Can we debunk this nonsense? Elon Musk was awarded (note: not given) cost-per-result contracts to perform a service for the US government. The total of those for SpaceX specifically is ~$22B, which includes repaid loans, state tax incentives, etc. The deal was simple: put stuff into LEO at or below a set cost. If SpaceX does it below the set cost, SpaceX keeps the difference. If it doesn’t, the company is responsible for the overrun. End result? SpaceX & Elon lowered the cost of getting 1 kg into LEO by 95-97% vs what NASA was paying previously. And for the record, every other company around at the time was offered the same opportunity to bid on the contract - Musk/SpaceX just took it. The handout narrative implies the taxpayer is the patron and SpaceX the dependent. The cost data shows the opposite: before SpaceX, NASA paid Russia’s Soyuz $80-86M per seat; SpaceX delivered at ~$55 million. SpaceX saved the US taxpayer $300M-$465M each year on that alone (the US sends 12-15 astronauts to space each year) On the lunar lander, NASA estimated SpaceX’s fixed-price bid saved $20B-$30B vs the Boeing-preferred cost-plus approach. So: SpaceX saved the US taxpayer more than the total value of contracts it earned on a single project, PLUS provided the US government with the requested services (put stuff in LEO) at the best possible price.

not a single person on this list was born a billionaire the world that i want to build, live and vote for is a where this will continue to be true every generation, except the numbers keep getting larger

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.

I spoke with someone who contributed to another report, separate from the academic senate report, that advised Napolitano in her SAT decision-making. What he said, paraphrasing: “Jelani, what if the admissions objective is not to admit the students who will perform the best academically, but to admit the students who would benefit the most from a Berkeley degree, say as measured by increase in lifetime earnings.” Of course, if you start producing graduates that are substantially weaker, high-paying employers will notice and cut back on hiring your graduates. Their counter is some idealized/wishful thinking that the university experience is so transformational that it can turn any student into a diamond coming out, even if they didn’t know how to add fractions coming in. Link to the second report: ucop.edu/institutional-resea…

This recapitulation of the actual argument being made by Anthony's supporters underscores that what we are seeing is two different and irreconcilable conceptions of right and two different conceptions of law. The supremacy of the one conception over the other is what is at stake here. Anglo-American law or the honor code? Similarly, under Islamic conceptions of female modesty, the uncovered girl walking alone unaccompanied by a male protector has in fact consented to sexually servicing a man and his 24 cousins. It would not be possible to organize the 24 cousins for the ensuing gang rape in the absence of a collective understanding of the legitimacy of these actions. Female relatives of the gang rapists wouldn't publicly blame and heap scorn on the victims of their brothers and husbands and sons and nephews if we were simply seeing aberrant conduct understood to be criminal by the community. This is in fact a community value and a community acting out its values. The law being imposed upon them (to the partial extent to which it even is) is an alien force to whose power they will submit for now without recognizing its legitimacy. That a woman can walk freely unaccompanied by a male protector and retain the right to say no to sexual activity is a recent innovation of a handful of societies. That a man can have his manhood challenged without thereby acquiring a right to murder his challenger is a recent innovation of a handful of societies, still disputed within them to some meaningful degree, and entirely rejected by certain subcultures within it. The supremacy of this recent innovation is by no means assured for all time.

If this is not satire Europe deserves to be destroyed.

If this is statistically proven, which I think is just going to be a matter of time, the jury system will need to go.

This is one of the most mentally ill articles ever written.

Stories like this are unbearable.

Today feels like a good day to reshare this clip of Ariane Aerospace’s CEO calling SpaceX’s reusability plans “a dream”

Here is a story about a group of students who fundraised and worked for an entire year to bring Neil de Grasse Tyson to speak at an event: "We were a small college club with around 10 members and on a whim one of our members emailed tyson's agent to see if we could book him. We found out it would cost 40k (it raised to 50k in December of that year where I think it still might be) for his speaking fee plus expenses to have him come to our college for 1 day where he'd host a small lecture, a press meeting, dinner with up to 6 people, and the main lecture and a book signing time permitting. We decided to go for it, and spent a year where our club exclusively worked on bringing him in. When he arrived, myself and others introduced ourselves and our fields of study. He went after first of us in humanities or soft sciences pretty much relentlessly from the get go. We're all used to the philosophy major working at McDonald's joke, but he wasn't trying to be funny, and spent the ride from the airport making repeated comments about the uselessness of our majors. Additionally he spent about 5 minutes trying to show that logic was stupid but he was citing logical rules and Occam's razor. The small lecture was him bragging about how famous he was, and how easy it is to pull yourself out of poverty or etc. The dinner was for leaders of other clubs so helped us raise money. He took the piss out of how one student held her fork, and was impossibly smug when giving advice to physics students. The main event was a terribly boring lecture consisting of fart jokes and fan service; teasing the upcoming TV series he was in and not much else. He spent a quarter of the time reading Sagan's blue dot, which is nice but shouldn't have cost us because it wasn't his material. He left at about 2am, and we were all exhausted because we had spent the day busy setting up and tearing down. The whole affair cost nearly 85k. The additional money being for locations, personnel, air fare, Tyson's hotel, catering, etc. We all decided he was an ass hole. I'd never want to spend 16 hours with a celebrity again." From another member of the same group: "Neil deGrasse Tyson, who came to our university, gave a crappy speech rife with lame fart jokes, was rude and disrespectful with the people who organized the event (there were a couple campus clubs working on it for about a year). He equated one of the group's member's philosophy major as a degree in mental masturbation. We were so pumped to hear a talk about the universe, astrophysics, black holes and dark matter, and instead he gave a speech on debunking lame pop media science misconceptions such as the "supermoon" because the organizing club is known as a skeptic/secular humanist society. He then basically said he did us a favor and that we "owed him one" for that. He delivered a private lecture to our group and members of the campus physics club in which he realized he had said something witty, whipped out hsi iphone, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect wording for it to post it to his twitter. In the middle of a lecture we spent a year's work and $55k total to organize."

🔥Humanities professors unite w/ STEM faculty, demanding the University of California reinstate the SAT “We call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last 6 years & return to including both the math & the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions”

Housed within the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the group's conception of academic freedom seems to have little to do with free speech. Here's a meeting where one fellow says that UPenn punishing Amy Wax for her speech was academic freedom in practice.

This is completely true.

EXCUSE ME @FBI

The title of the article ought to have been "How the College Board Corrupted a Perfectly Good Test of Academic Aptitude." For the sad thing is that the SAT was still an excellent test through the 1980s. There had been drift over time--ETS's internal studies found that from 1963 to 1973, the SAT got easier on Verbal by 8-13 points and on Math by 10-17 points. But it wasn't until after the recentering in the mid-1990s that the test was made much less demanding. BTW, Dick Herrnstein and I published a long but by far the most thorough and accurate analysis (sorry to brag, but it's true) of the meaning of the long decline of SAT scores from 1963 to the early 1980s. It appeared in The Public Interest. You can download it, no paywall, at nationalaffairs.com/storage/…

Why are we going out of our way to defend a cold-blooded murder?

Fired ‘60 Minutes’ Reporter Cecilia Vega Was Preparing Cozy Profile of UN’s ‘Racist Antisemite’ Francesca Albanese When She Was Axed: Vega Also Fronted 2025 ‘Disgraceful Hitjob on Israel’ freebeacon.com/media/fired-6…

I just want to emphasize again how extraordinarily bad an idea it is to continue racial preferences in admissions using proxies for race, and how obvious it is that colleges are not going to simply stop because it's illegal.

I'm a bit angry.