I mean I dunno if any internal numbers are meaningful at all as anything but accounting fictions. But the cost of the falcon 9 to external customers is on the believable end of things, even if they are potentially subsidized by funding rounds, and impressive. Near as I can tell it comes from accepting trade-offs: they accept low specific impulse and thus declining performance at high velocity for cheap engines, they accept an overpowered oversized upper stage to have only one engine assembly line and to shift some of the burden to the upper stage that optimally would be on the first, they accept that entering at 2 km/s is way easier than entering at 8 km/s and don’t try to recover the second stage, they accept the steep payload penalty of recovering the first stage. Starship on the other hand tries to brute-force through every trade-off - meaning theyre trying to push their engines through all sanity, the second stage is heavy and bulky and comically oversized, and theyre trying to have a big empty fuel tank be a heat shield which not even the shuttle ever tried.

I mean Starship is a VERY questionable financial decision the way they are running it. The falcon program is another matter. It’s actually remarkable how the two of them are almost diametrically opposed in how they are run.

So.

How much of this is folding all the meme stocks into the one thing that actually produces a product that people all over the world demonstrably want to pay for over the competition to keep their stupid plates spinning?

And how much is religious psychosis, advancing along the singulatarian eschatology from AI to dyson sphere to rebuilding the universe in His Image?

I can’t tell.

Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?

The Great Leader himself, on how he avoids going insane during the onging End of the World because among other things that’s not what an intelligent character would do in a story, but you might not be capable of that.

Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?

The long expected collapse of the rationalists out of their flagging cult into ordinary religion and conspiracy theory continues apace.

I look forward to the cultists continuing to update these graphs convinced they are seeing the future of the cosmos as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the fever dreams

Of course. People who have money and don’t need to make money will use it.

I wonder what will happen to all the data-center-specialized hardware when the demand falls through the floor. SOMEONE will buy it, the question is what will people figure out how to use it for despite it not being like ordinary consumer hardware.

Gerard and Torres get namedropped in the same breath as Ziz as people who have done damage to the rationalist movement from within

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd/tell-people-as-early-as-possible-it-s-not-going-to-work-out