This morning an ROV found the tail cone and debris, indicating a catastrophic loss of the pressure vessel. All crew pronounced dead.

Sweet zombie Jebus…I just read WHY there was such catastrophic damage at the launch pad…NO FLAME TRENCH, NO WATER CURTAIN!!!
It seems Elon, on a guesstimate, decided the most powerful rocket ever built didn’t need any method of deflecting the thrust away from the plain concrete launch pad. He did plan to eventually try a huge steel plate under the rocket, but couldn’t get it done so just launched anyway with NOTHING.
NASA has been using both for over 50 years with success. A flame trench is a reinforced trench designed to redirect thrust horizontally away from ground infrastructure. A water curtain is exactly what it sounds like, a huge curtain of water dropped at ignition that absorbs the initial pressure/heat wave, also minimizing damage to ground infrastructure and lowering initial sound levels.

Why Elon decided he needed neither for the most powerful launch system ever is unfathomable. His launch pad is destroyed and this launch never even came close to 100% thrust. How many times does Elon have to totally screw the pooch as an engineer before they take his drafting table away? He’s playing with public money, somebody stop this insanely poorly implemented boondoggle please.

Crop failure by 2030!?….oops, try 2022.
Unprecedented drought and unheard of global temperatures right now. Massive crop failures worldwide, and more just not being planted for lack of water.
We aren’t on the road to global catastrophe, we are knee deep in one. Thousands if not tens of thousands will die This week in Europe as a direct result of human caused climate change. Over 1500 died in Spain and 1000 in Portugal from heat just in this one event, over 4200 across Europe….so far. Crop losses will multiply that exponentially.
We are on the downhill ride into mass extinction and we already ripped our brakes out and pulled the steering wheel off and are arguing over how hard to stomp on the accelerator.
If the ecological cost of burning gasoline was included in the price, it would be well over $10.

I can't imagine this would be anything but catastrophic to the surrounding environment.

Very cool build. One odd thing; Stainless is beautiful; but when it fails, I understand it fails catastrophically and without warning. In some odd ways, regular steel, rusty and all, would be less scary for something which is going to hold up a heavy vehicle when you are crawling under it in an emergency (yes, jackstands but...still)...

Bob, please read this carefully. I know we fuck around a lot here, but I 100% honestly don't want to see you get hurt financially.

Obviously, if you believe in TSLA, I understand you putting your money where your mouth is (full disclosure: I'm holding POTX and CURLF, so I'm on the same page with what I'm saying on this) but PLEASE don't bet money you don't have on TSLA.

“At 10-times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback (P/E 10, my note), I must pay you 100% of revenues for 10-straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. It also assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company.

That assumes zero expenses, which is hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that expects you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10-years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate.

Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those underlying assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes.

What were you thinking?”

-- Scott McNealy was the CEO of Sun Microsystems
2002

At the peak of the Dot-Com, roughly 30 stocks in the NASDAQ 100 traded above 10 P/E. Today ALL stocks in the DAQ do: the average P/E is ~25.5.

TSLA is at a P/E of 175.

There is no American economy. There hasn't been since since October 3 of 2008. Things got catastrophically worse on September 17th of 2019 when the repo market came within hours of completely locking up in a catastrophe that would have made AIG look like a rounding error. The Fed was forced to firehose astronomical amounts of money into the system to keep this from happening and this was before Covid.

In Jan of 2021, there was $2.6 TRILLION in Zombie Debt out there. That's $2.6 TRILLION on the verge of default at 2021 interest rates. The Fed is now in a horrific position: raise rates and watch massive defaults explode like financial nukes, or keep rates steady and watch inflation implode the economy.

People don't understand how bad this is and how much worse it can get. If the Fed has to raise rates by 500 BP -- and Christ fucking help us if they do -- the first order defaults will be the worst in Capitalist history and the second and third order effects could very well be the nightmare scenario we came within 36 hours of in 2008.

Save your money, Bob. Cash is king. And fuck BTC.

This is propaganda from an oil company. Carbon capture technology is bullshit to distract you from thinking it is okay to continue drilling oil at a rate that will cause catastrophic harm from global warming. Solar, wind, nuclear, and battery powered electric vehicles are how we get off of our addiction to oil.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

any medicine, procedure, or vaccine carries risk. no guarantees, just probabilities. and the blood clotting risk is - what? greater than 1 in a million?

love to have those odds...say a million to one that Scarlett Johansson would reject an improper advance versus one in a million to ever suffer an immediate reprisal.

it'd be worth a shot.

more concerned that not enough citizens will help get the population up to the point of herd immunity. the consequences of that maybe become a catastrophe.

BTW: 1 in 5 chance, of any american car passenger, over their span of life, will be killed or maimed for life. is this worth the risk? doubt many ever give it a concern.

A United Boeing 777 flight from Denver to Honolulu had a catastrophic engine failure after take off.

