s policies doesn’t mean you are a KGB spy
At least he didn't call his party "True Americans" somewhat like the Finnish conservative / centrist party did ~10 years ago.
Ha, sounds like a good experiment for a new party in Scotland.
No, they'll be called Americas. As in North America, South America, and Elon Musk. We're talking about the America Party, not the American Party. A member of the Democratic Party is called a Democrat, not a Democratican.
This feels like Elon wanted to make a libertarian party without having to deal with a bunch of Libertarians. And even if you just consider the two main parties, I'm not sure there's enough of a base for a new party as I don't see the techbros and Roganites willing to give an inch on immigration, let alone anybody willing to give Elon the time of day. If it's not a money laundering scheme, it pivots into a lobbying group in six months.
Elon still has a very large and dedicated following and there’s very much a niche of a party focused on handling the budget better.
Mixed with Elon having money and connections I wouldn’t be totally surprised if this has some impact. That said I of course feel it’s the scam of the week or whatever.
I’m not sure that the budget wonks were ever the ones winning elections for the GOP, and Elon lost the MAGA base in the divorce. Elon may have better luck holding a boombox at the DNC national headquarters with all the other Republican expats, because if an internet following could move the needle, we would have had our third term of Bernie Sanders. (/vent)
The budget not being an priority has been a complaint of people for a long time, and yes they often weren't the ones winning in the GOP, which is why it's a long running issue.
Elon still has a base. Hell it's many of the same people as before, and it's some of the uh...different..maga supporters who want a chance to jump ship.
I think underplaying this based on vibes is foolish. Elon still does well in the US, his European nosedive doesn't affect him nearly as much there.
This party is only centrist insofar that Elon considers himself the center of the universe.
More seriously: Setting the stated ideals of the "America Party" aside, I don't see how it will distinguish itself from the Republican party. Other than their disagreement over the budget, Musk has been a vocal supporter of nearly all of Trump's policies; indeed, Musk himself was personally responsible for perhaps this administration's least popular initiative so far, the so-called "Department" of Government Efficiency. So what's the appeal here? It's a copycat populist party but without the strongman.
I think in many ways it's positioning itself as the successor to this administration. A lot of folks have felt somewhat reassured by the fact that Vance doesn't hold nearly the same popular sway as Trump, Musk sways a different but overlapping group of people. So while they compete now, whenever they don't have to compete in the future, it continues the bad times for us.
This is great for anyone that doesn't align with Trump's nonsense. As smart as musk pretends to be, he apparently doesn't understand game theory.
A 3rd party in a first past the post system not only has no chance of winning, the more "successful" they are, the more they hurt the party that they're most closely ideologically aligned with. The best thing possible for Democrats is this party to gain steam. It virtually guarantees them a victory if it does.
If he only pulled people away from Trump that would be one thing. I'm not so convinced of that, the "technocrat" advocates have not been so clearly blue/red (hence their whole "gray" thing")
But I think it's more likely to position itself as the successor of the current head of the GOP, whether they rebrand or primary folks or not, I doubt they commit to the full 3rd party. But if they do, I guess we'll see.
I don't support the existence of more racist political parties just because they might fuck up the guys I don't like. Actual people are being harmed horribly right now, and I can't play political sports over it.
That may have been true 8 years ago, but the Republicans have done a good job of capitalizing on the areas where Democrats are unpopular with that group; namely by jumping on criticism of identity politics and putting forward a sham philosophy centered around so called "meritocracy". Since that time, the overwhelming majority of the tech bro types have gone red. A lot of that is thanks to musk himself.
At this point, I can't imagine a tech bro party being made up of any less than 70% Republican refugees.
Sure, but I watch the trends of young men and white men voting and that is still 30 percent too high and a party with more money than god. I have no doubt where their ideology lies; I also have no doubt about how appealing that ideology can be when you're disgruntled part of the nominal majority and would rather believe in bootstraps but maybe without all the Jesus stuff.
As you said, those areas are incredibly appealing, including to Dems who would potentially vote against Republicans, but are easily swayed away from equality and social justice
I do not find it a positive thing that there is a brand new white supremacist lead party. I do not see any good coming out of those ideas being even more loudly espoused And more socially acceptable.
So what you’re saying is, we ought to be collectively sharing and retweeting and retruthing and liking and subscribing and registering as members of the America Party just to inflate the bubble as much as possible? The thought of millions of fake supporters pumping it up just to spoil elections in the eleventh hour is… delicious.
I mean I think that convinces real people to support even if only in a bandwagon way.
There's so many other things one could do with that energy rather than le epic troll.
