SpaceX successfully launched its Starship on May 27, but the rocket lost control mid-flight and eventually fell apart.
They failed to recover the reusable booster, which exploded, and the second stage was tumbling out of control, and exploded. SUCCESS!
This was the ninth Starship launch, and none of them have “succeeded” by any reasonable meaning of the word. Maybe someone needs to teach the editors at the WaPo the word “failed”? Somehow, I think they’re going to need to use that word a lot in the next few years, in lots of contexts.
Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.
You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.
SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions. Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.
If you have even a passing knowledge of engineering, you know this is what iterative design looks like. So, why hasn’t Musk done this?
Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why?
Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; they might as well keep shoving money at the beast.
This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
On Friday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature that repealed the state’s sui generis right-to-work law. Colorado legislators had voted to pass the Worker Protection Act (SB25-005) by a 22-to-12 margin in the Senate and by 43-to-22 in the House, in both cases along party lines.
Existing Colorado labor law—the Labor Peace Act—was enacted in 1943 before the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act enabled states to pass right-to-work laws that curtailed unions’ ability to collect dues from all the workers they represented in collective bargaining. Colorado’s Labor Peace Act prefigured those right-to-work laws in several ways. Under its terms, once a majority of workers vote to form or join a union, it requires that union to win 75 percent of the workers’ votes in a second election to be able to collect dues from all the workers it represents once it has successfully bargained a contract with the employer.
The difficulty unions have in clearing that second bar—a hurdle unique to Colorado—explains in large part why the percentage of unionized Colorado workers is so low. Data from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that Colorado’s union density (7.7 percent in 2024) much more closely resembles that of right-to-work states (with an average of 6.2 percent in 2024) than non-right-to-work states (15.8 percent in 2024). Colorado is the only state with Democratic trifecta control of government to have such a law.
The bill Polis vetoed drew unanimous support from Democratic legislators, and from Colorado Worker Rights United, a statewide coalition of labor unions and worker centers. Given that vetoes occurring after the Colorado General Assembly’s session can’t be overridden, there isn’t an opportunity for legislators to nullify Polis’s decision.
“I believe there must be a high threshold of worker participation and approval to allow for bargaining over mandatory wage deduction. And SB 25-005 does not satisfy that threshold, which is why I am vetoing the bill,” Polis wrote in his veto letter.
This marks a sharp departure from the views Polis presented when he sought the Colorado AFL-CIO’s endorsement in 2018, at which time he positioned himself as an ally of working people set on strengthening the state’s labor movement.
The question is this–are there red lines to be a Democrat. For instance, I’d have a real hard time accepting someone as a Democrat who does not support gay marriage or legal abortion rights. But I feel there’s a lot of Democrats who think those rights are more important than union rights. That should not be. If you don’t have a class analysis, you aren’t really a Democrat. You don’t have to be a personal fan of unions, just like you don’t have to personally think abortion is a good thing. But you do need to support the basic legal rights that allow both unions and abortion to thrive. Jared Polis is a Democrat who hates working people. There’s no room for that. Go away rich boy.
Pretty funny if not like a clown investigation here (gift link) from Maggie’s farm.
TL;DR: Trump’s announcement that Qatar was giving him a very special 747 that’s been tricked out like a luxury jet for six year old pimps was just Adderal Grandpa getting all confused and excited about a potential new toy:
Interviews with 14 people involved in or briefed on the search for the replacement plane say it started when the White House Military Office, which oversees presidential travel, worked with Boeing and the Defense Department to compile a list of every late-model 747 on the market with a business-jet layout, which could more quickly be retrofitted into a presidential plane.
There were only eight planes in the world that fit the bill, including a flashy double-decker jet that Qatar had been trying to sell for several years, with no luck.
A brochure for the aircraft advertised just the kind of opulence Mr. Trump favors. There were “soft fabrics of the highest quality” in the bedroom, along with “luxurious leather and exquisite wood veneers” and a “lavishly designed” bathroom that is “almost a piece of art.”
I bet.
Hey, who’s at the center of this cluster? Oh this guy:
This second 747 was still available for sale.
Mr. Witkoff, an old friend from Mr. Trump’s early days in New York real estate, knew the Qataris well. The country’s sovereign wealth fund had bailed him out in 2023 when a real estate deal on Central Park South went bad.
It’s good to have friends.
So Mr. Witkoff got in touch with the Qataris to ask about the plane.
Love at First Sight
By mid-February, Qatar had agreed to send the jet to Florida when Mr. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort, so he could see the plane firsthand.
