impartial_fanboy [he/him]

I’ll give it a shot.

1. China can discipline individual capitalists but it cannot discipline Capital (in more vulgar terms, international capital).

2. Since it lacks this capacity China is therefore dependent on Capital cooperating with it to achieve its vision of Socialism.

3. Thus it will not achieve Socialism with its current trajectory.

Yes, Boeing made the first stage of the Saturn V.

‘Defense contractor’ and ‘small’ are oxymorons. The old guard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocketdyne, etc. all got used to cost-plus contracts and so geared their production assuming they’d always have them. Now they’re big mad that SpaceX and others are upstaging them in cost, performance and scale because, surprise surprise, decades of no accountability doesn’t foster competence.

Rocket production has always been a public/private partnership, the only difference is SpaceX takes commercial customers too, not just governments (or companies who basically are part of their government).

His personal disgust with it.

5v5. All the most toxic games are 5v5, whether its CSGO or League etc. I can’t stand them. Though the real problem is automated matchmaking and lack of server browsers, most other pvp games have ways of mitigating the toxicity but 5v5’s really just encourage it full tilt.

I really wish larger team based esport games were the ones that took off, but alas.

Jared Leto’s character was originally going to be played by David Bowie which would have been better because then Jared Leto wouldn’t be in it.

The bigger problem is what it doesn’t say, like about anything about the board of directors or shareholders. I don’t think it would help much unless they’re also familiar with Chinese labor law.

This all comes with the caveat of it being a translation but I really don’t think it says what you think it does.

Section I just say the employees are informed of and get a performative say in what the company was already planning on doing, not that they get an actual say in that plan. Section II is only about working conditions and not about the nature of the work itself, if it should be done, how best to do it, etc. Section III also is only about contract points which deal with remuneration and not with the actual business of the company. This part of Section IV;

Electing or dismissing employee directors and employee supervisors

Is suspiciously worded and makes me think that it really only means their direct managers and department heads, which of course is an improvement but they aren’t voting on whether major shareholders get a seat on the board of directors or not. Even if it did include the regular C suite, it absolutely does not include members of the company appointed by the party/state.

Some of the better seeming parts have no teeth.

electing employee representatives to meetings of creditors and creditors’ committees of the enterprise subject to bankruptcy proceedings in accordance with the law

Just says they get to show up to the meeting, not that they actually have any say in that meeting. Especially the last part of section IV.

and recommending or electing management personnel of the enterprise as authorized

Is super weasel wordy. This could be satisfied just by acknowledging the recommendation of the assembly, it doesn’t actually require the company to follow that recommendation.

Section V also has no teeth. There is no mention whatsoever of the makeup of the board of directors or what say shareholders have. Which leads me to believe that this is whole thing is just designed to appease workers and not actually provide workplace democracy. To be clear, it is a potentially a step in the right direction if it is given teeth but as it stands it is absolutely just as ‘class collaborationist’ as Germany’s.

Of course all of this ignores the corrupting and profit maximizing nature of modern corporations which is not changed one iota just by changing who can vote for who is in charge (as evidenced by large co-ops like Mondragon) especially since they still have to compete against corporations who absolutely will cut every corner and cheat to get ahead.

Edit: I forgot how to format

Guess I’ll be the Lib.

How is this any different than the German codetermination system? Honestly it seems like they’re just copying it, though it does apply to small businesses too. Which is cool but I wouldn’t call it workplace democracy.

If you have enough emails from your job you could fine-tune one of the models on them and it would probably do pretty okay. It’d be really cheap cus it’s not that much data, assuming you don’t have the hardware to do it yourself.

God forbid … It’s not like they’re advocating for NATO invading China. Having criticism/doubts of AES does not undermine them, they’re not that fragile.

Oh sorry, to clarify: The 5m one in the article is almost certainly Long March 10. They seem to have decided to make the first stage reusable, contrary to previous statements. It’s not clear if that means just the boosters or the boosters and the core but I would guess all three like falcon heavy does. It’s also, at least for now, the rocket they plan on sending people to the moon with before 2030 with an Apollo-style lander.

The smaller 4 meter one seems to be for a commercial rocket.

Long March 9 last I saw was still not planned to be reusable until the 2040’s but if this recent space push actually turns into a race I’m sure they’ll accelerate that.

Long March 10 (the 5m one in the article) isn’t a Starship/Super Heavy competitor, it’s a Falcon Heavy competitor. I.e. it’s only barely considered a super-heavy and depending on the reuse penalties, it might only be one if it’s launched as expendable. I’m guessing most of the specs on Wikipedia are very out of date so it’s hard to tell exactly.

They’ll probably go through the same process of getting the core and boosters reusable but not bothering with the second stage and just push Long March 9 development instead. Obviously they have to walk before they can run but at this rate they’re still about ~8-10 years behind.

Not just nationalism but also our naivete to how states act, regardless of whether they are ‘socialist’ or not. So many of the USSR’s decisions prioritized the immediate interests/survival of the state at the expense of revolutions abroad and eventually those betrayals left it without the external support to survive the West’s onslaught.

Look I’m not saying it’s a desirable position but I don’t think misrepresenting the situation is helpful either.

US literally forgot how to make rockets when their looted nazis died off and spend 10 years having to beg Russia for a lift.