That’s the point! Drum up as much real people’s support as possible with the deliberate goal of fracturing the right.
I mean, it’s kind of a troll, which is rather fitting as an implement against Musk. But it’s also a legitimate strategy to poison the two-party system by bolstering a third party to turn the opposition against itself.
I just signed up for the mailing list. Use a burner email and keep an eye on it.
It's actually a psyop.
Good on you, the market has been way over saturated by state-backed ones lately.
I don't think we have the same political goals.
What they might do is try to avoid campaigning on hot button issues in effort to capture both voters who’d previously sided with the incumbent parties as well as potential voters who previously didn’t vote. That may be a surprisingly effective strategy depending on how many people have become fatigued with the various talking points that’ve become beyond worn out in the past couple of cycles.
It also depends on what’s viewed as “success”. If that’s just stealing enough seats to prevent either of the two major parties from taking total control, that’s a much lower bar to clear.
Who knows if the people involved in this are that strategically smart, though. I’d wager not.
It's almost like someone who knows nothing about U.S. politics, history, and law, or economics, ecology, public health, sociology, geography, biology, chemistry, philosophy, etc. is trying to start a technocratic political party that specifically benefits his businesses.
It's uncanny how oblivious Elon is to the impacts of anything outside his areas of (somewhat questionable) expertise. Ne supra crepidam, and leave the rest of us alone.
I'm confused as to why this site looks so low budget and thrown together. There's not a single picture or video, no candidates or endorsements.
Oddly I kinda find it refreshing, mostly from a UX perspective. It isn’t trying to be snazzy.
There aren't any candidates yet right? Well they'll have about 3 years to figure that out
Why anybody would take seriously a political party launched by a Nazi, I don't know.
Oh hells, not this again. Platitudes and big ideas without any of the how explained. This is a joke, right? When you have real policies with concrete steps and well defined solutions that I can read and critique rather than hand-waving I'll start to care. Until then enjoy wasting your money in the black hole of politics. It does not work unless you bring a lamp with you into the darkness, and this ain't it.
Look, Elon, if you're stuck without anything intelligent to use for party planks, just steal all of this (or in json if you prefer) because the work has already been done by smarter people better educated in societal engineering than you or the kids you employ. Then I might start to take you seriously.
Or, well, just give Yang a lot of money and otherwise fuck off? I remember liking some things about Yang's
platform. I'd be fine seeing that platform get a proper hearing. I just don't want Elon getting any of his Nazi bullshit into it.
I find this party very appealing. Not because of its policies, which are pretty vague and generic, but becauae I really like the color teal.
They're missing out not naming it the Teal Party
You joke, but I know of at least two people that voted for the New Blue Party in our provincial elections not too long ago, solely because of the name/colour.
Ok everybody, get used to the idea of "there is no good guy side, just multiple bad guy sides". Sorry for the total disregard of nuance, I'm sleepy and headed to bed, but the core of what I'm seeing more and more around the world and here in the US is summed up in that sentence.
Not an absolute statement. More a trend.
If this party is meant as a confrontational alternative to Trumpism, why is the homepage of the affiliated PAC full of tweets glazing Trump administration actions?
Ha, can't view the website outside the US lol
My guess is that it will be more of a PAC (Political Action Committee) than a party, but it has Musk’s usual exaggerated branding.
Obviously the double dash — is used outside of LLMs generated text but I don't see it very often. The entire website is full of double dashes.
I had a look around but I cannot find any discussion of this. Is the website content AI generated?
Professional editor here. There seems to be a "thing" going around that em dashes are commonly produced by LLMs, but the punctuation is extremely popular and always has been.
Please, do not encourage me to get up on my grammar pedant soapbox again.
The various dashes are also easily produced on Apple platforms. By default, iOS and macOS turn two and three consecutive minus signs into long dashes, so a lot of people are probably using them without even realizing it or started actively using them after noticing the subtitution. Consider then the proportion of people hailing from the US (in which iOS is the dominant mobile platform) in the English speaking internet, which likely made for increased long dash frequency in online posts since 2007, which then fueled use of these dashes by the LLMs that were trained on those posts.
It’s going to be so good to read some history articles ten years later on the history of em dashes in an LLM world. On one hand they are a marker of AI assisted writing — on the other, when you start reading text with them everywhere it’s tempting to take them for a spin.
Damn good call out.
While casting shade on Elon, this is the same guy who had the AI he funded identify him as the single largest spreader of misinformation online. The richest man in the world can't even buy a machine to lie for him.
