Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, September 16, 2024
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32 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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It would be informational to know how Laura Loomer – until very recently a source of comedy for watchers of the very-far-out-right – somehow got close to Trump. (No pun intended.)
It suggests that there’s not a lot of internal monitoring on the campaign. She certainly wasn’t a person with an assigned role who he could have met in a campaign setting. And who else is she introducing into Trump’s orbit? I’m pretty sure this last question is giving his team some sleepless hours every night.
@Not the IT Dept.: I don’t really think she’s introducing anyone, unless Bo Tox is a person. She’s just around to feed on his ego, which might be a euphemism.
How about that? the Steelers do know where the end zone is.
As there’s been some discussion of this here, via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice, here’s Albert Burneko at Defector on Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars. His first sentence gets right to it,
He adds a line that should become a classic,
@Kathy:
They just have a funny way of getting there sometimes.
A pet peeve of mine is the way the media portrays choices by Congressional leadership as essentially Constitutional mandates. So they often talk about how Dems can’t get the votes needed to pass some legislation in the Senate, when the reality is that the Dems have a majority but some specific Republican is filibustering, i.e. preventing majority rule. They don’t mention who that Republican is, they don’t mention how rarely the filibuster was used in the past, but rather just assert, “The Dems don’t have the votes” without even mentioning the ahistorical need for a supermajority for every single issue.
The WaPo has another one today: in talking about how Republicans haven’t been able to pass Government funding legislation for 2 years, they simply state:
They elide the fact that passing a bill with only Republican votes is a choice, and an ahistorical one at that. They could accomplish a great deal if they crafted legislation that got, say 75% of the Republicans and 35% of the Dems. But they choose not to do that, instead employing a metastasized version of the Hastert rule combined with the Gingrich doctrine which has essentially become, “We will pack every bill with issues that are poison to Democrats and so we can’t get any Dem votes, and therefore must pass with only Republican votes”. It’s a choice. It’s not a fact of life.
@gVOR10:
There are many problems with colonizing Mars. The one that’s just as big as the hard radiation problem is: profit. Where is it? Colonization has almost always been either for survival – one bunch of Goths fleeing another bunch of Goths – or for profit. Slaves, sugar, tobacco, spices, gold, precious stones, or even just farm land, etc… What is the Martian equivalent of sugar? Why would anyone, even a jackass of a billionaire, want to spend trillions of dollars to look at reddish sand?
Exploring Mars will be a job for robots. We could colonize the planet using robots but, again, why?
@gVOR10:
If I ever wrote dystopian fiction, I’d choose the following for my pseudonym.
Ann R Key
@Michael Reynolds:
We will probably never populate Mars but Jupiter has been taken care of already.
@Bill Jempty:
That was the work of the most powerful deity, Ate.
@Bill Jempty: C’mon, Bill, ya gotta keep up! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars,_Pennsylvania
@gVOR10:
I’ve mentioned magnetic fields in connection to habitable planets like one or two million times 😉
It’s not entirely a deal breaker when it comes to Mars. But it increases the difficulty and expense to ridiculous levels. After all, 12 astronauts walked on the Moon and a few more orbited it, and they all survived for decades afterwards. Radiation at the Moon is not that different.
The difference is they spent a few days all told per trip, not months, and certainly not lifetimes. I’ve also said a few billion times that Xlon has said not a word about ho he plans to protect his colonists en route to Mars from radiation.
I figure he doesn’t give a damn. If he ever makes the trip himself, his Xtarship will have a solid gold* lining three meters thick.
But in the first place:
@Michael Reynolds:
Which I’ve touched on lots of times before as well.
You do get one thing wrong:
He won’t spend his money on his Quixotic Mars Project. He’ll spend either government or investor money.
I bet he sells two hundred percent of Mars, and cancels the missions on opening night 😀
@Michael Reynolds: My understanding is that the asteroid belt is chock full of valuable metals and minerals. Enough to make going *there* highly profitable.
Mars, in this scenario, would likely become a way station.
By the way, the Space Station doesn’t have a magnetosphere either. Nor does the moon. There are engineering solutions to this kind of problem, the primary issue is cost effectiveness, as you have pointed out.
A quick web search (on Physic Stack Exchange, so it’s fairly reliable) suggests that it takes a bit less than 1 Gw of power to create Earth’s magnetosphere. That’s a significant building project, but not one that seems completely out of reach for Mars.
As you say, the main sticking point would be why.
Perfect weather in Vegas today: 70 on the morning dog walk, rising to mid 80’s later, nice breeze, clear blue sky with just enough cloud to make for a beautiful sunrise. I am now able to smoke cigars on my balcony.