The plane arrived on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 15, after a nonstop flight from Doha to West Palm Beach, Fla., according to flighttracking records. Mr. Trump left his club for the short drive to the airport and stepped out of his limousine about 10 a.m., to lay eyes on a plane that once had been used by the Qatari royal family.
“Every surface and detail in this room reflects the opulent design,” the sales brochure said. “The highest level of craftsmanship and engineering prowess was applied to outfit the interior meticulously.”
See if you can guess where this is heading.
By the time Mr. Trump toured the aircraft on Feb. 15, discussions about how to acquire the plane had changed. The talk among senior aides to Mr. Trump shifted from a government-to-government sale to a donation.
Ah the passive voice.
That was a surprise to Air Force officials. At no point, Pentagon officials said, did the Air Force propose that the plane be donated.
One senior administration official told The Times that Qatar raised the option of a potential gift, or at least that Qatari officials were “agreeable” to the idea of a no-charge, government-to-government transfer when it came up. A second official said Mr. Witkoff, for one, always believed the transaction would be a donation.
The inevitable punchline is the Qataris had been trying to sell this monstrosity unsuccessfully for years, and thought they had found somebody vain and stupid enough to buy it:
Government officials in Qatar — who had long wanted to unload the plane — had a different version of the sequence of events, according to a person familiar with their timeline.
They were willing to send the jet to Florida for Mr. Trump to take a personal tour. But the expectation was that the plane would be sold to the United States, not offered as a gift.
Now of course they’re finding out that Donald Trump’s basic economic theory of life is that you give him stuff for free, and maybe one day he will be able to do you a favor. It’s all about the relationship dontcha know, plus a refusal is not the act of a friend:
Mr. Witkoff also has strong personal ties to the Gulf kingdom that go back several years. Aside from the bailout by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, attended the wedding of one of Mr. Witkoff’s sons.
“I have a personal relationship,” Sheikh Mohammed said in an interview this year with Tucker Carlson, around the time the plane negotiations were underway, describing his ties to Mr. Witkoff.
Let’s make a deal:
The Qatari plane has a luxurious interior. But considerable work would be necessary to prepare the plane to serve as a true Air Force One — including ridding the jet of any hidden electronic listening devices and adding advanced communications equipment and specialized systems to protect the plane from a missile attack or other threats. And even if the plane is donated, the cost of those retrofits would be enormous, according to current and former Pentagon officials: at least $1 billion.
Which is pretty funny, given that that figure is about ten times what the plane was being shopped for by the Qataris.
“It is ridiculous,” Mr. Foulkrod said of the idea that the Qatari plane could be a quick fix, adding that the existing Boeing projects could probably be accelerated more. “That’s a better dollar value than trying to take an airplane from somebody else and trying to make it into a presidential plane. It makes no sense.”
The Qatari plane is currently in San Antonio, according to photographs of the plane and flight records examined by The Times.
No new appropriation for any work on the plane — or to maintain it and supply a crew — has been approved by Congress, which would be sure to scrutinize any deal completed with Qatar.
White House officials have said they are considering hiring L3Harris, a military contractor, to handle the work needed on the Qatari plane, although the source of the money to do this work, or even the total price tag, has not been made public.
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One backwards-baseball-cap-wearing Chicago dudebro’s campaign to enact legal revenge on women who called him “clingy” and a “psycho” online has ended in ignominious defeat: yesterday, a Federal judge dismissed his second amended legal complaint against these women and dozens of other defendants with prejudice.
Nikko D’Ambrosio’s apparently very incompetent lawyers filed his first lawsuit in January of last year, alleging that several women who had dated him had said mean and defamatory things about him in a private Facebook group devoted to calling out guys who date very badly.
In posts on the Chicago version of the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” group, one woman complained that he had been “[v]ery clingy very fast. Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.” Another called him a “psycho.” Still another said that he had ghosted her after the two had sex. The first woman posted his picture and mentioned his first name, and shared a text message she said she had gotten from him, which I have lightly censored:
Speak for yourself you ugly vial [sic] fake whore. Your ego matches that fake fucking face where you can’t even smile in pictures because your teeth are so fucked. The truth hurts bitch and my message will stay with you forever c*nt.
So, yeah, this is the guy who thinks it’s defamatory to call him a “psycho.”
Anyway, so not only was the defamation case somewhat silly–these women were basically expressing their opinions, and making a few claims about him that his lawyers didn’t actually challenge directly in the suit–but his lawyers arguably fucked up pretty much everything about the complaint that they could possibly fuck up.
