All we're asking is that you fill out the missing wolf form.

Thanks.

> I have a little bit of
> insight into SpaceX.

You should share more... I've never paid much attention to these guys (Theil/Musk/Andreessen/Bezos/the VC's), and have been trying to catch up without getting overwhelmed.

> Perhaps Jobs' biggest advantage
> over Musk is that Jobs hired the
> detail people and had little
> tolerance for sloppy execution.

I don't think that's right. First, EM was part

Hey! Musk's intials are "EM," which was the name of the 70's sex music that's been linked for the last two days! All of life's a circle! Let's celebrate and eat sustainable vegan foods. Okay.

I don't think that's right. First, EM was part of a team that finally/finally/finally in our lifetimes created an important new player in the world of finance. Details abounded. I've heard Thiel talk about them, and it goes on for awhile.

Secondly, I mean, there's no reason to do a paragraph for each venture. Everything Musk does involves details. As he said in that Swisher interview, these things are "monumentally difficult." That hardly means they shouldn't be done, or that he'd be more respectable for being too daunted to try.

Jobs apparently knew, on some conscious or unconscious level, that people were going to be putting unboxing videos for the Iphone on the internet, so he sold it in a pretty box. Details! Musk learned to land freaking reusable rockets on a mobile ocean platform. That requires details too... Little parts and careful measurements. And he builds cars and flamethrowers and batteries. His teams are apparently as strong as anyone's, and they're often people who will make insane sacrifices to be part of something remarkable. They'll put up with a lot of shit and still get their homework in on time.

The thing about NASA is, it's easy to imagine that they're flatly, unremarkably envious, and not inclined to defend their reputation of being the Big Boys of outer space... But they lost their glitter at about the same time disco left the FM dial.

This clip came in through the datastream a few months ago.

See this article from Wednesday—

[A] list of “interested parties” published on the federal government’s FedBizOpps procurement website included 28 companies. The interested parties list included SpaceX and Blue Origin, two of the biggest privately-backed space companies, but neither were selected by NASA, and it’s not known whether they submitted proposals.

But here's the thing...

Thirtyish years ago, Easterbrook wrote a brilliant article about the shuttle program and its borderline featherbedding, with the ludicrous complexity that seemed destined to kill people no matter what. Its promises of reusability were tragically oversold.

Even with the understanding that there have been losses, a clip like this buys you (EM) a lot of credibility... It's as exciting as anything we ever saw from the shuttle.

And then there was that moment last month when Musk painted an enormous blossom in the sky over my house. YeahYeahYeah, he got lucky with separation just outside the umbra. But it was an emotionally gratifying demonstration of proficiency (and detail), a month after he was toking up with Rogan. I'll never forget it.

So on the 60 Minutes clip, EM readily concedes that he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Well, golly, that's admirably humble, right? And then you read the Andreessen essay and the article about Tesla updating the braking software to cut the stopping distance by twenty feet.

Here's the thing: TWENTY FEET IS HUGE! Almost unimaginably huge.

How could it be ethical to ship a car, even just a sample for Consumer Reports, with that much unexploited brake performance lurking silently in the design? Did this honestly not show up on anyone's spreadsheet? How many fatalities could have been saved in America in the last year if drivers had had another twenty feet? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? I can't understand the regulatory or corporate incompetence to explain it.

I love cars, enjoy driving aggressively in the Indiana hillside during frequent visits, and like to watch Formula 1 on teevee. But I've lost a loved one to a crash, and we all know people who've suffered in them. Getting car manufacturers to take safety seriously took decades, nearly a century, and hundreds of thousands of lives were lost while engineers and accountants dithered.

Well, so far as I can tell, Andreessen is right: Software is *it* now. Iterative improvement is how things work in IT... The fish don't know they're wet. 'We'll tighten up the algorithms in the brakes... Whatever, dude.'

But compare Tesla's innovation to the ongoing intercourse between General Motors and the governments of both the United States and China.

Conan's rock 'n roll metaphor is spot on. All these industries being overwhelmed by computer tech call to mind the Sinatra-era celebrities on television in the 60's, trying to make sense of the Beatles. 'Wait a minute... All these stunningly gorgeous teenage girls are showing up in plunging necklines and miniskirts to scream in adoration for guys with hair like my daughter playing fuzztone guitar without even a horn section?'

Youse guys is harsh:

> Jobs hired the detail
> people and had little
> tolerance for sloppy
> execution.

