Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

On a Los Angeles Times post, somebody commented, "Californians may not miss Elon Musk, but the economy will."

I was curious enough to look this up: last year #Tesla had $24.9 billion in #revenue, and #SpaceX $8.7 billion, while #California's #GDP was $3.9 trillion. So very roughly, Tesla + SpaceX revenue was almost 1% of California GDP, although I doubt all or even most of that money actually stayed in California.

That's not insignificant, but it's not vital either. Given California's overall economic power, I think the state will absorb Musk's departure just fine, especially since there's no way to move a major industrial operation all at once. And most of Tesla's manufacturing is already outside the state.

The main economic impact of moving everything to #Texas may be to (slightly) ameliorate the famously high housing prices in the Bay Area and LA metro. Also, it will raise the average intelligence of both states. That's a win-win!

From comments on a post elsenet: "If I'd wanted to stay in business programming, I wouldn't have hung on the World-Tree a.k.a. grad school for nine years, a sacrifice of myself to myself. And my eye-socket itches."

I can hear this gravestone, and I bet now you can too.

My texts and private messages have blown up. It might be a while before I get through the backlog. And the rock cried out, no hiding place.

I wish #Biden hadn't stepped down. I believe, and will continue to believe, that he could have won—**if** #Democrats had rallied around him after the debate fiasco, instead of being so eager to throw him off the sleigh in the desperate hope of distracting the wolves. But we don't do that, do we? Fucking ever. The circular firing squad is always ready. Democrats fall in love, and then they fall out of it, while #Republicans fall in line.

Well. This is where we are now. As the prophecy foretold. The prophet was Octavia Butler, BTW. Seriously, go read *Parable of the Talents* again and tell me you don't see it.

The nominee has to has to has to be Vice President #Harris. She's our best chance of national survival. I will not be taking questions at this time.

If I were a Party official, I'd seriously try to plant someone in the audience to yell "Give 'em hell, Harris!" at an opportune moment during her next speech. So, of course, she could come back with "I don't give them hell. I tell the truth and they think it's hell!" But probably no one will do that. Lack of showmanship is almost as much a Democratic flaw as lack of party discipline.

Yeah, I'm scared. If you're not, you're not paying attention.

Take some time. Absorb the impact. Process the fear and anger and grief. Do what you have to do, for as long as you need.

Please come back when you can. We have roughly three and a half months to figure out how to save our country. Anyone who seriously decides to get out, and can make it happen—I don't blame you. Most of us don't have that option.

Good afternoon, and good luck.

Yes, I'm quite sure many of the 1/6 participants discussed their plans to make war on the United States on #Xitter.

I find this a horribly believable future, except I'm pretty sure some flavor of Protestants would win the battle.

@Lana I find this a horribly believable future, except I'm pretty sure some flavor of Protestants would win the battle.

@UweHalfHand Yeah. And we could have had that world. There was nothing stopping us. Except, apparently, ourselves.

@AndySocial With all the screaming about Biden's mental state, the media's failure to report on Trump's increasingly bizarre rants rises (or sinks) nearly to the level of criminal negligence.

🎼The Eagle has landed, tell your children when
Time won't drive us down to dust again!

For years I sang along to those words and felt them as they were intended: I believed that of all humanity's ephemeral accomplishments, at least one would last. In one sense it's still true. We did this thing, made a mark on another world that will almost surely outlast any monument on our own. Reached beyond our home to touch something outside the warm, nurturing blanket of atmosphere. Took our first tottering steps as a spacefaring species. Not once, but several times, to show it was no fluke.

"We" is not metaphorical, by the way. I was a baby on July 20, 1969, but my father was hard at work making it happen, one of hundreds of thousands. I grew up in a house full of space memorabilia. It is, in every sense, in my blood.

And then, the long retreat. From far beyond the blanket to barely past its outer edge. Not a collapse but a slow steady grinding down, an ill-maintained machine juddering toward its inevitable halt. The world in those brightly colored pamphlets and posters slipping from our grasp. Promises that always took too long or cost too much. Science and exploration transmuted, by a kind of reverse alchemy, to rich madmen's ego games.

