49 Replies to “Shut Up And Turn Over That Plastic Straw Before Somebody Gets Hurt”

  1. Starlink is supposed to provide worldwide Internet coverage. In other words, it’s extremely important that some brainless teenyboppers get to post selfies of themselves doing idiotic things from their homes in Moose Snout to some website like Farcebook.

    Astronomers? Who are they anyway?

  2. How about this one.

    First ever picture of a multiplanetary system like our own released
    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/first-ever-picture-of-a-multiplanetary-system-like-our-own-released/ar-BB173ggz

    Scientists have released the first ever picture of a solar system like our own – a Sun-like star, orbited by multiple exoplanets.

    Image from the European Southern Observatory, July 2020, shows the star TYC 8998-760-1, upper left, and two exoplanets.

  3. Starlink could prove to be one of the greatest human achievements.
    Literally connecting the entire world with their satellites.
    And, done by a private individuals efforts.
    Of course someone has to be butt hurt.

      1. It’s a sign that human activity is pushing outwards rom the planet more. And it’s a good reason to go to the moon – imagine the telescopes we can construct there and with no light and radio pollution at all, except from Jupiter and the Sun of course. And then, of course, don’t forget the First Lunar Bank.

    1. That’s just what the planet needs, 25,000 or more satellites for even more internets. ‘Greatest achievement’?? ..more like planetary pollution courtesy of a deluded billionaire. Musk needs to dissappear..along with Zuck and Bezos…and all the helpless fanboys that incessantly praise them.

      1. 25,000? Musk is encroaching a commons with that number. And how will he deal with the satellites, as they die?

        Why isn’t he being stopped? He is filling the sky with space junk.

        1. “He is filling the sky with space junk.”

          The satellites individually weigh around 260kg and fall out of low earth orbit in around +/- 5 years, thus burning up in the atmosphere. I’d say looting and burning cities down in a fight towards Communism is a bigger concern.

          https://www.starlink.com/

          1. So if that’s true that deals with the dead satellites issue creating an unsafe space for future satellites. But a larger issue is, Is there a more valuable use of the space orbits that space link will occupy? That is what the regulator of a commons must have as one of his preeminent goals, and I wonder if that assessment has been done. And as we all know, china now poses a huge threat to the world, because government regulators and legislators – the swamp dwellers – that should’ve enforced the global rules which China agreed to when they were granted access to the WTO, were/are completely derelict in their duty to see them enforced. Dereliction at various levels of government is one of the largest issues that made – and continues to make – a Trump presidency necessary.

          2. What if those same communists are the ones launching and operating those satellites?

          3. “What if those same communists are the ones launching and operating those satellites?”

            What if? I don’t see Musk as much of a Communist, and all the more reason to defeat them on the ground before they have the ability. We should start with Goggle & Facebook.

            Regardless, I’m not sure what the naysayers alternative to space technology and exploration is? Sitting around candlelight and reading great books from cradle to grave?

            I personally welcome innovation and human advancement every bit as much as many interesting people did in the 13th century. Others liked the idea of a flat earth, and keeping their small existence to a township and the old ways. So be be it…………

        2. The satellites are in low orbit, and will fall out of orbit and burn up in a few years, doing no harm to anyone. To people who live outside the reach of wired broadband, as I do, they are a beautiful sight indeed.

    2. “And, done by a private individuals efforts.” I guess if it’s an individuals corporations getting the big welfare from daddy gov then it’s alright.

  4. ooooh. Ruining the night sky.
    ooooh. Debris.
    The sky is literally falling.
    I hear the planet may be warming too.
    Luddites is right.

    1. This is Progress! Don’t you know how exceedingly important it is for people to have the opportunity to watch twerking videos on YouTube any time of the day from anywhere in the world? Can you imagine how bleak life in, say, Coleslawvania must be if teenagers there can’t post selfies of themselves on I_Am_A_Self_Absorbed_Idiot.com?

      Good heavens, how did we manage without this crapola 30 or more years ago?

      1. Not to belabor the point, but there can be significant life improvements for people living in remote rural area’s with better access to medical technologies, banking, and education services online. To name a few.

        Sure Youtube can suck, but it’s kind of nice when you can watch someone teach you how to tear down and rebuild just about anything, or paint or knit a new sweater. It’s currently hard to watch Rebel News in the Appalachians, but who knows maybe one day there will be a new Ezra cult handling snakes and drinking better moonshine. Just say’n.