Tell it to people who bought the Apple III. Or the ones who had to take their Lisas in for weird retrofits which essentially crippled their machines. A lot of those late-90's machines were wickedly slow, and more than once Jobs compelled his users to throw everything out and rebuild their software collections.

Final answer to Cousin's question would be: Elon Musk gets results, but there's no such thing as pristine credentials. I wish the new kids understood how the old folks got us to where we are. As Andreessen says elsewhere, the reason old firms aren't deft in innovation is that the old patterns work wonderfully right up to the moment there's something better.

1 million viewers -

https://twitter.com/DrJaneRuby/status/1068244060253577216

"Border Patrol agent hospitalized after being attacked by illegal immigrant"

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-central-southern-az/tucson/border-patrol-agent-hospitalized-after-being-attacked-by-illegal-immigrant

We obtained internal Google documents showing employees discussing pros/cons of burying @DailyCaller and @BreitbartNews in search results, as a response to @realDonaldTrump winning the 2016 election. Google VP was part of conversation

https://twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1068345724675465216

Ann Coulter on Marc Lamont's firing for his comments about Palestinians and Israel -

"At least this will put an end to the "Jews-control-the-media" slander."

https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/1068286959595003909

Anybody remember the Deep Dream Doggies?

Okay, like that, but people.

Google Is Developing Dossiers on Students Using Their Classroom Products, Disclosures Show

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-is-developing-dossiers-on-students-using-their-products-in-classrooms-disclosures-show/

Marriott Hacked: Massive Data Leak Exposes 500 Million Customers—Starwood Hotels Breached Since 2014

Here's the link -

https://www.newsweek.com/marriott-hack-massive-data-leak-hits-500-million-customers-hotel-breached-1238449

"Elon Musk gets results, but there's no such thing as pristine credentials. "

Well, yeah. That was what I was trying to say. The Saturn V is thought of as an example of perfection today. And although it was a magnificent machine, it wasn't perfect. The test flight prior to Apollo 8 was plagued with premature engine shutdowns, which would have resulted in a mission abort if it had been a manned mission. And it had some first-stage "pogo" problems that were never fully solved. Part of the rationale for cancelling the last three Apollo missions was that people in Washington were getting nervous about how many more times they could go to the well.

I worked on a space project that was, in terms of attitude and culture, a lot like SpaceX. We set out to find better ways of doing things, cut the paperwork, use improved technology to reduce the number of people required. Everyone had multiple jobs and multiple competencies. When we flew a payload, practically everyone who worked for the company went to Houston and worked a console in mission control. It was a great experience. We also had some screwups and, a couple of times, learned some expensive lessons. Some of those occurred because we didn't have the institutional knowledge, that an organization doing the same job a decade previously might have had. But that organization would have been far larger and more expensive than ours. We had pretty good quality control. We had to do a lot of thinking to figure out how to do it without it being a huge overhead burden. We didn't get rid of all of the overhead because you can't and still get the job done the right way. But you can always find ways to reduce it.

When SpaceX started, they were playing with fire regarding quality control. Part of this was due to resources, but part of it was due to a just-git-er-done mentality in which details were sometimes ignored, and that flowed down from Musk ultimately. Through diligent hard work and a bit of luck, nothing really bad happened and they learned lessons. They are better at it than they used to be, and they have successfully demonstrated solutions to some very hard problems. They've also had a few major fuck-ups. That's to be expected in a program of that nature. They are fortunate to have Elon's backing, and not have to waste a bunch of time groveling before Congressional committees every time something goes wrong. Elon firmly believes in the mission, and he pushes people forward. That kind of leadership is hard to beat. Sometimes people under him have to say "whoa, wait a minute". Elon has gotten better than he used to be at listening to those voices.

Finally, a word about NASA. Don't confuse the NASA people with their organization. In a very real way, the working-level people at NASA are in opposition to their organization. Yes, there are bad apples. You can always find bad apples. But there are a whole bunch of diligent people who are chafing because they aren't getting a chance to do any of the things that NASA ought to be doing, which is advanced exploration. They just announced a new lunar initiative. Everyone is excited now, but as always in the aerospace industry, no requirement is real until it comes with a check attached. We'll see.

