Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:
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Just had a weird thought. Say youāre an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as youāve accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state ā one of the big ones ā can accomplish this.
Wouldnāt co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people donāt usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.
What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, itās deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.
On one hand I wish someone were there to āyes-and?ā citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.
Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responderās vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying ābrevity is the soul of witā. Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Bostrƶm to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page ā fascinating as they are in a particular sense ā are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.
Donāt forget that the soil is incredibly toxic and that what little atmosphere exists smells like getting continuously Dutch Ovened forever
at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars isā¦ much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive
Implicitly assuming that the technology to terraform Mars is just around the corner is the weāll become profitable once we hit AGI of space exploration.
Yeah, Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to Mars. The temperature is maybe in a comparable ballpark if you squint. Everything else is way easier. You can breathe the air as is instead of living in a pressure vessel with an artificial atmosphere 24/7. You have water everywhere you can simply melt or desalinate and you donāt have to even go to the even colder polar ice cap region for it because youāre already there. You have a magnetic field allowing for an ozone layer which is nice because the sun is a deadly lazer. There are organisms around you can eat for nutrition, and whatever resources you lack can be brought over with a boat or aeroplane instead of a spaceship. You can get to Antarctica from any human settlement (with the possible exception of space stations) or vice versa in a matter of hours. You can have near-instantaneous communication with other humans on earth at any time, whereas one-way trip between Earth and Mars will take a radio wave anywhere between 3 and 14 minutes, assuming thereās not some opaque body (such as a moon or a star) in the way. Iām probably missing a lot of other stuff but thatās the ones off the top of my head.
Sadly that isnt there on Antarctica, the ozone hole never was fixed, it just stopped growing. (And now due to somebody tossing aluminum sats in the atmos to burn up it will start growing again, which if there ever was a terraforming mars colony (there isnt going to be) would also not be great for any attempts there to fix the atmosphere).
from what iāve looked up in five minutes (and knowing a bit of atmospheric chemistry) iād guess the problem is chlorine and nitric oxide, not aluminum part. chlorine comes in as hydrogen chloride from ammonium perchlorate, and nitric oxide just appears when you heat up air enough, this means it also is generated during reentry and would also happen with oxygen/hydrogen rockets or any other for that matter. normally hydrogen chloride would be washed down, but when itās high enough this doesnāt work. (thereās also soot idk about this one)
thereās alternative that does not introduce chlorine, and itās even a bit higher performance, but itās more expensive. (ammonium dinitramide) itās also more of matter of interest for military, because it leaves less smoke
slightly related: in 2019 there was discovered an illegal CFC manufacture in China, by way of CFC emissions being higher than expected. i think it was spotted remotely and only later traced to China. by 2021 it was shut down, and itās impressive because in CFCs, youāre working with very friendly things like carbon tetrachloride, hydrogen fluoride, chlorine, antimony trifluoride and not at rt, but like, 70 atm 450C, not exactly something you can run in a bucket, everything is corrosive or at least would destroy your liver. in order for this to make sense they had to set up entire factory with capable chemical engineers, and they had to know theyāll have customers that would violate Montreal protocol
Ah, I recalled it having recovered quite a bit some years ago, but apparently that was temporary and due to a weather event. Even so, the direly depleted form of Ozone layer present in the Antarctic is still better than anything Mars could support.
Not that solar UV is going to be your biggest problem when the atmosphere is so thin you might as well try to breathe in a vacuum and >90% of the little that is there is CO2. If you can figure out how to breathe, you can probably come up with sunblock, too.
Yeah the sunblock thing can prob be fixed, it just adds to a long list of āwow this whole shit sucks, and we didnāt even get dysenteryā
I think it isnt just toxic but also sharp, and some of the toxics might be water soluble, so could contaminate whatever water they bring, and contaminate the air. (And iirc the moon is worse but at least they are not planning a base there. Right?).
I mean, the moon doesnāt smell like the craft trailer, Iāll grant you that, but the dirt is made of razor blades, which is bad.
Miners lung on the moon.
People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative āI was conned by some assholeā is too much to bear.
Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. Iād be in favor, though Iād settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.
Yeah, sadly looking more and more like a lowtax / bunker while the commies close in speedrun.