It would potentially mitigate the risk identified by the GGP regarding “unreliable” contractors who force risks on you that you may not want. Same reason I often choose to do house maintenance myself. Not to say it’s also not without costs/risks, it just comes down to which balance you prefer.
NASA still makes these competitive contracts though and picks among several contractors. Afterwards NASA is still involved in design through reviews and other lines of communication.
Using your analogy, if I do hire a contractor I'll talk with them a lot about what they're going to do and make sure it's generally in line with what I want, but they're generating most of the ideas and just incorporating what I say.
Eh, not so much. They have reviews, but it is a much more hands off approach. *
There were instances where NASA engineers brought up issues with designs and were told it wasn’t their role to drive the design. The concept of CCP was they were buying a ride, not a rocket. Just like you don’t tell Airbus what engine they should use when you buy a plane ticket.
* IMO the goal of CCP was to find a mechanism to informally circumvent many requirements. NASA could always waive requirements but I don’t think many people were willing to sign on the dotted line even if they disagreed with the requirements. CCP unburdens them from the same requirements while also allowing them to avoid full responsibility for the decision. (More charitably, it also allowed them to avoid some political costs, like having to spread projects across multiple political areas to avoid funding cuts.)
Right, reviews, where important design concerns can be raised. IDK what specific design concerns you're referring to, but just because an issue is raised doesn't mean it's a real issue.
Again, you don't want two different organizations trying to design one thing.
You missed the part where NASA engineers were told to pipe down about concerns because it wasn’t their place to drive the design. There were numerous, the ones I’m familiar with involved touch screens in cockpits and the amount of reliability needed in safety critical hardware.
NASA still sets requirements and invites several companies to compete for contracts with different solutions. See the lunar lander contracts from a few years ago for example.
You are ascribing beliefs to be based on others in this thread I think.
What I think is that if a company is going to build and provide the solution then they should own the design. NASA should of course get to be involved in reviews and discussions, which they absolutely fucking are, but I do not think that it makes sense for one organization to design something and the other one to build it as if there's like a hard line between these two activities.
I'm not convinced that is how it worked in the days of Apollo either as you've just asserted that without citation.
How are you measuring effectiveness? It seems like you might have a pretty shallow perspective on what NASA does and what their goals are. For example, do you know how many mission directorates they have and how they differ?
Not the person you're responding to, but JWT, SLS, and several other projects have suffered extreme bloat in both cost and timeline. Mega projects like that are some of the most public -facing things NASA does, so they unfortunately tend to drive public perception.
I will never argue that NASA doesn't accomplish amazing things, but large parts of the organization are ineffective. IDK if I'd go so far as to say the entire organization is ineffective, but large parts are.
I also don't think we should cut NASA's budget at all. We should cut the bloat and redirect it to more projects.
It does read to me that many people view this with the same lens we apply to private companies.
As an example, some of the bloat is intentional because it buys down political risk. It would be more efficient to have a program like SLS done within a single NASA center. But that also makes it easier to cut funding because there are a limited number of constituents affected by those cuts. This is exacerbated by long timeline projects that don’t align with shorter political timelines. By spreading the project to many centers, it adds inefficiency but also ensures the survivability of the project. To an extent, there has a a good chance there never would be audacious projects if they were run with maximum financial efficiency. So you’re stuck with the choice of an efficient project that never gets completed or inefficient one that does. As a taxpayer, I’m not thrilled with that dynamic but I understand why it exists
JPL is also not really “NASA” in the same sense. There are only a handful of civil servants and the CalTech as a contractor. It’s similar to the “quasi-government” operations of national lab.
Not really. Early rockets included multiple private contractors like Douglas, Boeing and NAA, but those were basically government projects top to bottom.
Single vendor commercial rockets are a recent (2000s) invention.
Think of how wasteful and inefficient multi-vendor rockets are as a concept. What complex machine would you engineer in such a way? Would you have the government, rather than buy cars from Ford, GM, Tesla, etc, instead contract out the production to one company for the motor, one for the frame, and one for the interior and instrumentation?
It was the only way to do it at the time, no company would have had the capacity for such a project, including reserves for damages. And even in private businesses it is common to outsource specific elements to external suppliers. The Saturn program was massive.
You could take these type of orders as "pending" then require a SMS code to access the final payment page. Adding an extra step like this might discourage the attacker if their goal is not attacking you specifically. They will move on to another easier target.
Wall to wall astroturfing on Reddit is killing it's usefulness since the election. We need an alternative that prevents botmasters from having 5000 accounts. One solution is doing like X/twitter and charging $8/month. Another solution would be using Meta's social graph. Is there some other way to prove you are a human?
Only one lab in the world doing GoF experiments on this specific furin cleavage site AND a random natural mutation happens within a few KM of this lab on this specific furin cleavage site. What are the odds of this happening? Very close to zero.
> He seems to realize he is an Elon bro but still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
I'm confused by this belief. Anyone who has ever interacted with a big government in the West knows they are a knot of old and confusing regulations that cause every thing to be slow and expensive. A leftist should be happy that the state gets to accomplish more with it's existing budget.