The ISS was complete so there was no more use for the shuttle other than bleeding money. Obviously the geopolitical situation allowed for them to use the cheap option, they are capitalists after all. But obviously those 90+ y/o nazi engineers were the real reason.

China is steadily keeping its announced terms for everything and basically caught up to NASA in 15 years of what NASA spent 70 to do.

CNSA has been around for 30 years and NASA for 66. It’s also much easier to catch up (which they haven’t) than to develop initially especially since they were cooperating until 2011. I wish China was putting more effort into their own version of Starship (Long March 9) but at least as of last year they don’t intend to have it ready and fully reusable before 2040.

In the meantime US is defunding their one somewhat working agency and are throwing insane amount of cash to the Musk grift.

They’re defunding planetary science, not Artemis really. Which is bad obviously but SpaceX is certainly less of a grift than Lockheed Martin or Boeing so I’m not sure where you would put that money instead.

Seeing things like OP and believing USA over China is just utter stupidity.

The OP is about JPL, the division actually being affected by the cuts. Again, they don’t make rockets. CNSA says 2030 for the moon but it will be on Long March 10 (i.e. not reusable). NASA says 2026 (which admittedly will probably slip to 2027/2028) but it requires Starship to work. If China manages to get there first it would be impressive and a welcome surprise but they would be unable to sustain a presence there (just as the US was) without a fully reusuable superheavy vehicle.

This is good actually

You’re kind of right, it will (hopefully) force JPL to get its shit together when it comes to project management but more importantly, JPL doesn’t make rockets.

Sorry to burst your bubble but unless something major happens, the US is going to be the only one capable of projecting any power into space. China is good at playing catch-up but even their plans talk about a having a domestic fully reusable superheavy lift rocket in the 2040’s, which could obviously be accelerated somewhat if circumstances demand but we’re not talking about a Moon race type situation here. SpaceX/NASA are the only players here right now.

Again, none of this disagrees with what I wrote. You aren’t going to see any breakthroughs soon, either from NASA or SpaceX.

I mean … you’re disagreeing with what you wrote so I don’t know what to tell you.

To begrudgingly defend SpaceX here, if Starship actually works as advertised it actually is a game changer. Their intended launch cadence makes things like Skyhooks a realistic consideration which in turn would make Sci-Fi levels of interplanetary activity possible. Even the semi-reusable Falcon 9 has made a big difference in the launch market, for better or worse, Starlink and the other satellite constellations would not have been anywhere near the realm of profitability without it.

Solid rockets cannot be throttled, and if it explodes, there’s no way to abort the crew safely.

For the Shuttle yeah but Orion has launch abort capability. I agree they shouldn’t be used on principle but SLS is a jobs program that happens to build rockets, not the other way around.

I hate to bring this up, but SpaceX (and I’m not giving Elon any credit here) as a private space company has done more significant advances than NASA has done in a long time.

Most of the fundamental technology breakthroughs were achieved by NASA in the 90’s but due to various issues, the space shuttle being the obvious one (thanks Nixon/Agnew), they were not followed up on. Also NASA has worked very closely with SpaceX essentially from the beginning, just another case of the government selling off technology to a private company because it’s the only way things change in this country.

NASA has no spacecrafts right now!

NASA has never built rockets or passenger carrying spacecraft. They have always contracted them out, yes even the Saturn V, with NASA oversight/management. Also you literally bring up Artemis so not sure what you’re talking about.

using the same Solid Rocket Boosters (the very same defective booster design that caused the Challenger explosion)

You’ll notice how they haven’t had an accident since either but you can literally thank Obama for SLS.

At least SpaceX is trying something new with their Raptor engines.

Which itself is based on old Soviet and Aerojet Rocketdyne designs. Just like how Starship’s design is inspired by the N1.

I’m not denying that there are some cool satellites and telescopes and stuff, but the heavy engineering that is going to blow everyone’s minds by achieving some incredible breakthroughs is not there anymore.

It was never there. Apollo only got funded as a way to ‘peacefully’ develop ICBM and related technologies. If China manages to land on the Moon before the US does again then perhaps there might be a similar program for Mars or an effort to industrialize LEO but while China is making progress in space they don’t seem to be making it a priority and I would be genuinely surprised if they manage to make it to the Moon before the US/SpaceX does.

Edit: Also even if China did manage to somehow beat the US to the moon they don’t have a fully reusable superheavy rocket (even their plans talk about the 2040’s) so it would be a significant but ultimately very temporary victory.

So, hows privatizing the space sector going for you, America?

Well JPL has always been this way but go off. This is essentially punishment for their (mis)handling of the Psyche mission and other recent bureaucratic fuck ups. Obviously since those who did the fucking up are in charge of budget allocation, the workers take the brunt of it but its not as gloom and doom as it seems.

Really they should just cancel SLS and nationalize SpaceX but Elon would have to do something unforgivable for them to actually do it.

Didn’t Alexander share a tent with his best friend Hephaestion though?

Yes and Hephaestion had died less than a year before Alexander. His body had to be physical pried away from Alexander because he wouldn’t leave it for the entire day. He wept and didn’t eat for three days after and had the doctor looking after Hephaestion hanged. He declared an empire wide period of mourning. They also both married daughters of Darius and Alexander hoped that a child who was related to the both of them would one day rule. You know … normal heterosexual things.

Hephaestion’s wikipedia page is where they put all the gay stuff since I guess it’s too offensive to have in Alexander’s.

Wilson should be in the top 5 for sure.