Tag: Elon Musk

Elon Musk Bows to the Scientific and Economic Wisdom of photog and Pivots to Luna City Goal

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Last June I wrote a post called Moon Mining in which I made a lot of hyperbolic statements about my future as a miner of precious metals on the Moon.  But in a more serious vein (no pun intended?) I said, “But seriously, I think there is a lot more likelihood of the Moon becoming economically useful to humans than Mars.  The difference in distance alone makes Mars almost impossibly difficult for manned flights.

The Moon on the other hand was reached more than fifty-five years ago by men whose technological capabilities were rudimentary compared to what we have at our disposal today.  Imagine what improvements modern computing power and automation could do to make reaching and working on the Moon safer and easier.”

And then there’s this post from last week, “It’s Shiny and New” where I talk about Luna City.

And here we are a few days later and this headline appears:

“In a reversal, SpaceX prioritizes ‘city’ on the moon over Mars project, Musk says”

In the article it says, “Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a “self‑growing city” on the moon, which could be achieved in less than 10 years.

SpaceX still intends to start on Musk’s long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, “but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

What else do I need to say.  Elon, there’s no shame in admitting you’re wrong when someone gently reminds you that wisdom is still a higher authority than Midas-like wealth.  Well, he’s still relatively young and there’s time for him to learn what’s really important, namely building Luna City and naming the main street Neil Armstrong Blvd.

Seriously, I was starting to doubt whether he wasn’t just blowing smoke with all the Mars mission talk.  That stuff is a generation away.  Building and maintaining a permanent Moon base is an achievable goal that will show us whether human habitation beyond the Earth is feasible and profitable.  If it isn’t it’s better to learn that from a place where retreat takes a couple of days rather than a year.  Trillions of dollars and, more importantly, lives would be saved.

So, get going Mr. Musk.  Sell the boys in Washington a plan to build something like a town on the Moon.  You’ll make a whole lot of money and you’ll spark the imagination of a generation of boys whose grandfathers thrilled to the Apollo landings.  Just make sure you do a good job on the accounting so it won’t come back to haunt you when the Democrats come back into power.  They’re a vindictive bunch and they love to punish people whom they hate and from everything I’ve read they hate you now even more than they hate people like me.  And that’s a whole lot of hate anyway you stack it.

I have to confess I’m actually kind of excited to hear this goal.  I think he can get this done.  I’m guessing Trump would like to have his name involved in it too.  That quite a combination.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 05JUN2025 – The BBB

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Actually, based on the title, I thought this would be a political post.
I’m referring to Elon’s opposition to the BBB.
Is it perfect? No.
Will we get a better package with a razor thin majority in the house and the RINOs and squishes we currently have in the GOP?
Also no.
The BBB is just a stepping stone and will give team MAGA breathing room to win the midterms and, maybe, get rid of a few RINOs. Here in Texas, we are going to primary John Cornyn and replace him with a real conservative.
Trump needs time to show his economic policies are working and to get the right people in congress.
Baby steps, Elon. Baby steps.

And, yes. I would love to see a moon base. But its Elon’s money and if he wants to spend it on a symbolic trip to Mars, I won’t stop him.

Come On Elon, Baby Steps

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So, what to talk about tonight?  I’m kinda at a loss.  I’m not in the politics mood.  I haven’t figured out the next chapters in the stories I’ve been spinning.  Not much going on around the Compound today and even the First Selectman has been on his best behavior and hasn’t eaten anyone in a few weeks.  I guess things are in a lull right now.

So, I was thinking with all the talk about Elon Musk getting us to Mars was that really the space mission we need?  I think not.  What would be better and much easier would be to build a Moon base.  The space station we have now is a lame piece of junk that is more trouble than its worth.  And living in free fall is really bad for humans.  But a permanent base on the Moon is much easier than a Mars trip, much cheaper and much less risky for the astronauts.

Of course, the real reason why this base would be so valuable won’t appear until a magnetic survey is performed and a strange “anomaly” discovered.  Once this mystery is investigated and the signal is tracked back to a Jovian (or is it a Saturnian) moon the real exploration of the solar system will begin in earnest.  All we need to remember is not to drive the ship’s AI psychotic with conflicting mission requirements and also make a point of not teaching it to read lips.

But seriously (or semi-seriously), I think a Moon base is a much more realistic space project and putting stuff on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit is probably a good idea in general.  There’s just too much junk floating around up there.