To be fair to Rolling Stone, the emdashes are in sections where they directly quote the America Party website
lol ok yes
Early in Trump II (wait, that started this year!) I thought Musk and Trump were fighting for headlines. They both want to be the center of attention and know how to drive the media into giving it to them.
Actually in theory this is how democracy is supposed to work: exploit the narcissistic tendencies of the elites, and direct their efforts towards improving life for everyone else. You know instead of building armies to fight each other. Obviously the improving part isn’t working so well these days, though I guess the majority of voters disagree. But in principle I am in favor of their feud.
It's been less than six months, and we have another 42 months to go.
I keep counting backwards. We're 1/8th of the way through this hell—and that's assuming that an all out coup doesn't happen or the equivalent by way of the swap-a-veep bullshit they've tossed around publicly.
Musk, if you're reading this: Don't run for president! Instead, focus on winning smaller elections first; mayorships, state congress seats, and the House of Representatives seats with ranked-choice voting. The UK has proved that it's possible for a country with single-representative winner-takes-all-districts to support more than two parties, but you have to start small. To quote your own party program: Smart growth. Running for president is just a giant waste of money that ends in embarrassment.
(Same goes for members of the Green Party, Libertarian Party, and members of any other US political parties who happen to be reading this. Stop wasting money and resources on the presidential election!)
There's no world in which I want a third party run by a guy throwing Nazi salutes and supporting false claims of white genocide to be even the slightest bit "successful"
He's got enough money he doesn't need any of our advice and shouldn't be offered it. (And if you think the Green Party as led by Jill Stein cares about winning elections, I think you are lying to yourself.)
Musk is South African, he’s ineligible to run for President.
He's a naturalized citizen, so it makes more sense to call him a South-African-American rather than just South African. He's ineligible for that one office either way, so might as well be more accurate about it.
I don't like that he's an American any more than you do, but that horse has long ago left the barn.
Out of curiosity, are you interested in this party doing well?
I'm just surprised to see support for it.
I was also excited when I heard of this announcement for one very specific reason that either commenters here haven't thought up or just haven't said out loud: It splits the right wing vote.
Muskrat is a nazi piece of shit.
He attracts other extreme nazi pieces of shit.
Turns out there are quite a few nazi pieces of shit out there.
None of them are leftists and they undoubtedly voted for El Cheeto.
If this party takes off, it's the end for, primarily extreme, right wing candidates.
If the Republican party wants to recover voters they lose to this neo-nazi party they will have no choice but to move back towards the center.
It's beautiful and I wish Muskrat all the best in this endeavor.
It has been mentioned up above, I'm personally just not as convinced it will only poach off the right wing nor that it won't end up functioning much in the same way as the tea party did. At "best" it replaces the Republican party after a bunch of turmoil in the short term like any other successful third party has done. Meanwhile the rhetoric gets even more violent/extreme/supremacist.
I'm not optimistic enough that the "best" outcome will happen, much less that it results in "good." There's just too much money in the hands of a Nazi wannabe involved for me to think it goes well
Yeah. I remember people joking about/memeing Trump when he entered the 2016 presidential race. I remember when r/TheDonald was a meme subreddit. I remember the DNC propping up Trump's primary campaign because they thought he would be easy to beat. And I've seen a few of the friends who were memeing trump in 2016 just turn into genuine MAGA in the intervening time.
I don't think political games are what we need, right now. If Musk splits the conservative vote and causes a reckoning on the right then sure, maybe that could ultimately be a good thing, but it's certainly not a sure thing. And I've been feeling for a while now that we are who we pretend to be. Doing stuff ironically or boosting nazis because it might split the vote just gives real nazis cover and pulls in people who are on the fence or vulnerable to radicalization.
The American left have been playing semantic games and strategically fucking around for decades and it's gotten us nowhere. Maybe we should just find a vision for making people's lives better and then just...fucking say it with our chest? Quit with the focus groups and just be moral people with a strong vision on right and wrong and how we can improve everyone's lives. I dunno, maybe I'm naive.
I really want to see more third-parties in general. I don't trust Elon Musk, but even a third party launched by him could have good outcomes.
Both the Democrat and Republican parties are widely seen as out-of-touch. Politicians don't accurately represent their voters, but get re-elected anyways because they're better than the other party's candidate. Even if they get zero seats, just by running, AP candidates pressure the Democrat and Republican candidates to align closer with their voters. Plus, one third-party getting any success will inspire others.
Via a friend: Elon will pay you to join his party. Just wait.
Not that he won't try it, but isn't that totally illegal?
So were prizes for registering to vote, and that didn't stop him.
It ended up being stopped, I thought. A judge ruled his million dollar lottery scheme was to be stopped.