I have this practice I think of as my level one diagnostic: I play solitaire on my phone. The object is to test for any deterioration in certain brain functions. I average .65 seconds per move, with a record of .55. These numbers neither decline, nor improve. So far. So, just as a computer has a top speed, so does whatever part of my brain finds essentially numerical connections and deploys eye-hand-coordination.
Pretty pokey when I compare it to my verbal processing speed. Much harder to construct a test for that, but very rough calculations suggest a much higher speed. Is that nature or nurture? Given that for my entire life words have been easy and all things numerical, spatial, or involving eye-hand co-ordination have been a struggle, I think it’s mostly good old DNA.
One tends to do what’s easy, or fast, and shy away from what’s difficult, or slow. If one part of the brain has better wiring from tabula rasa state, the brain will follow that path. It generally irritates writers when I say it’s a gift of DNA, because like most people, writers want to believe it’s about education and hard work, plus some version of sitting on granny’s lap to hear stories. You can’t really take much credit for your basic wiring. And there are no charming stories to tell a classroom of rapt (okay, indifferent) students.
ETA: It’s sobering to realize that an Earth devastated by global thermonuclear war, would still be many times more habitable than Mars. Global warming, same thing.
@Jay L Gischer:
If you found a 500 meter diameter asteroid made of equal parts gold and diamonds, and sent it to Earth, it would collapse the value of gold and diamonds, so that by the time it entered Earth orbit it would be worth a fraction of what it was originally assessed to be worth. If you had to run regular flights back and forth and maintain way stations to boot, it is almost impossible to think of any substance (possible exceptions: vibranium and unobtanium) that would make economic sense.
@Jay L Gischer: Mining asteroids might contain valuable minerals, but sending humans to mine them increases the extraction costs tremendously. A mechanical device is much cheaper. The mars rovers and helicopter work well and don’t risk any lives.
@Michael Reynolds: The diamond market would collapse, but gold is pretty darn valuable in electronics and (I imagine) other fields. So the price might come down substantially, but it would become more and more widely used as it became practical. I could see it still being worth, say, $100-200 / ounce
Well, this is awkward. I think I may have had COVID late in July…
You may recall I posted about some semi-lucid dreams (my term) around that time. While I get such dreams sometimes, they’re very rare. Mostly I have them when I get a fever. the last times prior to this one was when I got the AZ vaccine boosters.
This time, though, I didn’t feel like I had one. I took my temperature and it came out like 36.8 C. Normal is about 36.5 or so. Anything under 37 is nothing to worry about. Plus I had no symptoms of anything at all. No aches, no swelling anywhere (especially not the lymph nodes), and in particular no scratchy throat, runny nose, or cough. I still decided to be cautious, and called to say I wouldn’t go to work that day. However, around 11 the temp was back to normal, 36.5, so I went to the office anyway.
A few days later I felt like a cold was starting. One did, but it was about the mildest I ever had. I had some post nasal drip and stuffed sinuses, but it didn’t even keep me from sleeping, After a few days, it was gone. And I still was careful around the house not to pass it to my housemates (wearing a mask, using hand sanitizer, distancing, etc.) Despite the earlier low fever, I din’t connect the two. Therefore the thought of a COVID test didn’t cross my mind.
Yesterday I met someone who’d been to the apartment a day or so before the fever/dream incident, and they shared that they’d had COVID late in July, and it was bad.
Given ho slick, insidious, and sneaky the trump virus is, I may have gotten ti from them, may have given it to them while presymptomatic, we might have caught it at different times and places, and I may have just had a cold and not COVID.
If it was COVID, I’d like to thank Pfizer, BioNTech, and AstraZeneca for a job well done. Which reminds me, the time to get the latest booster is coming up. I’m thinking mid to late October, combined with the latest flu shot.
@MarkedMan:
Unless of course DeBeers gets space weapons and blow it out of the sky. Which we both know they’d try their damndest to do.
@Jay L Gischer:
There’s a lot I don’t know about magnetism and associated fields. However, the ISS’s orbit lies within Earth’s magnetic field, so it doesn’t need it’s own magnetosphere.
The issue of planetary magnetic fields isn’t so much about power, but about size. I would expound on this, but I don’t understand it.
BTW, I think all four Galilean satellites orbit inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which is the second largest one in the Solar System. So they might be a better target for colonization. Of course, they could be the poster children for Kathy’s First Law: there’s a downside to everything. Seeing as they orbit a deep gravitational well and are really cold, among other issues like no atmosphere, sulfur volcanoes, etc.
@Kathy: a couple of years ago I read about a study looking for “super dodgers,” folks who had managed to avoid COVID no matter how often they had been exposed. I joked with my sister that she should sign up for the study, since she has still, to this day, never had Covid. Anyway, I guess this means you are no longer a super-dodger!