        1. There are other ways of doing what you just described. For example, any number of geostationary satellites with communications transponders can accomplish much the same thing.

          As for learning how to do things via the Internet, there’s always the public library. When I was a wee sprat in NE B. C., back when pterodactyls filled the skies, I spent a lot of time at the one in town. Rather than watching a video recording of someone doing something, one could read about it. People managed to learn things that way back then and we weren’t sitting around wearing, as Spock put it in one Star Trek episode, wearing bear skins and using stone knives.

          People were creative back then and human civilization managed just fine without the Internet.

          I’m sure you’ve heard about Iridium, a similarly misguided attempt from 20 or so years ago. It never really fulfilled its objectives because by the time all the satellites were in orbit, its capabilities had been superceded by ground-based fibre optic cable networks. As a result, from what I remember, the original company behind it went bankrupt.

          Yes, Iridium still exists, and it’s still touting itself as the wave of the future.

          We managed to survive without Rebel News in Podunk Corners. When I was younger, I could listen to a number of medium wave radio stations in my part of the country and, if I wanted a foreign perspective, there was always short wave. What I could listen to and when depended upon the time of day and propagation conditions. No satellites needed for that.

          Starlink is just another Elon Musk vanity project and it’s likely that it won’t become the civilization-changing undertaking that it’s advertised as being.

          1. Vanity used to be called glory in the old days. The gold, God, glory formula. Pick one to carry us up and off of our mud ball. Save us from ourselves and carry the new pagan. Intersectionality, to the solar system and the stars.

            Competition with the current ‘owners’ of the internet backbone will be a good thing. Cheaper, faster, better — capitalism always wins.

            Any successful, repeated, delivery of non-governmental launch capacity is a great thing. Look at the terrible track record that NASA has trying to develop Orion. They lost the ability to deliver any innovation when they cancelled Apollo and chose the shuttle back in the 70’s. Bureaucracies barely innovate and can’t compete.

            Also, Google is trying to achieve the same results as Musk by using high altitude balloons. I want one over my house. (I need to google ‘Luddite’ and ‘twerking’).

          2. “any number of geostationary satellites with communications transponders can accomplish much the same thing.”

            Well you should tell Musk that, maybe he missed something?

            Yes, it’s great that some people lament the days of sitting in Libraries thumbing through well worn classics, going home and listening to local short wave, playing in the garden, and easing back in bed with a good paperback by 7pm.

            The good news is that those days are still open to anyone wishing to do just that!

            Otherwise most everyone else in the world is eager to innovate, and move on with technology, and someone needs to make it. We can’t pick our Innovators, I’m guessing Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell had their detractors in their day. The Lamp Oil Industry comes to mind, and why the hell would anyone need a “telephone” when you could just send a letter?

            Of course any detractors are more than welcome to:
            a) Invent something else.
            b) Become president and make it illegal to Innovate.
            c) Move to a Third World Country and shun modern society.

            It’s all there for anyone, which is why democracy and free markets are the greatest inventions of all!

          3. B A, agreed. I loved going to the library, whether at school or at home. And, we got along just fine without smartphones and the internet.

            But, thanks to the Wuhan Flu, our libraries have been closed for months and only recently have we been able to place holds and pick them up. Returned materials are quarantined for three days and no more browsing among the shelves or reading newspapers and periodicals.

          4. Vanity used to be called glory in the old days.

            Many of the glory boys of yesteryear were nuts as well. The antics of some chap named Bonaparte was more about him and his ambitions than in bestowing enlightenment upon the masses.

            Look at the terrible track record that NASA has trying to develop Orion. They lost the ability to deliver any innovation when they cancelled Apollo and chose the shuttle back in the 70’s

            Orion is a government pork project–always was and always will be. Even worse is the Space Launch System (often referred to as SLS). If you don’t believe me, look up who Senator Richard Shelby is.

            The motive behind Apollo wasn’t to go to the moon but to show the superiority of American technology over that of the Soviets. Once that was accomplished, there was no reason to continue. How it was actually done wasn’t what Wernher von Braun had in mind.

            The space shuttle was little more than an earlier government pork project. While it produced some nice hardware, it hardly met its advertised objectives, now did it?

            Well you should tell Musk that, maybe he missed something?

            Building geostationary satellites takes time and is expensive. They can be large. I once stood beside an Anik that was being tested by Spar Aerospace and the thing was the size of a city bus.

            Launching them and putting them into orbit is expensive and difficult.