Incident report and photos https://avherald.com/h?article=4e35503b&opt=0

We found something that might be yours https://i.redd.it/gdrau4za8pi61.jpg

blancolirio channel goes into detail about all things this incident

Trick with those, just never investigate. If you reach a conclusion, there's no more room to lie.

Wait, forget i said that.

--------------------------------------
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"been fed wild falsehoods. Because he was angry he lost an election

"There is no question, none, that president Trump is responsible for provoking and the events of the day. No question about it

"The people that stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president

"Having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president continued shouting into the largest megaphone on Earth.

"[He] manufactured an entire atmosphere of looming catastrophe. Increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election

"And I am voting to acquit
-Mitch McConnell

https://youtu.be/yxRMoqNnfvw

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

@bcglorf Here's a tome for you....


It's certainly not (the only way). Converting to green energy sources stimulates the economy, it doesn't bankrupt it, and it makes it more efficient in the future thanks to lower energy costs. My solar system paid for itself in 8 years, giving me an expected 12 years of free electricity and hot water. Right wingers would tell you it will never pay for itself....utter bullshit.

Every gap in our knowledge I've ever seen that we have filled with data has made the estimates worse. Every one. Every IPCC report has raised the severity and shrunk the timeframe from the last report....but you stand on the last one that they admit was optimistic and incomplete by miles as if it's the final word and a gold standard. It just isn't. They themselves admit this.

The odds of catastrophic climate change is 100% in the next 0 years for many who have already died or been displaced by rising seas or famine or disease or lack of water or...... and that goes for all humanity in the next 50 because those who survive displacement will be refugees on the rest's doorsteps. Don't be ridiculous. If we found an asteroid guaranteed to hit in the next 50-100 years, and any possible solutions take a minimum of 50 years to implement with no surprises, and only then assuming we solve the myriad of technical issues we haven't solved in the last 100 years of trying and only if we can put the resources needed into a solution, not considering the constantly worsening barrage of smaller asteroids and the effects on resources and civilisation, we would put all our resources into solutions. That's where I think we are, except we still have many claiming there's no asteroid coming and those that already hit are fake news....including those in the highest offices making the decisions.

Every IPCC report has vastly underestimated their projections, they tell you they are doing it, only including data they are certain of, not new measurements or functions. They do not fill in the gaps, they leave them empty. Gaps like methane melt that could soon be more of a factor than human CO2, and 100% out of our control.

The AR5 report is so terrible, it was lambasted from day one as being incredibly naive and optimistic, and for not including what was then new data. Since its release, those complaints have been proven to be correct, in 5 years since its release ice melt rates have accelerated 60 years by their model. I wouldn't put a whit of confidence in it, it was terrible then, near criminally bad today. I'll take NOAA's estimates based on much newer science and guess that they, like nearly all others in the past, also don't know everything and are also likely underestimating wildly. Even the IPCC AR5 report includes the possibility of 3 ft rise by 2100 under their worst case (raised another 10% in this 2019 report, and expected to rise again by 2021, their next report), and their worst case models show less heat and melting than we are measuring already and doesn't include natural feedbacks because they can't model them accurately yet so just left them out (but noted they will have a large effect, but it's not quantitative yet so not included). Long and short, their worst case scenario is likely optimistic as reality already outpaces their worst case models.

Again, the economy benefits from new energy production in multiple ways. Exxon is not the global economy.

It took 100 years for the impact of our pollution to be felt by most (some still ignore it today). Even the short term features like methane take 25+ years to run their cycles, so what we do today takes that long to start working.

If people continue to drag their feet and challenge the science with supposition, insisting the best case scenario of optimistic studies are the worst we should plan for, we're doomed....and what they're doing is actually worse than that. The power plants built or under construction today put us much higher than 1.5 degree rise by 2100 with their expected emissions without ever building 1 more, and we're building more. Without fantastic scientific breakthroughs that may never come, breakthroughs your plan relies on for our survival, what we've already built puts us beyond the IPCC worst case in their operational lifetimes.

There's a problem with that...I'm good with using real science to identify them without political obstruction and confusion, the difference being we need to be prepared for decisive action once they're identified. So far, we have plans to develop those actions, but that's it. In the event of a "surprise" asteroid, we're done. We just hope they're rare.
This one, however, is an asteroid that is guaranteed to hit if we do nothing, some say hit in 30 years, some say 80. Only morons say it won't hit at all, do nothing.
Climate change is an asteroid/comet in our orbit that WILL hit earth. We are already being hit by ejecta from it's coma causing disasters for millions. You suggest we don't start building a defense until we are certain of it's exact tonnage and the date it will crash to earth because it's expensive and our data incomplete. That plan leaves us too late to change the trajectory. The IPCC said we need to deploy our system in 8-10 years to have a 30-60% chance of changing the trajectory under perfect conditions....you seem to say "wait, that's expensive, let's give it some time and ignore that deadline". I say even just a continent killer is bad enough to do whatever it takes to stop, because it's cheaper with less loss of life and infinitely less suffering than a 'wait and see exactly when it will kill us, we might have space elevators in 10 years so it might only kill 1/2 of us and the rest might survive that cometary winter in space (yes at exponentially higher cost and loss of life and ecology than developing the system today, but that won't be on my dime so Fuck it).' attitude.