As for the name, Luna City is one obvious choice.  I could be convinced that Sheepshead Bay would sound good.  After all there are a lot of Mares up there so a seaside name makes some sense.

But the most important thing that a lunar base would provide is a chance to see if space travel is useful at all.  Can a base on the close-by Moon come up with anything useful that can’t be done better and cheaper on Earth?

One thing I can think of are particle accelerators.  Maintaining a vacuum on the Moon will be a heck of a lot easier than on Earth.  And the lower gravity might have some advantages in certain kinds of construction.  And there are probably other scientific experiments that can be done better on the Moon.  Maybe the long lunar night would be a great time to do telescopic observations.  Instead of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes maybe we could build a really big telescope on the Moon and see right out to the edge of the universe.  Of course, we might not like what we find on “the edge.”  We might find that the galaxies are arranged to spell out the words, “TO READ BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MUST BUY A SUBSCRIPTION!”

Well, anyway, that’s what I was thinking.  The Moon’s the perfect compromise between the fantastically risky Mars mission and the useless and boring International Space Station.  Come on Elon, baby steps.

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

The Sesquarcentennial Man

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Today is my regular Wednesday zoom call with the boys and of course we were hooting about last night’s speech.  Everyone loved the hilarious jabs at Biden, the endless list of billion-dollar boondoggles cut from USAID and Trump’s droll braggadocio of his list of accomplishments.  But I think I had them laughing hardest when I reminded them of the three hundred- and fifty-year-old social security recipient.  I thought a couple of them were going to have a stroke or swallow their tongues.  I think everyone inherently senses how this absurdity just encapsulates what runaway bureaucracy looks like in its terminal stage.  As Trump said, “This guy is a hundred years older than the country but he’s still on the rolls!”  You have to have a kind of primal respect for someone defending a lie that big.  It’s epic.

Now some would rightly point to the much greater financial impact of there being many millions of Americans claiming to be alive after 110, 120, 130 and even 140 years of age.  The benefits for millions of people are enormous.  They’re in the tens of billions of dollars.  They are an outrage and they should be crimes that are rooted out and punished.  Even the people just working in the social security department and ignoring the absurdity of these impossible ages should be punished.

And yet I can’t help but hearken back the Sesquarcentennial Man.  So that means he was born in 1675 AD.  Isaac Newton and Louis XIV of France were still alive back then.  In that year King Philip’s War broke out, as the Wampanoags attacked Swansea, Massachusetts.  Maybe Sesquarcentennial Man remembers the trauma of those frightening days.  Maybe he still requires medication to deal with the fear.  But whatever else we can say about him the most important characteristic he possesses is that we’re still paying for him.  And without Elon Musk we probably would continue to pay for him until the US Treasury finally closes its doors and goes out of business.

So yeah, we got a hoot out of it and thank you Donald Trump for your love of comedy.  But the real point is that the federal government is filled with people making six figure salaries while ignoring the apparently endless incompetence and corruption going on all around them with no concern for how it impacts their fellow Americans or the country as a whole.

Well, I think it just hardens our resolve to see DOGE fire as many of these useless and despicable individuals as is humanly possible.  We should want to see the number of federal employees reduced to the bare minimum possible through the use of automation and continuous improvement of the systems and processes needed to perform the critical functions of the government.  And by eliminating all non-essential functions of government.  No more research studies into fields that the government has no business funding.  If anyone has an unquenchable curiosity about the sex lives of any animal (including humans) let him pay for that voyeuristic pursuit out of his own pocket.  And likewise for every other pseudoscientific time sink.  Fund yourselves.

But more than anything else, I want to know about Sesquarcentennial Man.  Who is (or was) he?  How many descendants has he?  And most urgently, who’s cashing his social security checks.  Elon, can you help us out here?

Fixing Research With a Chainsaw

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A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.

Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences.  And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.

Now Sabine is far from a conservative.  She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas.  But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.

She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.

I agree with her.  Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science.  It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.

I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies.  It should be a mighty bloodbath.  And that will change the universities too, for the better.  They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.

We All Better Hope He Can

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“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

This to me seems to be a wise policy.  Based on the fairly frequent bubbles and panics occurring in our economic environment I’m fairly convinced that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.  So, I’ll assume that’s what the problem is.  The people running the economy just don’t know what they’re doing.  And maybe, all things considered, they’re doing as good a job as is possible.  After all, human society is a dynamic system with an enormous number of factors contributing to the output of goods and services and a big random universe throwing everything from hurricanes and droughts to wars and plagues at us in an almost completely random manner.  Alright, I’ll grant that too.  It’s a maelstrom of causes and effects.  So then, what’s a leader of the United States to do?

