Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

But you repeat yourself…

I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.

Worse than that… The commercial weather services aren’t doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there’s no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won’t necessarily follow.

Even better, the British had been trying to cede the islands to Argentina (over the strenuous objections of the locals) for some time, and the Argentinian military dictatorship decided to take them by force to distract the populace from internal troubles.

See, when Top Gear did a challenge with some French TV presenters and Clarkson kept muttering “don’t talk about Agincourt” that was at least funny…

He was given special permission to view Northrup’s “Senior Ice” ATB demonstrator (from which the B-2 was ultimately derived) just before he died.