"A New Biography Takes on Edward Gorey, a Stubborn Enigma and Master of the Comic Macabre"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/books/review-born-to-be-posthumous-edward-gorey-biography-mark-dery.html

First paragraphs:

By Jennifer Szalai Nov. 28, 2018

Writers are supposed to have a hard time killing their darlings, but there are a few who apparently thrill to the task. In “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey,” the cultural critic Mark Dery explains how Gorey was always looking to pare things down. Right up until his death from a heart attack in 2000, at 75, he was relentlessly productive — staging plays, producing puppet shows, illustrating books and publishing a hundred or so little volumes of drawings paired with arch, taciturn texts — while taking care to keep it all “very brief,” as Gorey put it, in pursuit of what Dery calls “an almost haiku-like narrative compression.”

But it was by murdering other kinds of darlings on the page that Gorey earned his reputation for the comic macabre. Poisoned husbands, heartbroken suicides, gaunt innocents so consumed by illness that they wander into the street and get run over by a car: Gorey depicted their grisly deaths, and often their hollow-eyed ghosts, in meticulously crosshatched tableaux that resembled Victorian engravings. He even created an alphabet book, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” that dispatched 26 wee ones with matter-of-fact equanimity. (“I is for Ida who drowned in a lake / J is for James who took lye by mistake.”) Dead children became such a Gorey signature that The New Yorker asked him why so many of his victims were young, to which Gorey replied: “It’s just so obvious. They’re the easiest targets.”

Gorey, however, isn’t the easiest target for a biographer, as Dery himself admits. Part of this has to do with what seems to be the enormous gap — or the yawning crevasse, to put it in high-flown Goreyland terms — between art and artist. Even some of Gorey’s most ardent fans assumed he had to be British and long deceased. Such intricate, gothic scenes were supposed to unfurl from the pen of a wan, wraithlike neurasthenic holed up in a garret — not some towering Midwesterner partial to floor-length fur coats and busy days attending the New York City Ballet. There’s only so much biographical material Dery can wrest from the work...

(snip)

Check out the articles at NPR and the BBC, too.

Gorey was drafted during WWII, graduated from Harvard in 1950 (he majored in French), and his roommate there was the poet Frank O'Hara.

Aside from the usual favorites like "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" and "The Wuggly Ump," two stories of his I like are "The Sinking Spell" (for its unusual gentleness) and "The Tuning Fork" (for its semi-friendly monster).

Anybody remember the name of that Kevin Spacey gambling movie?

The psychology profession's cognitive dissonance regarding evolution. The following exchange takes place in my mind:

Me: "So humans are blank slates. All of our thoughts, opinions and actions are determined by society."

Psychologist: "Yes."

Me: "And all humans are inherently good. Bad people are made that way by society."

Psychologist: "True. No one is born bad."

Me: "But society is made up of people. If there are no bad people, how does society become evil?"

Psychologist: "Because it is controlled by people from evil identity groups."

Me: "How did the people in those identity groups get to be evil?"

Psychologist: "They were born that way."

Me: "You just argued against your own theory."

Psychologist: "Shut up, racist."

More from Amy's friend Sheryl.

Pristine credentials? maybe the US Navy can learn things without the pain.

At Jutland, history issued a grim verdict on British administrative prowess. Germany had only started building an oceangoing battle fleet around the turn of the century. Consumed with administrative trivia, the vaunted British Navy—which had ruled the waves for a century since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805—came off worst against a fledgling navy crewed by landsmen reared on continental combat.

Perversely, the Royal Navy performed poorly at Jutland in 1916 in part because it won big at Trafalgar that long century before. In October 1805, an outnumbered fleet commanded by Lord Horatio Nelson, Great Britain’s god of sea warfare, crushed the combined fleets of France and Spain off the Andalusian coast. In doing so, Nelson’s force eliminated all peer opposition for the balance of the 19th century.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/13/the-u-s-navy-has-forgotten-what-its-like-to-fight/

> Some of those occurred because
> we didn't have the institutional
> knowledge, that an organization
> doing the same job a decade previously
> might have had.

I-knowledge is a weird thing, and years ago I heard that it was particularly a problem for rocketry: The people who'd built this-or-that Saturn series were gone, and had taken their technology with them... Not that they were bashful, but they were, y'know, dead now. I heard the same thing about the Panama Canal, that its enabling genius was unrecoverably dispersed by 1940 or so. (I wish I had saved the cites for those. These things stick in the brain like the Lost Commandments. And for the aforementioned Easterbrook article. I've spent hours Googling for it. He quoted an engineer describing his reaction when first hearing of the shuttle + SRBs. It went something like 'You want to take WHAT compounds at WHICH pressures and spin them up to HOW fast before moving them WHERE for combustion?')

