I listened in by phone. Here‘s the white paper.
As one would expect, a consensus from thirteen space organizations is going to be mostly motherhood, and implicitly self contradictory. More after I’ve taken the time to go through it. Elliot Pulham said that the campaigns have received it with “gratitude and interest,” but as he said, the main goal is not so much to inject space into the campaigns as to prevent people from saying stupid things about it. Good luck with that.
Berin Szoka lays out the scenarios:
PLAN A: Stop Trump before the convention (5%?)
PLAN B: Deny him a majority, forge an alliance to pick anyone else (20%?)
PLAN C: Sane Republicans reform as the Conservative/Constitutional Party, deny either Hillary or Trump a majority of electoral votes (it would have to be a swing state, unless Trump is sweeping those, which is quite possible), which kicks the election to the House, where Republicans would elect the Conservative/Constitutional alternative to Trump (30%)
PLAN D: Use a Hillary presidency to catalyze the party around a new set of ideas, that respond to profound economic discontent without resorting to racism, protectionism or demagoguery. Paul Ryan leads what the Gingrich Revolution should have been. (25%)
PLAN E: Batten down the hatches and prepare to ride out a
or a Trumpclear winter. Keep a list of Trump’s Vichycon collaborators for purging when The Occupation ends. (20%)
A would be nice but almost certainly won’t happen. B just might. C may well be our best hope. D may be what the GOP really needs. E absolutely terrifies me — not just in terms of the 4-8 years of a Trump reign, but in terms of its long-term consequences for American politics.
My preference is obviously (A), but that seems unlikely at this point.
We may be able to turn it off, and reverse it. I’ve always been amused by (in Clarke’s words) the “distinguished elderly [or not so elderly] scientists” who think that the laws of physics require our bodies to deteriorate over time.
Via Glenn, who has some further thoughts.
No, we can’t “just” throw our trash into the sun.
But I hate when people use current launchers to demonstrate the cost of a massive space project. That’s not how it would be done. And I wish they’d simply say “the sun is the most expensive place to get in the solar system.” Because it is.
I was thinking this last night as well. It’s not as strong as it looked:
We won’t know the exact numbers until Wednesday, but it looks as though Trump will, by some estimates, finish with somewhere in the neighborhood of 245 delegates. A week ago, that would have been a worst-case scenario for his Super Tuesday. It gets worse: Cruz won resounding victories in Texas and Oklahoma. He trails Trump in the delegate haul for the night by only about 60 delegates. And when you put together the not-Trump share, Rubio and Cruz (and Kasich) will top out around 320 delegates to Trump’s 245 (or so). He’s still falling way short of half the delegates.
There’s more evidence of Trump weakness if you look closely: Why did he lose Oklahoma? Because it’s the only state where the vote was restricted to actual Republicans. Which further bolsters the case that Trump is not leading a revolt from within the party, but staging a hostile takeover of it.
Yes. The RNC’s primary process is idiotic, in that it’s set up to allow non-Republicans select their nominee.
The single most shocking number from Super Tuesday might have been this poll showing voter awareness about various aspects of Trump: Only 27 percent had heard about his reluctance to denounce David Duke and the KKK; 20 percent about Trump University and the fraud lawsuit; 13 percent about the failure of Trump Mortgage.
At some point, those numbers will all be at 90 percent because someone will spend a lot of money putting ads about them all over television in battleground states. The only question is whether it will be conservatives or Hillary Clinton who expose voters to this information. Either way, it suggests that Trump still has the potential for downward mobility if conservative donors are serious about stopping him.
Of course, you can spend your life flyspecking trend lines. And Trump could continue to lose momentum over the next four weeks and still grind his way to the nomination. Winning is what matters.
But if you believe that stopping Trump matters too, then Super Tuesday offered evidence this goal is achievable.
We opened with Sly Stallone but we’ll close with Arnold and a great line Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” That’s true of Trumpism. Maybe Trump will be the nominee. That’s where you’d put your money if forced to bet on it. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. And if anything, Super Tuesday proved both Trump’s strength and his vulnerability.