I believe there is some guidance that can be used.  All the way back to Aristotle and all the way up to our own nation it has been observed that the most successful, stable and the most pleasant nations to live in are the ones with the largest middle class.  Not the one with the most billionaires and certainly not the one with the most poor people, but the one with the largest number of people who work for a living and live well enough to keep their families well-fed, well-clothed and with enough money to do something for fun every now and then.  When the majority of the country can be described in that way you are living in as close as life on Earth can come to a paradise.

And up until about the 1970’s that was a reasonable description of post-WWII America.  People thought they were well off and that their children would be even more prosperous in the future.  But since the 1970’s the proportion of Americans who felt this way has been steadily shrinking until now only the elites feel this is true.  The working class has slipped out of the middle class and the white-collar jobs that were the hallmark of the upper middle class are disappearing from the United States through automation and through off-shoring of the manufacturing industries that used to provide both blue-collar and white-collar jobs for the majority of the nation.

Well, all of this is old news.  We all know all about it.  Now we see Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to get American (and foreign) corporations to manufacture their products here and thereby provide Americans with relatively high value employment.  I applaud Trump for doing this.  He needs to do as much of this as possible.  In fact, this will need to be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.

But this is just a band-aid.  Forcing these companies to bring some part of their manufacturing capacity back here is a small part of what’s needed.  America needs a “Marshall Plan” to identify the industries and infrastructure that will produce a re-invigorated middle class.  All the super-geniuses who have created artificial intelligence and advanced automated systems need to put their supposedly infallible business acumen to the problem of how to engineer an economic order where the maximum percentage of Americans are prosperous and usefully employed.  Call it a Marshall Plan or a Manhattan Project or just a survival plan.

The free-traders or the globalists or whatever you want to call the people who deindustrialized America from the 1970’s on have demonstrated how to destroy the middle class.  Now it’s the federal government’s job to undo that process using the levers of power they control; taxation, tariffs and the anti-trust laws.  But as I said it’s not enough to just bring back the old industries.  Innovation will always drive prosperity.  Silicon Valley currently represents that innovation.  What must be done though is to force the innovators to reckon with the dislocation that their innovation can cause to the lives of regular people and come up with a way to make change work for all of us.

A hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk into his administration.  Granted, right now Musk is entirely a disruptor of the established order.  But he is also capable of building up new constructs.  The challenge is to see if Trump and Musk can produce a vision that includes the restoration of the American middle class.  I hope he can.  We all better hope he can.

Fake Science Exposed

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Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.

TANSTAAFL!

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I was looking at the latest available numbers for the federal budget (fiscal 2023).

Mandatory
Social Security $1.3 trillion 1,300,000,000,000
Medicare  $839 billion 839,000,000,000
Medicaid $616 billion 616,000,000,000
Welfare $448 billion 448,000,000,000
Other $502 billion 502,000,000,000
subtotal 3,705,000,000,000
Discretionary
Defense $805 billion 805,000,000,000
Non-Defense $917 billion 917,000,000,000
subtotal 1,722,000,000,000
Interest on the Debt $659 billion 659,000,000,000
Grand Total 6,086,000,000,000

And we only brought in about 4.4 trillion in revenue that year so we ran a deficit of about $1.7 trillion dollars. And that is equal to all of the “discretionary” spending which by the way includes all of defense spending. Now that is a grim picture.  But as the kids say, “It is what it is.”  What we should be shooting for is a budget that doesn’t exceed our revenues minus our debt payment.  So, our budget should be around $3.74 trillion dollars.  Or roughly speaking we have to trim the budget by 40%.

That’s a lot.  But you know, I’ll bet it’s about in line with the amount of waste we could delete from the budget if honest people were looking at it.  Even line items like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are riddled with inefficiency and featherbedding employment practices that a determined auditor could ferret out and eliminate.  If Elon Musk could fire 70% of the staff at Twitter without any noticeable diminution in the capability of the business surely the federal bureaucracy can be pared back by 40% without too much trouble.  Let’s face it automation probably already does most of the work that these people get credit for.

