Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[Owendonovan]

SpaceX loses spacecraft after catching rocket booster at the launch pad in latest Starship test.

That's 2 in a row.

https://apnews.com/article/spacex-elon- ... 8d9357d7ba

[Suliso]

There are some serious issues on the upper stage. They should pause for few months to get to the bottom of the problem.

[ponchi101]

I just don't know whether technological advance can be halted...

It can't. There is no way you can stop technology in a world that is as interconnected as ours.
But that, to me, is the crucial issue. Like Harari says, what do you do with this useless class? Mind you, he does not define them as useless in the pejorative sense that will have no skills or professions. He means that those skills and professions are being replaced by AI and automation, and therefore they will not be able to enter the work market.
Right now, it is getting to the stage in which if you do not enter any of the STEM careers (plus medicine), you are being a labor kamikaze. And as much as I was never interested in the liberal arts as a field of study (I value them as an achievement of the human nature), a lot of people do. What career offers can you give them?
Last. Now, AI is being really good at using software other than itself. In the past, there was a good demand for the top notch software. AutoCAD programmers, PhotoShop designers, etc. Now, even those people are being in danger of losing their jobs.
That is what worries me. What do you do with those people? And, most terrifying, what happens to me if I get replaced? An elderly person that lives in L. America. I am scared, by now.

[Suliso]

I wish I had good answers. Myself now approaching 50 and past the age of being able to easily change careers...

Of course we will come up with something, but that might not be in time for this generation. What might help somewhat is the coming significant population decrease.

[ti-amie]

My initial answer to Suliso about jobs vs technology was both. After reading the discussion between Suliso and Ponchi that is still my answer. If society can't find a way to gainfully employ people what will we be left with? A permanent underclass?

We had discussions on TAT1.0 about training men and women in regions like Appalachia for jobs in tech but now that Tiny and Elmo, when he's not blowing up rockets, want to rely on people with H1b visas because they will work for less pay, be willing to live in dorms, and work unbelievable hours.

To me that is why the culture wars have become paramount for the party formally known as the GOP. The shredding of the social safety net makes no sense to me.

[ponchi101]

This is one of the many things that bug me about Elon.
SpaceX has now lost several vehicles. And they continue to develop, as they should.
But he wants to scrape off the F35 program, because some of the aircraft have malfunctioned. Hey, it is the same thing. The F35 and the F22 are by far the most advanced fighter jets in the world. But the technology is at the very edge, just as SpaceX is.
So, by his own logic, this SpaceX vehicle should be scrapped.

[Suliso]

Some more about technology based jobs reductions. I've been working in R&D department of a large company for nearly 16 years now. The company has done a lot of oursourcing to cheaper places (India, Hungary, Spain and even UK), but I can't think of much to technology alone. Perhaps going from 3 secretaries in the department to 1 1/2 would count.

Maybe the next 15 years will be very different, but maybe not.

[ti-amie]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-s ... 025-03-26/

[Owendonovan]

This is a fun little snarkfest from The NY Times.

Amanda Hess
By Amanda Hess
Amanda Hess is a cultural critic who writes about pop and internet culture.
April 14, 2025

This morning, Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight startup, Blue Origin, launched six well-known women into space. The company documented the event with a livestream hosted by the sportscaster Charissa Thompson. The celebrities Kris Jenner, Orlando Bloom and Oprah Winfrey watched from the ground. Bezos himself escorted the crew to the capsule. As the rocket blasted into the sky, live audio from inside the ship was broadcast down to Earth. One of the occupants could be heard screaming: “Oh my goddess!”

Bezos has said that it’s his generation’s job to “build a road to space, so that future generations can unleash their creativity.” Now he has made his spaceship into the world’s most extravagant influencer platform. The flight’s roster seems to have been assembled with the energy of an American Girl doll collection, with seats awarded to women with different claims to fame and relevance. There was the pop star Katy Perry, the journalist Gayle King, the aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, the feminist activist Amanda Nguyen, the film producer Kerianne Flynn and Lauren Sánchez — the television journalist, aviation businesswoman, philanthropist and children’s book author who is engaged to marry Bezos.

Bezos’ company has promoted this as the “first all-woman spaceflight” since the Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she made a solo trip to the Earth’s orbit in 1963. Tereshkova spent three days in space, circled the Earth 48 times and landed an international celebrity and feminist icon. The Blue Origin flight attempted to reverse-engineer that historic moment: By taking established celebrities and activists and launching them into space, it applied a feminist sheen to Blue Origin and made its activities feel socially relevant by association.

Blue Origin pitched the flight as a gambit to encourage girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers and to, as Sánchez put it in an Elle cover story on the trip, inspire “the next generation of explorers.” But the flight was recreational, and its passengers are not space professionals but space tourists. Their central mission was to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it. They are like payload specialists with a specialty in marketing private rockets. If the flight proves anything, it is that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most decadent spoils alongside the world’s wealthiest men.

Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. (In 2019, NASA was embarrassingly forced to scuttle an all-women spacewalk when it realized it did not have enough suits that fit them.) An all-women Blue Origin spaceflight signifies only that several women have amassed the social capital to be friends with Lauren Sánchez.