            Yes, it’s great that some people lament the days of sitting in Libraries thumbing through well worn classics, going home and listening to local short wave, playing in the garden, and easing back in bed with a good paperback by 7pm.

            Oh, excuse me. I’ll go back to my cave now, bang some rocks together, and continue communicating with my fellow australopithecines using grunts and scratching my armpits.

            The conclusion I get from Musk’s fanboys in this thread is that anyone who isn’t gaga about that attention magnet and subsidy moocher is long past fossilization and should become extinct.

          5. “Oh, excuse me. I’ll go back to my cave now, bang some rocks together…….”

            LOL – Geeze Louise, don’t be so touchy 🙂

          6. Geostationary satellites are a pretty lame way of getting internet service. It beats dialup, but it really doesn’t work all that well, due to the fact that it takes almost a second for a signal to get from earth to the satellite. Makes for pretty slow loading of complex web pages. Does well for big downloads, though.

          7. it really doesn’t work all that well, due to the fact that it takes almost a second for a signal to get from earth to the satellite

            “Comrade General, the people in this country are unbelievably backward. They have to wait a second longer than we do to download their Internet smut. Such primitive technology…..”

            “I agree, Comrade Commissar. A platoon of schoolchildren from our country could conquer them overnight. It shows that our Central Committee was infinitely wise by relying totally on that degenerate capitalist Musk’s Starlink.”

  5. I got banned from the Space.com forms for criticizing the Star Link satellites Elon Musk and Space-X. Star Link satellites are useless flim-flam space junk.

  6. Does anyone think that all those satellites that are capable of great full-time observation … in detail … won’t be used against the population of Earth … the burgeoning, slave planet.

    The communists, wherever they be from, including the western world, simply don’t like the middle class. That is the class that asks the hard questions, make other cultures look stupid (which they are) and owns lots of firearms … want to be free and prosperous … but they keep getting in the way of communist ideals, they vote for conservatives … so they must be eliminated. That is what’s happening.

    Musk is building our global prison.

  7. I’m calling shenanigans on that photo of the comet with streaks supposedly from Starlink. Given where comet NEOWISE is in the sky, there’s no way an orbit of any satellite is going to cut through the frame like that (on that angle). It’s a bit too much that the streaks of the alleged satellites are also parallel to the frame of the photo. In my opinion that image has been photo shopped.

  8. “Musk is building our global prison.”

    Well everyone can view reality through their own lens, I see Musk as the poster-child for Capitalism.

    That said, of course there are powers that be that are indeed trying to create a global prison, they’ve been doing it since the creation of Ancient Sumer, and have existed in every civilization since. Today we call them “Globalists” in the west, Communists in the east, and Islam in the middle.

    That shouldn’t stop the future technological creations and explorations built on Capitalism, it’s simply means that people need to buck up and continue fighting the Totalitarian regimes in the real world.

    1. “I see Musk as the poster-child for Capitalism.”

      Has Tesla ever actually turned a profit? – I forget.

      I see Musk as the poster child for gaming the system, suckering greeeen-wannabe politicians into legislating sweetheart rebates on his behalf, and slopping-up massive subsidies – in effect, hustling taxpayers into funding his crummy electric cars for any virtue-signalling eco-radical stupid enough to want one. His parts-suppliers see him as their worst nightmare, and his employees see him as a head-in-the-clouds little hitler. And too many mothers in the third world see his battery suppliers as the reason most of their kids are dead.

      “Rechargeable all-electric cars are the wave of the future – and always will be.”

      1. Yea whatever, like I said different lens.

        I own a camper and two street bikes – hated by the non-camper people, hated by the non-bike people. I’m guessing there’s even bike people who hate the camper people. OMG what should I do?

        That said, who cares if Musk builds electric cars that fail? I don’t care if that’s all he built, I don’t personally want one, but I’m glad there’s options if people do want them. Just don’t force that option on me.

        1. Yep, welfare for corporations is good but for people bad. For the record I think welfare is bad all around but I see the hypocrisy when it comes to the corporate world and fellow conservative minded (of varying degrees) individuals.

          1. “For the record I think welfare is bad all around….”

            Me too!

            I don’t know if Musk sucks the teat of corporate welfare or not but he sure is making cool crap. Someone on the domestic welfare couch just smokes pot and thinks about it.

            That said, entrepreneurs that use the system provided them for advancement aren’t necessarily EVIL, they are simply using the tools provided, like Trump filing for Chapter 11 a few times. What would you do if it was legal and a benefit to do so?