Yes. It isn’t too late to stop him, but it would sure help if the non-Trumpers could coalesce. Kasich almost certainly gave Virginia to Trump.
[Late-morning update]
Aaaaand Carson is out. So, is Kasich cutting a deal with Trump, or staying in under the delusion that an Ohio win will somehow propel him to ultimate victory?
[Thursday-morning update]
The Trump tipping point. What strikes me about the Trump supporters is how utterly ideologically incoherent they are. Just like him. If you could go with either Trump or Sanders, you have no political principles, other than “the guy who will give me stuff I want.”
[Update Thursday afternoon]
Trump wants to make America great again. Like Denmark.
And the GOP establishment had it coming. No question about that.
Space News has a story on Bridenstine’s proposed legislation.
I’ll have to take a look at the actual draft bill, but it has some good things, and some not so good. I don’t think that SSA should be simply handed over to the FAA. I don’t think that FAA should even be involved in launch licensing. If we’re going to be making radical changes in structure, it’s time to seriously consider a U.S. Space Guard.
I’ve been saying for a while (at least on Twitter) that the problem with Trump isn’t that he will lose to Hillary, but that if he wins, he will be a truly terrible and completely unpredictable president. Lileks agrees, at length. The finale:
To vote for Trump is to validate; to vote for Trump is to participate. He is a crass, gutter-tongued, vulgar man whose self-regard blinds his ability to understand his own ignorance. A man who casually encourages the worst, enables the mediocre, and wafts aloft cartoon concepts of American greatness with gusts of flatulent banalities. It takes a certain kind of historical illiterate not to realize his facial postures are literally aping a second-rate Italian fascist.
Sorry for taking the long way; could have just linked and agreed. But the author’s points deserve interrogation. Short version: no. Long version: hell no. On the off chance history makes marks in a ledger: I will not support Trump if he is the nominee. I will not vote for him. The devil you know is still a devil, and worse yet: you don’t really know him at all.
I have no idea what Trump will do as president, on any issue at all, including immigration. If you think you know, you are deluding yourself.
I’m trying to format a micro-SD to install Fedora on my Raspberry Pi 2. I’m following the instructions here.
But when I get to the part about building the swap partition, I’m getting an error message. This is the output of fdisk:
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdd: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0002ce31Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 2048 264191 262144 128M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2 264192 1312767 1048576 512M 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd3 1312768 62333951 61021184 29.1G 83 Linux
Now here’s what happens when I run mkswap:
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mkswap /dev/sdd2
mkswap: error: swap area needs to be at least 40 KiB
I’ve tried searching for a similar issue, but am coming up empty. Anyone have any ideas?
[Update a while later]
OK, I’ve decided that it’s a bad SD. But now I’ve got a new problem; I can’t mount the W95 FAT32 boot partition:
Disk /dev/sdd: 14.5 GiB, 15560867840 bytes, 30392320 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 2048 264191 262144 128M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2 264192 772095 507904 248M 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd3 772096 30392319 29620224 14.1G 83 LinuxCommand (m for help): q
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mount -t fat32 /dev/sdd1 /tmp/rpi/boot/
mount: unknown filesystem type ‘fat32’
[root@new-host-5 raspberry]# mount -t auto /dev/sdd1 /tmp/rpi/boot/
mount: /dev/sdd1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other errorIn some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so.
It doesn’t work with “auto” or “vfat” either.
[Tuesday-morning update]
OK, not sure what the problem was, but after rebooting the machine, I managed to get it all to work. I haven’t actually tried booting the Pi, yet, though.
It’s been rescheduled for Tuesday. They’re hoping that the fourth time will be the charm.
I think this is an issue of lack of experience with subcooling the LOX. This is only the second flight of the new vehicle. With sufficient flight experience, they’ll get it down, I’m sure.
The latest agenda (including Yours Truly) is up. It really is the best space conference for the buck.