> They are fortunate to have Elon's
> backing, and not have to waste a
> bunch of time groveling before
> Congressional committees every
> time something goes wrong.

Indeed, and my fondest hope is that the marketplace can fund this stuff. Taxpayers don't enjoy the groveling any more than do the grovelers. To wit:

> chafing because they aren't getting
> a chance to do any of the things that
> NASA ought to be

It would be great if the best and most expensive talents were priced by the marketplace rather than typically fat gummint pay scales.

> history issued a grim verdict
> on British administrative
> prowess.

Today, we're told the RN has more Admirals than ships, and is one-quarter the size of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.

Amy's advice -

https://twitter.com/amyalkon/status/1068552870897770496

Remember that crazy lady who was forcing her son to be a girl? The Texas court sided with her

https://twitter.com/ChristusPatriot/status/1068047017174167553

These two pieces are rillgud.

> The Texas court sided with her

I knew a couple who forced their kid to be Christian.

Just saying, people have always done crazy stuff with their kids.

The email came within days of a blistering speech Mr. Soros delivered that month at the World Economic Forum, attacking Facebook and Google as a “menace” to society and calling for the companies to be regulated. ~ from the link by Crid at November 30, 2018 8:33 AM

One wonders, with Soros' history of financial shenanigans, if his call for more regulation of social media is in response to a true menace to society or out of a desire for a more easily manipulated mark.

Well, who doesn't love a fresh, steaming omelet?

Thorough fisking.

To pull off confiscation now you’d have to be willing to kill millions of people. The congressman’s suggestion was incredibly stupid, but it was nice to see one of you guys being honest about it for once. In order to maybe, hypothetically save thousands, you’d be willing to slaughter millions. Either you really suck at math, or the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line. And if that’s the case, you’re a sick bastard, and a great example of why the rest of us aren’t ever going to give up our guns.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/11/19/the-2nd-amendment-is-obsolete-says-congressman-who-wants-to-nuke-omaha/

Well, who doesn't love a fresh, steaming omelet?

Jesu Christi! In the feed on that tweet, one person asked what breakfast the photographer chose.

On the positive side, if it shed a fan blade it didn't rip thru the passenger compartment or the rest of the plane. That said, I think I'd decline the voucher and tell 'em I'm calling John Morgan.

"Perversely, the Royal Navy performed poorly at Jutland in 1916 in part because it won big at Trafalgar that long century before. "

To a considerable extent, that describes the U.S. military in Vietnam.

"It would be great if the best and most expensive talents were priced by the marketplace rather than typically fat gummint pay scales."

That's already started to happen. Watch this space, so to speak.

Today, we're told the RN has more Admirals than ships, and is one-quarter the size of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.

Heh. MSDF is looking at acquiring 100 F-35s so some can be embarked on their Izumo class destroyers.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/27/national/politics-diplomacy/japan-eyes-introduction-multipurpose-aircraft-mother-ship/

Once that's accomplished, the Imperial...errr...MSDF will be able to project power unseen since the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

It's all about the brand

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1068220572470075394

We hardly new ye, Neil.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/11/two-more-women-accuse-neil-degrasse-tyson-of-sexual-misconduct/

It's all about the brand

Lends credibility to my theory that some people have more money than sense.

IRA,

Stella MacCartney-branded white tee shirts can easily go for $200 each and the only thing differentiating it from the $10 Hanes is the tag on the back.

I thought this was a cute wedding proposal but it wasn't

https://twitter.com/Mens_Corner_/status/1067810435863379971

> Heh.

I sincerely apologize for the first-word comma in the sentence you cite.

I hate when people do that. Hate, hate,

→ HATE IT. ←

Adoring readers, if you do it, I'll mock you fiercely even though I did it. Today. Once.

Then again, I also did it at November 30, 2018 10:32 AM.

But that one was okay because it was a comedy. Blog burlesque. A real crackup.

It's not a Nazi swastika, you insane assclowns.

White male cop rescues innocent Buddhist from violent SJW mob.

Establishment patriarchy saves another life.

Ignore that link - unless you like time-wasting games, of course.

Here, try this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=44&v=OkFb6Z4qBo4

This is so messed up on so many levels.

Hang in there, kid, only five years until you can run like hell and never look back.

Here's one of the finest graphics I've seen this year.

For reasons of culture, geology and climate, history is moving north... No matter what, Donny.