Blue Origin is one of several private spaceflight companies — among them Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures and SpaceX — now offering rich people and their friends access to space. Its New Shepard rocket is self-piloting, and the six women had no technical duties on the flight. Though two participants had some aerospace experience (Bowe worked for NASA, and Nguyen interned there), Sánchez has said she picked them all because they are “storytellers” who could step off the flight and promote their experiences through journalism, film and song. To Blue Origin, their value lies expressly in their amateurism. Kristin Fisher, a journalist and the daughter of the NASA astronaut Anna Lee Fisher, who joined the livestream, called the flight’s roster “so refreshing.” In the early days of human spaceflight, astronauts “were all white male military test pilots, and they had to have ‘the right stuff.’ You could never talk about nerves, or being nervous, or your feelings,” Fisher said. “But now, in 2025, it is the right stuff.”

Sánchez arranged for her favorite fashion designers to craft the mission’s suits, leveraging it into yet another branding opportunity. Souvenirs of the flight sold on Blue Origin’s website feature a kind of yassified shuttle patch design. It includes a shooting-star microphone representing King, an exploding firework representing Perry and a fly representing Sánchez’s 2024 children’s book about the adventures of a dyslexic insect. Each woman was encouraged to use her four minutes of weightlessness to practice a different in-flight activity tailored to her interests. Nguyen planned to use them to conduct two vanishingly brief science experiments, one of them related to menstruation, while Perry pledged to “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”

The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs. In each case, she stands to win a free trip to space. She can have it all, including a family back on Earth. “Guess what?” Sánchez told Elle. “Moms go to space.” (Fisher, the first mother in space, went there in 1984.)

The whole thing reminds me of the advice Sheryl Sandberg passed on to women in “Lean In,” her memoir of scaling the corporate ladder in the technology industry. When Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive of Google, offered Sandberg a position that did not align with her own professional goals, he told her: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” It is the proximity to power that matters, not the goal of the mission itself.

As Blue Origin loudly celebrates women as consumers of private space travel, it has elided the experiences of professional female astronauts — including the little details that humanized their own flights. Elle suggested that the Blue Origin flight “will be the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done.” As Perry put it, “Space is going to finally be glam.” But in fact, female astronauts have long brought their beauty work into space with them. Life magazine published an image of Tereshkova at the hairdresser, explaining that she was “primping for orbit.” The astronaut Rhea Seddon, who first flew to space in 1985, took NASA-tested cosmetics onboard, knowing that she would be heavily photographed and the images widely circulated.

Though sending women to space has largely been framed as a project for inspiring other women, it stokes certain male fantasies too. Life described Tereshkova’s mission this way: “A blue-eyed blonde with a new hairdo stars in a Russian space spectacular.” Senator Kenneth Keating of New York said she was “carrying romance to a new high.” Robert Voas, who served as a NASA astronaut-training officer in the 1960s, put it this way: “I think we all look forward to the time when women will be a part of our spaceflight team, for when this time arrives, it will mean that man will have really found a home in space — for the woman is the personification of the home.”

Blue Origin’s vision is that “millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth, our blue origin.” This spaceflight feels like a training mission for the billionaire fantasy of escaping Earth’s smoldering husk. In order to fulfill that dream, women will need to get onboard. The private aerospace industry’s largely male clientele may not wish to bro down forever on Mars. They will desire moms to go to space with them, and fiancées too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/arts ... perry.html

[ti-amie]

Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. (In 2019, NASA was embarrassingly forced to scuttle an all-women spacewalk when it realized it did not have enough suits that fit them.) An all-women Blue Origin spaceflight signifies only that several women have amassed the social capital to be friends with Lauren Sánchez.

I stopped reading here:

Sánchez arranged for her favorite fashion designers to craft the mission’s suits, leveraging it into yet another branding opportunity.

They're trying everything to make that gazillion dollar wedding Sanchez and Bezos are holding palatable to the masses. Good on Ms Hess for giving this the treatment it deserves.

[Suliso]

On a more important note they're going after Harvard now. This kind of attack on top universities (Harvard just latest and most famous) will greatly diminish research in USA. As I noted a month ago or so if this continues top talent will move to applied research in industry, retire or move abroad. Nobody becomes Harvard professor just to teach classes.

[ponchi101]

On a more important note they're going after Harvard now. This kind of attack on top universities (Harvard just latest and most famous) will greatly diminish research in USA. As I noted a month ago or so if this continues top talent will move to applied research in industry, retire or move abroad. Nobody becomes Harvard professor just to teach classes.

Right now, why would any top talent from a foreign country would come to America is something I would not understand.

[ponchi101]

This is a fun little snarkfest from The NY Times.

Amanda Hess
By Amanda Hess
Amanda Hess is a cultural critic who writes about pop and internet culture.
April 14, 2025

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/arts ... perry.html

Fun read.
Wonder what would happened if a man had written it.

[Suliso]

Right now, why would any top talent from a foreign country would come to America is something I would not understand.

Yes, but there is danger of losing talent instead of merely not gaining. It hasn't happened in US since at least WWII, but under this regime...

[Owendonovan]

Right now, why would any top talent from a foreign country would come to America is something I would not understand.

Yes, but there is danger of losing talent instead of merely not gaining. It hasn't happened in US since at least WWII, but under this regime...

Hi India!