It's been a long time since I believed that hopeful future was inevitable, and now I seriously wonder if it's even possible. Scientifically possible, technically possible, economically possible—oh yes, it's still all of those. Politically possible, there's the rub. Socially possible. Possible by imagination and courage and will. Maybe not. Maybe 1969-1972 was a unique high point, one of those shining moments that will never come again. We all have those in our lives, and we learn to live with them.

The footprints are still there. Still I can look up at the sky and hope I'll live long enough to see someone return.

Fascinating bit of #scientific #history: using #radio #astronomy to measure #continental #drift. These days they just do it with #GPS, of course.

https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report2/42-56/56I.PDF

@ampersine I expect Republicans to be evil. But it's really striking to me how cowardly so many of them are, too. Like diarrhea icing on a shitcake.

Some setting the record straight about Thomas Matthew #Crooks, the attempted #assassin of convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John #Trump. This is as much for my own reference as anything, but I'll be happy if it's useful to anyone else.

The following are verifiable facts:

1. He donated money to the Progressive Turnout Project, a #Democratic #PAC. Early reports that the donor was another Thomas Crooks, living in another part of Pennsylvania, appear to be false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation/

2. He was a registered #Republican. He donated to PTP on January 20th, 2021, the day Biden was inaugurated, when he was 17. He registered as a Republican in September 2021, shortly after he turned 18. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-republican/

There is really no contradiction here.

It’s hard to remember now, but #President Joe #Biden took office with very high approval ratings. My guess is that like a lot of other people, Crooks was feeling pretty good about President Biden in January 2021, but soured on him by fall of that year. There was no good reason for this; people didn’t give President Biden *nearly* enough time to clean up the mess convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump left behind. But the rapid change in the national mood is undeniable.

Many people are pretty aimless in their late teens and early twenties, searching for an adult identity. Crooks was an extreme and tragic example.

There is a very long conversation to be had about why members of a certain demographic to which he belonged are much more prone than others to turning their search for identity into grotesque violence—but that's not what this post is about. Just trying to make sure the facts are clear. Supporters of convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump don't care about facts at all, as they've shown over and over. We can and should do better.

So now that the facts are clear, let's get back to making sure convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump never gets within a mile of the White House again, by legitimate means if at all possible.

Presented without comment.

#Pasta evolved. It rebelled. There are many noodles. AND IT HAS A PLAN.

@skua Hell, you have to joke about it. You can go nuts otherwise. But collectively forgetting about it *is* nuts. I'd rather have the jokes. 🙂

@AndySocial I really miss being in the patient care biz, but that's one thing about it I don't miss at all. And I think it's *dramatically* worse than it was back then. Not just in medicine, either—it seems like we're in a particularly anti-intellectual phase at the moment, where all kinds of expertise are mocked or ignored. I have no idea what to do about this.

My Facebook Memories from 2020 and 2021 are full of posts about #Covid-19. It's so weird to me how that's just vanished from the national conversation.

Everyone knew at least one person who died from it, often more than one. Nearly everyone was terrified of dying from it themselves, and the ones who weren't were burying their heads in the sand. It killed a million Americans in a year and a half—more than every war we've fought, combined, for a *century* and a half. At its height, it was far and away the leading cause of death. It still kills people, albeit at a much reduced rate: far less than the big killers like heart disease and cancer, but about ten times as many as die in motor vehicle accidents. You know, by way of comparison.

And *it will happen again*. Maybe a new strain of SARS-CoV2, maybe influenza, maybe something else entirely. Something is out there right now, something that doesn't infect humans, or causes at most mild symptoms, or isn't easy to catch. Yet. Mindlessly waiting for the next mutation, for its turn.

I don't know what it's like in other countries. In the US, we seem to have collectively decided to pretend it never happened. We're good at that, of course—if we weren't, the current political landscape would look very different. And I don't want this to be about politics, but of course it is. When the next plague strikes, and the next after that, and the next after *that*, our response will depend critically on who's in charge. Sorry, folks, pathogens don't care about market-based solutions.

Honest, I'm not trying to ruin anyone's day. I just can't quite believe that we've all tacitly agreed to this case of national amnesia. But I suppose I don't have much choice.