It may not be possible to reduce all that spending within a year or even four years but what is needed is a detailed plan to do just that. The plan needs to be a continuous improvement process that allows managers to apply metrics that tell them how many people to remove from the system on a monthly basis and how the remaining human resources are allocated and rated to determine who stays and who goes.  It will be as murderous and cutthroat as the private sector is.  Basically, it will be hell for bureaucrats and many of them will run away screaming just to avoid the stress.  But it is exactly what’s needed.  We can’t afford to make the federal government a jobs program for the dim-witted and lazy people who can’t make it in the private sector.  At the very least the first thing we should do is lower all salaries by 40%.  And I understand there may be some lower paid employees for which this is an unreasonable cut.  But that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis.  But it’s a good estimate for what we’re trying to do.  And as far as boondoggles, we know there are plenty of those.  Probably not two and half trillion dollars’ worth but still plenty to trim.

And let’s be honest.  We all probably benefit from many programs that will have to be cut.  So be it.  Everybody will have to suck it up to some extent.  Who knows, it may turn out that we can’t have free Chat GPT because it’s really paid for by our tax dollars.  Fine.  We’ll have to pay for that and probably a whole bunch of other things ourselves.  Well, in the words of RAH, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

H.O.P.E.

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Elon Musk is all over the place.  Everywhere you look he’s involved in any number of important and cutting-edge endeavors.  And this is in addition to his business ventures.  He runs a space company (SpaceX), a satellite communications company (Starlink), an electric car manufacturer (Tesla) and whatever X is.

Most recently Musk has volunteered to assist the nascent Trump administration in taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy (the imaginary D.O.G.E. or Department of Government Efficiency).  And considering that Musk fired about 80% of the employees of Twitter to make X less unprofitable, it makes sense that he might be supremely qualified to pare back the Washington payroll.  And based on the favorable results of Argentina’s experiment with government reduction I wholeheartedly endorse Trump employing Musk, Ramaswami and any other tech bros who want to help us get the national debt under control.  Amen.

But if Elon Musk really is a very smart guy who understands how automation and other technology breakthroughs can be integrated into a livable world order then that would be a much more worthwhile contribution to the mess, we’re currently in.  As things currently stand the last fifty years of computer advancement have revolutionized the efficiency of the workplace.  Programs like a world processor and a spreadsheet have allowed on person to do the work that previously required whole departments.  The secretarial pool is a thing of the past.  Even the technical departments have been pared way back because a pc on every desk means that a computation department is unneeded.  At most you need a couple of IT nerds who troubleshoot network issues.  And in the factories, machinists have been replaced by CNC machines.  Well, let’s say they’ve been replaced ten to one with a CNC technician.  And so on and so forth.  Even engineers and scientists have seen the handwriting on the wall.  AI will begin to make them redundant too.  And supposedly it will replace authors, musicians and other kinds of artists.  And finally, AI is supposed to eventually replace software coders too.

If you’re a tech entrepreneur you are probably saying to yourself, “Duh!  That’s what’s supposed to happen.  That’s efficiency and progress.”  And from your point of view, you’re right.  Better, cheaper, faster.  But if you’re a human being and the parent of human beings you’re saying to yourself, “Then what the hell do we do?”

And that is what the big brain guys should be thinking about.  People like Jeff Bezos have been perfecting a way to eliminate ninety percent of the humans who sell us stuff.  And then they want to whittle down that last ten percent forever.  Instead, what we need is a plan to keep one hundred percent of Americans gainfully and happily employed.  If you’re a libertarian you’ll say that competition is a good thing and allowing Amazon to bankrupt every retail seller except Walmart is a good thing that brings down the price of goods and helps everyone.

I disagree.  Machines are more efficient and cheaper to use than humans.  That’s proven.  But we are human beings.  If the machines aren’t benefitting us then they are the enemy.  And we should fight back against them.  In a sense, that’s what this recent election was about.  The people who have been made obsolete by automation and globalization and efficiency voted to throw out of office the people who represent the people who make, run and own the machines.  They want Donald Trump to turn back the clock and bring back a world where they could work in a factory that made cars or toasters or pencils and make enough money to raise a family.

Well, he can try and he can do a lot of things that will tilt the playing field in favor of those that have been left behind.  But in the long run efficiency will triumph.  So instead of a Department of Government Efficiency I think Trump and Musk and Ramaswami would be better off inventing a Human Optimization Planning Effort (HOPE).  And they could use the existing monopoly laws to force people like Bezos to design their processes and systems to accommodate a new parameter; human happiness.  If they don’t, then one day the forgotten men may come visiting the tech lords.  And they may be armed with the proverbial pitch forks and torches.  And despite what we saw in “Terminator,” my money is on the peasants.