            So it’s the probably government and the commercial laws that allow certain benefits that piss you off – that would be a better and more productive focus than the end user that utilizes them.

        1. I liked the article – I only read the headline, but that was enough. It included “despite … lower sales”.

          So, lemme see if I got this straight, okay? Tesla turned a profit despite lower sales? When its entire corporate earnings history has been a never-ending loss, I mean they’ve NEVER turned a profit before, despite formerly higher sales?

          Riiiiiight.

  9. “I see Musk as the poster-child for Capitalism”
    The EV industry is built entirely out of Big Green Government grants, subsidies, and buyers incentives. If the world’s most successful rent-seeker is capitalism’s poster child then ‘Houston we have a problem’.

    1. “suckering greeeen-wannabe politicians into legislating sweetheart rebates on his behalf, and slopping-up massive subsidies”

      I don’t see how that’s his problem. I do see how it’s a greeeeen-wannabe politician problem though.

      I didn’t read anywhere where building the coast to coast railroads or the first Texas oilfields were charity constructions, maybe I missed something. No government lobbying there I suppose?

  10. It is the lack of concern for others in pursuit of exorbitant wealth that is reprehensible, not the progress.
    Is it too difficult to understand? Musk could have been made to comply with the requirement not to interfere with ground-based astronomy. No one gave out a pip-squeak, but the real brick-and-mortar industries on the ground are being choke dead with regulation. I smell corruption. But it is typical for Musk and it follows him around anywhere he goes.

    And if some of you believe that trying to expel opposing views from this blog’s comments is not cancel culture, give your head a shake. You prove to everyone who reads this that “small c conservatives” are no different than BLM and Antifa. Give your head another shake.

    1. @Citronella,
      “is the lack of concern for others in pursuit of exorbitant wealth that is reprehensible”

      The reprehension of “exorbitant wreath” is relative, I’m guessing there are plenty of people living in Mumbai’s slums that believe you have too much wealth. Much less your Progressive neighbor who believes you need to give all your white privilege and private property away. So why do you qualify to judge wealth more than they do?

      I hope your comments weren’t addressed to me about “expel opposing views” and practicing “cancel culture”, I stand firmly in the “Debate” category of commenting. Yes there is a big difference with debating opposing views online and ANTIFA & BLM street thug tactics, but we can debate that as well if you wish.

  11. Paul. Could you please provide a link that lists all the government grants and subsidies to the oil and gas industry in North America. Other than accelerated write downs from time to time (something all business is currently using in Canada since late 2019) I’ve never seen any evidence of these huge government subsidies the oil & gas industry is alleged to enjoy.

    1. “Could you please provide a link that lists all the government grants and subsidies to the oil and gas industry in North America.”

      Why? I’m not sure what relevance that has to anything I’ve said. As far as Oil & Gas industry goes it subsidizes my paychecks nicely thank you, and has for over 35 years as I write this from one of the few Offshore rigs still working in the world at the moment. This COVID-19 “shutdown” has been good for me.

      1. “I supposeI didn’t read anywhere where building the coast to coast railroads or the first Texas oilfields were charity constructions, maybe I missed something. No government lobbying there I suppose??”
        Sorry but when you made that comment I thought you were implying the building of the RRs and Texas oilfields were equivalent to what Musk is doing.

        Reply

        1. My point was that most of the major endeavors that included the building of Railroads across America required some government assistance to help pave the way through multitudes of regulation and investment returns.

          Capitalism & free markets have never excluded government investment in such ventures, in fact the government has requisitioned Corporate America in much of it’s infrastructure building such as railroads, oilfields, military hardware and on and on………..

          Because people don’t like Musk personally or because of his wealth is moot. The only consern Is whether he breaking the law, or not. It’s very simple.

          http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/railroad/

          1. To highlight linked summary:

            “Four of the five transcontinental railroads were built with assistance from the federal government through land grants. Receiving millions of acres of public lands from Congress, the railroads were assured land on which to lay the tracks and land to sell, the proceeds of which helped companies finance the construction of their railroads. Not all railroads were built with government assistance, however. Smaller railroads had to purchase land on which to lay their tracks from private owners, some of whom objected to the railroads and refused to grant rights of way.”

  12. Starlink is a great thing, unless you are a Canadian Sat internet companies with no competitors. I’m guessing the naysayers are either:
    1. US citizens, or
    2. Canadians who are gluttons for punishment by the Canadian Telecom Cartel.

    I’m also guessing that the naysayers want the CRTC to ban Starlink in Canada.

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