The problem is that no one believes Elon and company are actually trying to "accomplish more with it's existing budget". That would be a great goal, but I don't believe that's what they're doing or even capable of doing.
Remember, Elon downsized Twitter by 80%, and then Twitter lost 80% of it's value. Simply firing a bunch of people doesn't accomplish more, it can actually destroy the value of the thing to begin with.
We've all seen this with republicans before. They take over, make things worse, and then use the fact that things are worse as an excuse for why the government shouldn't do the things it does. Elon isn't an expert in efficiency, he's an arsonist coming in to destroy the government so he and his buddies can extract more value out of this country.
Many people believe Elon in that he's trying to right the ship. Elon has been very clear on his ambitions and he isn't what you are trying to paint him as (a political republican). And the counter point is that Elon and large portion SV have remained in the center while the Dems marched steadily left leaving everyone in the center without a party.
Twitter was broken and full of bloat as is clearly obvious given that it is performing in many ways better than before engineering wise. It has become much more of a wild west given his free speech absolutism perspective but you can't possibly argue that what he didn't proved all the critics wrong - lights stayed on, kept shipping products. It certainly hasn't lost 80% value from his actions - he bought it at the height of ZIRP mania.
Now whether Elon has a enough inertia to actually be able to tackle some of the truly endemic issues of the Federal government is another question. Some of his new found friends will certainly poison the water but my take is he is authentic in his attempt to reduce deficit and lower the debt for the US while increasing growth.
>he is authentic in his attempt to reduce deficit and lower the debt for the US while increasing growth.
The only way he is being authentic is if he is an idiot.
If he knew what he was talking about and was being authentic, he wouldn’t be publicly stating that he is going to cut $2 trillion from the budget.
Payroll for the entire Federal civilian workforce is only $300 billion.
I guess he could just be suffering from delusions of grandeur and he think he’s going to be able to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, or the Military.
He's planning on going after Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That's the only way to cut that much from the budget. Republicans have been transparent about their desire to remove the social safety nets for awhile now.
Yes, the republicans will cut spending. Next election cycle the Democrats will be able raise spending, but now from a more sound basis. The deadwood will be pruned. DOGE is good for both the left and the right.
xAI and X are two separate companies. xAI is raising funds with a target valuation of $40b, but that has nothing to do with X. The article you linked to makes this pretty clear and validates what I said about the 80% lost.
> The new valuation means xAI has surpassed the $44 billion Musk paid for Twitter in October 2022. X was valued at $9.4 billion by Fidelity, one of its investors, in September. The firm, which invested $19.6 million in the platform, has written down the value of its investment by nearly 79% since 2022.
Cutting 80% of the staff happened during the same time period when Fidelity dropped the evaluation by 79%. Cutting the staff doesn't seem like a good move at all.
The problem isn’t that someone is trying to improve government efficiency.
The problem is that we picked a billionaire professional internet troll to do it whose stated goal is cutting 2 trillion from the budget.
And ignoring the fact that Elon is already running 3 companies, you couldn’t possibly find someone with more conflicts of interest than the richest man in the world.
Here’s a quote from Reason (hardly a left wing publication) that sums up how absurd their goal is.
“Musk and Ramaswamy's public pronouncements thus far do not inspire confidence. Musk's promise to save "at least $2 trillion" annually—approximately one-third of all (noninterest) federal spending—suggests a lack of familiarity with the federal budget. Roughly 75 percent of all federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans, and interest, and the final quarter includes priorities such as infrastructure, justice, border security, health research, national parks, unemployment benefits, disaster aid, and disability benefits.”
Large organizations are inherently inefficient because id the non linear growth in communications overhead. If you don’t understand an organization, coming in and hacking away at it is insanely dangerous. How many companies have been ruined when hedge fund buys then and starts trying to “maximize efficiency”?
Yes cutting $2T is not realistic. If they manage to do a few percent of the goal it is still going to be good for everyone.
Bloat is a major issue that prevent anglosphere societies from achieving goals that poorer societies do easily. Ex: Spain or France do awesome public transit for 3 or 5 times less than we do.
You don’t accomplish things by setting wildly unrealistic goals that you know are unobtainable.
And he’s not going to completely reorganize society so that we can build cheap public transit. Especially not by running a “government agency” that can’t do anything other than make recommendations to the president.
Do you know how many similar commissions we’ve had to reduce waste and spending?
I do not understand how this article undermines the Kurgan Hypothesis. The modern horse enters the picture later according to those discoveries, but it is still within the right time frame and geographic location.
I think it's more that there's a more drastic/stricter version of the Kurgan hypothesis that sees Yamnaya migration + Horses + Indo-European language spread as all one packaged good, spreading in a rapid wave from the steppe.
Whereas this author is arguing that the horse part happened later.
We already know the cultural-linguistic spread was more complicated than Gimbutas' original theory. That's not really controversial.
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