@newtboy,

"bankrupting the global economy isn't the only way to plan for asteroids, now is it? What we have done is put some money towards developing solutions that could be implemented in time, with minor exceptions for super fast unknown asteroids we likely couldn't do much about if we did have a planetary defense system."

That's precisely my point though, bankrupting the global economy to reach negative net emissions tomorrow isn't the only way to plan for climate change either.

"the probability of disastrous climate change is near 100% if you take historic human behavior into account. For many it's already hit. It's only the severity and speed that are in question, and those estimates rise alarmingly with every bit of data we use to replace guesses in the equations.

And the odds of a catastrophic asteroid hit sometime in the future is near 100% too, it's just a question of how many millions of years Earth's luck holds out. Nor has every prediction or projection underestimated future warming so far, your flat wrong on that.

More to the point, the timing and severity of the changes we face is ABSOLUTELY relevant to the actions we need to take. Similarly, knowing the benefit of reducing our emissions by X% by a particular date is also extremely relevant to the actions we need to take. Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that we have a lot of gaps and uncertainty in our knowledge on those points.

At minimum base level, we know changing global temperature on the whole will impact us negatively, that our CO2 emissions will make things warmer than they otherwise would be, and thus can easily conclude with certainty that the science dictates policies to reduce emissions are a good idea.

Now, you seem to be hell bent on demanding those policies take the shape of staring down the face of disaster 2-3 times worse than the IPCC AR5 reports absolute worst case scenario. I've got to tell you, that the uncertainties involved with that kind of prediction are too great to warrant an honest dictate that the facts support a need for economically devastating action being taken today. It's just not the case.

Even if green tech never takes over, if the next century sees us final solve fusion power and adoption of electric cars, we already get our emission outputs off the worst track scenario the IPCC projected in AR5. I honestly do believe that we will see non-fossil fuel electricity generation and electric cars as the norm in my lifetime, so I'm hopeful for a future that tracks better than the IPCC worst case. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, but it's more like we should take a similarly rational/practical approach to it like you see us doing with asteroids.

@newtboy,

If North America is to adopt the Amish lifestyle, how many acres of land can the entire continent support? The typical Amish family farm is something like 80 acres is it not? I believe adopting this nationwide as a 'solution' requires massive population downsizing...

If you want to look at the poorest conditions of people in the world and advocate that the poverty stricken regions with no access to fossil fuel industry are the path forward, I would ask how you anticipate selling that to the people of California as being in their best interests to adopt as their new standard of living...

You mention overpopulation as a problem, then invent the argument that I think we should just ignore that and make it worse. Instead I only pointed out that immediately abandoning fossil fuels overnight would impact that overpopulation problem as well. It's like you do agree on one level, then don't like the implications or something?

The massive productivity of modern agriculture is dependent on fossil fuel usage. Similarly, our global population is also dependent upon that agricultural output. I find it hard to believe those are not clearly both fact. Please do tell me if you disagree. One inescapable conclusion to those facts is that reducing fossil fuel usage needs to at least be done with sufficient caution that we don't break the global food supply chain, because hungry people do very, very bad things.

Then you least catastrophic events that ARE NOT supported by the science and un-ironically claim that it's me who is ignoring the science.

You even have the audacity to ask if I appreciate the impacts of massive global food shortages, after having earlier belittled my concern about exactly that!

The IPCC shows that even in an absolute worst case scenario of accelerating emissions for the next century an estimated maximum sea level rise of 3ft, yet you talk about loss of 'most' farmland to the oceans...

Here's where I stand. If we can move off gas powered cars to electric, and onto a power grid that is either nuclear, hydro or renewable based in the next 50 years, our emissions before 2100 will drop significantly from today's levels. I firmly believe we are already on a very good course to expect that to occur very organically, with superior electric cars, and cheaper nuclear power and battery storage enabling renewables as economical alternatives to fossil fuels.

That future places us onto the IPCC's better scenarios where emissions peak and then actually decrease steadily through the rest of the century.

I'm hardly advocating lets sit back and do nothing, I'm advocating let's build the technology to make the population we have move into a reduced emissions future. We are getting close on major points for it and think that's great.

What I think is very damaging to that idea, is panicky advice demanding that we must all make massive economic sacrifices as fast as possible, because I firmly believe trying to enact reductions that way, fast enough to make a difference over natural progress, guarantees catastrophic wars now. Thankfully, that is also why nobody in sane leadership will give an ounce of consideration to such stupidity either. You need a Stalin or Mao type in charge to drive that kind change.