This is slightly off-topic for the Trump threads, so I’m posting it here. I noticed that his attempted assassin was interviewed by the New York Times a while back about the war in Ukraine, despite this guy having a very sketchy background. It made me recall all the news articles about “undecided” voters who turn out to be Republican operatives, and that story about the “Democrat voting for Trump” who was a convicted fraudster.
I have seen on several occasions a reporter on social media saying something like, “I’m doing a story about blah blah blah. If you have any knowledge or experience with this, please contact me.” While that may be a way to find relevant people to interview, it’s also a way to attract cranks, attention seekers, and operatives trying to shape a narrative. It seems like we should push the media to be transparent about the people they interview, and tell us what research they did to verify the person’s story and determine that the person is credible. This is especially true since it tends to be ordinary people and citizen journalists who end up doing that research.
@Monala:
I know of two times I was exposed, both post vaccination. I mean I was close to someone who had it, as in close enough to touch without extending my arm. Both wore masks, but in the first exposure I didn’t (it was early in the morning at home). I’m sure I didn’t catch it then.
But maybe they both had original strain, or one of the early variants, and the BioNtech/Pfizer shot kept me from being sick. this is unlikely given it happened when Delta was all over the place, but not impossible.
@Michael Reynolds:
In Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, the protagonist instructs the sole astronaut to claim he found diamonds on the Moon, and even gives him a few diamonds for him to “find” up there. The reason was to get people excited about fortunes to be made, so there’d be more investors eager to fund subsequent trips to the Moon.
Upon returning, the astronaut tells him he did indeed find real diamonds on the Moon, and plenty of them. The protagonist then panics, as that would bring down the value of diamonds. he instructs the astronaut to keep it secret.
@Michael Reynolds: There are lots of industrial uses for diamonds but in my lifetime, manmade diamonds have gone from “Report it on the nightly news” to “buy diamond sharpening plates at $20 for a set of 5″.
@Monala:
My wife has never tested positive for COVID, despite (among other things) living in a small hotel room with me for a week while I had it.
@MarkedMan: I read a short piece the other day that said you can buy a press capable of making small diamonds for $200,000 on Alibaba. Poking around there are indeed such listings, as well as listings for 10-carat VS1-clarity white uncut diamonds for $160.
Y’all couldn’t be more wrong about the need to colonize Mars. As long as the first ship contains some tech billionaires too.
The U.S. Secret Service said on Monday it was aware of a post by billionaire Elon Musk on the X social media platform musing about an absence of assassination attempts on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Not to worry though, he was joking. He posted this after he deleted the tweet: “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”
Because everyone knows that the whole subject is funny. He is Trump with $200 billion.
Oh, about that asterisk on the gold lining for Xlon’s Xtarship. Gold is denser than lead. Whether it offers more protection against radiation, I’ve no idea. Density isn’t all there is to radiation shielding.
NASA used gold on the umbilical line for some Gemini spacewalks, as can be seen in these photos. The helmet visor also contains gold plating, as a shield against sunlight.
I can’t find info on why gold was used on the lines. I’m guessing to reflect sunlight to keep the air inside from heating. Satellites these days sometimes carry gold plated mylar sheets for such purposes.
A half hour ago I was a catching up and bullshitting with a guy I knew from the homeless shelter from a few months back. Was out for an evening walk. Hadn’t seen him around in a few months. A pretty solid dude when not drunk. He’d been banned from the city shelter, and the big Christian shelter, so he was sleeping raw in a wheelchair on the streets, per him anyway.
I really had no option for him – he been 86’d out of the two best options already by misbehavior. That guy is going to try to live on the street and die by January. He has been left to die. Maybe not, people are crafty. Who knows?
All I know is we had a nice conversation. He got two cigarettes off me which I offered freely, and a (hopefully nice) person just sat and chatted a bit with him for 20 minutes on a pleasant evening to pass the time. His name is Chuck.
He is still alive and kicking, but he is sleeping raw. He is currently unsheltered. He was in fairly good shape for a homeless man in a wheelchair.
@Michael Reynolds: You know, I think that DeBeers could probably put a space-ship sized load of diamonds on the market any time it wanted to. And crash the price of diamonds.
Likewise, the Saudis could crash the price of oil.
But somehow, that doesn’t happen.
What’s in those asteroids are things like titanium, which is rare here, but less rare there. Ti has lots of uses, and while yes, the price would drop, it wouldn’t go to zero, but rather get used in a lot more places.
Yeah, lots of the exploration will be done by bots and drones. I think we will still find that we want some people on the spot, not a 30 minute radio transmission round trip away.