Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.

FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.

All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!

Yeah I hear you. There are truly very few options for work where you can be absolutely certain that no line can be drawn to enabling violence. Some are more obvious, blatant, and intentional than others.

I always forget about that. Do you think that reflects more on Elon or SpaceX employees?

Can you explain further? How is SpaceX’s goal to murder people? That feels misplaced and I’d love understand what you mean!

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

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

Thanks for single-handedly maintaining the connections to local events in this community! It’s nice seeing things that aren’t just copy-paste headlines I could’ve seen in plenty of other outlets 🙂

I have a difficult time separating the Elonverse from all the incredibly cool shit SpaceX keeps doing. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m following it for the engineers that are pioneering breakthrough tech and that it has nothing to do with Mr. Elmo. How you walk that tightrope when you’re a policymaker must be even more challenging.

It’s a bad line for sure. I watched and read through the follow-up quotes and I think this bit is important to read along with it:

“The mayor was not praising them, he was referencing they have an objective reputation as leaders in technology and innovation, and that it is a danger they are in the president’s orbit,” Housen said. “He certainly doesn’t agree with their politics, which is why he highlighted this through concerns around the actions coming out of DC like significant staffing cuts impacting cybersecurity and the degradation of protections and questions over access to personal data.”

Could’ve been foot-in-mouth syndrome, and I think the concerns he shared about federal layoffs support his real intent. I know it’s easy to see red right now, and that’s why it’s important to distinguish the real problems.

How do you feel about content like this? It’s long form, informative, and hobbyist.

Or this guy who generates customer leads to his interior design business?

I find takes like this unfortunate. I learned SO much on TikTok. Accounts like gatenerd, jerrythink, kellyscleankitchen, softpourn, publicopinion, hankgreen, alexisanddean, thelawsayswhat, kylascan, and countless interior designers, architects, chefs, and all the others I can’t recall.

There is no other platform like TikTok where you can get drawn in not just in minutes watched, but in knowledge gained. Wish you shared my experience.