maybe the worst part about private spaceflight is that the two biggest players in the space are such obnoxious pricks they've negatively polarized tons of people against the concept of rockets i think that's kinda sad

somewhat funni that sometimes it feels like socialists want to be capitalists, capitalists want to be feudalists, and feudalists want to be monarchists

I always come back to Lincoln on Memorial Day

We need public corporate governance structures that can a) accommodate governance horizons longer then quarter by quarter, but b) still hold the executives and management accountable.

A quick thread on being a better critic of SpaceX and Starship. Your first choice should probably be that Musk is a racist & bigoted fascist. Anything he's involved with should be looked at with scorn. This perfectly fine and legitimate, all on its own, requiring zero technical info or background.

This is why a future Dem admin needs to be deeply supportive of other companies building reusable rockets - Blue Origin is getting there, and hopefully RocketLab will have something useful for larger payloads in a couple years. And why the Euros should figure out how to move on from Ariane 6 asap.

Yeah I’m pretty pro-panopticon for anything involving cars. Speed governors, automated license plate readers, ignition interlocks for people with more than one DUI. Sorry, your rights to privacy ended when you began operating a multi ton piece of heavy machinery around me!

This is a backdoor way to ban speed and red light cameras and should be opposed

Perfectly competent public transportation is possible in the US. It just is very difficult to build up organically without some kind of forcing function to get over the chicken/egg hump of "barely anyone uses it because it sucks" and "can't justify funding enough to not suck because no one uses it."

The larger implication here is that gas stations are a bastion of populist political organization.

The short version of the Yale law prof is "The president can do whatever 33 senators will let him get away with as long as he's a Republican since no one will have standing to stop it. In case of a Dem president, then anyone and everyone has standing."

This is the correct approach. But I think you underestimate just how much people a)*really* like the flexibility of car based transportation, and b) seriously mistrust that public transit can actually meet their needs. There's a chicken/egg problem to getting it built up enough to prove it can work.

Early returns in Tuesday’s primary election showed Democratic-backed candidates held commanding leads in two out of four Deschutes County Commission races, with two open seats heading to a run-off in November.

Looking at the conspiracy laden discourse I really can't get on board with the idea that knowing basic physics, chemistry, and math aren't every bit as necessary for self government as civics

It's time to resurrect taxpayer standing to sue for and stop unlawful expenditures.

The next Dem administration needs to go nuts with asset forfeiture on the proceeds of all of this.

Regret to inform you that the people most likely to say “the purpose of a machine is what it does” do not have the self-awareness to apply it to themselves.

This is why I strongly believe that if you want to be critical of Israel and its government (and you should) - do not use the z word. It is the kind of term has different meanings to different people, and that ambiguity is all too often deliberately abused.

They hate being reminded that they really don't have the cultural power that they think they deserve.

New rule - members of Congress should have to publish a proof of life once a month.

This is a really fantastic thread on why outright banning bits of technology isn't what we need. We need careful and knowledgeable regulation based on a thorough understanding of how the stuff actually works. When you do that, you can in fact stop the bad stuff while keeping the good.

Oregon’s 2028 district map

The problem is that a terrestrial moratorium would be a giveaway to Musk and SpaceX. The business case for putting compute into orbit only ever begins to make sense if terrestrial is impossible.

you should vote yes on measure 120 most especially. keep ODOT workers employed, fund trimet, and don’t cut taxes for polluting vehicles. anyone telling you otherwise should lose your trust and is not worth your time

String Bikini Clad Ladies

a driverless bus is officially on the road in Norway www.electrive.com/2026/05/04/a...

This too is a form of audience capture. The GOP shitting on cities and urban areas is just another form of feeding red meat to thier rural base.

Promises to overturn Citizens United and platitudes about people over profits mean nothing unless we have a plan for how to get it done. And that requires taking our power back from the Roberts Court. mikesacksforcongress.com

They need to just buck up and run with a threshold + lottery system and eliminate anything that smells of subjective decision making on admissions.

We need a federal law to preemt state dealer protection laws to allow manufacturers to sell EV's direct to consumer everywhere.

I agree. The most optimistic reading the facts can bear is, I think, that he is an absolute moron of no character and no real concrete political views, which is sub-optimal but still better than a Republican

I get the temptation of going after the upper left. But politics has never been something you can map out neatly on a grid. Building winning coalitions is very hard and necessary work. But it utterly fails when you mistake the map for the terrain.

the only sustainable way to address our nation's housing needs is to radically increase housing density. that looks like allowing property owners to put their land to the highest and best use, regardless of whether or not their neighbors are going to complain about "neighborhood values" or whatever.

Proportional representation requires zero consideration of race and produces better minority representation, both partisan minorities and racial minorities, than any attempt to draw majority-minority districts ever could.

No. Actually I think we should make it vastly easier for anyone who wants to become an American to do so, fully and completely legally.

Unironically, they are using the ballroom to distract from everything else.

People would hate it, but the solution to this "problem" is to make a rule to not report any results before everyone has counted everything. And then report all the results at once.

The WHCA itself should be disbanded all together. If the president can arbitrarily kick out journos because they don't use his preferred name for a body of water, the president can kick all of them out.

Something tells me trump is going to use this event to argue in favor of his stupid ballroom.

There is a serious chicken and egg problem in that it is hard to get dense enough routes with short enough cycle times when ridership is very low. But it is hard to get the ridership without that level of service.

These two things are simultaneously true: a) We need more automated surveillance in the world in order to get better compliance with the laws we already have. b) We need robust protections on how that surveillance is used, who can use it, and when.

Probably the the most universal attitude in American politics is that managing and covering the costs of real risks always needs to be someone else's problem. Everyone is a special smol bean and can't be held accountable for their own risks.

Deep thoughts for late at night: The Last of Us would have been better titled as The Fungus Among Us.

When I was a kid growing up (pre-9/11), it was a fun outing to go out to the airport just to explore and watch the planes and people come and go. Locking out non-passengers from the concourses made the whole place much sadder.

There needs to be a rule change in both the house and the senate to allow for calling out witnesses and explicitly say, "you are full of shit."

The equivalent of a "Tizla strategy" for the US would be Mitt Romney running on a platform of overturning Citizens United, banning gerrymandering, court reform, and jailing half the administration. And I mean, if that were how ol' Mittens were rolling, I'd at least hear him out!

Put differently: every discipline is computer science now, but computer science is actually sociology.

This isn't even hard to build where there is already a bike lane. 1) move the raised curb to where the bike lane line is, 2) Fill in with asphalt. You don't need a big barrier between the bike lane and the street. You need drivers to know they risk damaging their cars if they encroach the bike lane.

The meta of "why people behave this way" is that people invest themselves heavily into pat narratives to make sense of a complex and messy world. So anytime anyone digs into the weeds to understand the underlying mechanics of something, at a minimum, it makes that pat narrative less compelling.