Among other things, they didn’t just sue the women who had made the comments about him; they sued nearly two dozen other women and one man, including relatives of one of the women who had posted comments. They also sued multiple different corporate incarnations of Facebook parent Meta. To top it off, as I understand it, the lawyers filed the case in the wrong jurisdiction–a Federal court–though some of the defendants lived, like D’Ambrosio, in Illinois and should have been sued in that state.
Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt, who has been writing about frivolous lawsuits for years, declared their complaint to be “the single dumbest lawsuit on the planet.” Ken “Popehat” White, a lawyer and legal commenter, said it was “astoundingly sloppy and incompetent … This may be the most badly drafted complaint by a lawyer I have seen this millennium.” White guessed that the case would be thrown out “for jurisdictional defects” and, lo and behold, it promptly was.
Anyway, D’Ambrosio’s lawyers in the so-called defamation case did what Masnick characterizes as a “slipshod job” fixing the problems with the lawsuit, then quickly refiled. And apparently they ended up amending the complaint a second time, though I haven’t found any news articles about this. (I’m not sure how they got away with refiling in Federal court, but I’m not a lawyer.)
So that gets us to yesterday, when Federal judge Sunil R. Harjani issued his 35-page ruling, basically tearing the complaint to shreds and dismissing it with prejudice. Harjani declared that the statements made by the women didn’t amount to defamation, and that “despite having ample opportunity, D’Ambrosio has yet to identify any false statements, the central element of a defamation claim.”
He also blasted D’Ambrosio for “su[ing] anyone remotely associated with those posts for all possible, imaginable claims, including the woman who dated him and her parents, women commenting on posts, the operators of the Facebook group, and Facebook itself.” As a result of these things, and a number of others that are mostly too complicated for a non-lawyer like me to explain or sometimes even understand, the judge concluded:
While evident from his complaint that D’Ambrosio objects to the idea that women in Chicago, and nationally, have a private invite only forum in which they are able to discuss and potentially warn other women against men’s dating habits and that he personally detested being discussed in that group, the statements made about him do not amount to defamation, false light invasion of privacy, or doxing. The comments about D’Ambrosio in “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” were subjective opinions, which even if D’Ambrosio dislikes, cannot amount to defamation. As a result of these deficient claims and D’Ambrosio’s failure to articulate how Meta could be liable under the other counts, any amendment would be futile. Therefore, the Court dismisses D’Ambrosio’s Second Amended Complaint with prejudice.
Case closed, as they say. Really closed, in that it cannot be amended and refiled again.
The irony of it all is that D’Ambrosio filed his doomed lawsuit in the first place because he was angry that women in the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” group were, unfairly in his view, making him look like a jerk. In a private Facebook group.
Now his lawsuit is dead for good, and as a result of the extensive news coverage of his Quixotic legal quest, so it seems is his reputation. Now that women around the world (including lots of them in Chicago) know what a jerk he really is, I suspect that he’s going to have a much harder time finding anyone to date. To put it mildly. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Cars and meat are major factors driving a gender gap in greenhouse gas emissions, new research suggests.
Men emit 26% more planet-heating pollution than women from transport and food, according to a preprint study of 15,000 people in France. The gap shrinks to 18% after controlling for socioeconomic factors such as income and education.
Eating red meat and driving cars explain almost all of the 6.5-9.5% difference in pollution that remains after also accounting for men eating more calories and travelling longer distances, the researchers said. They found no gender gap from flying.
“Our results suggest that traditional gender norms, particularly those linking masculinity with red meat consumption and car use, play a significant role in shaping individual carbon footprints,” said Ondine Berland, an economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a co-author of the study.
No idea what one does about this though as I prepare to do some driving the next couple of weekends and will probably order a steak salad tonight….
South African internet personality and Afrikaner commentator Willem Petzer addresses a group of white South Africans supporting President Donald Trump gathered in front of the US Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, on February 15, 2025. | Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images
Under the second Trump administration, there is one group of people getting expedited access to refugee status and resettlement in the US.
It’s not citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 6.1 million people have been internally displaced due to decades of fighting among armed groups and widespread gender-based violence. The US is not currently accepting more DRC citizens as refugees under President Donald Trump.
It’s not Afghan citizens either, despite the continued human rights violations, especially against women and girls, perpetrated by the Taliban after the US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Instead, the Trump administration is now revoking temporary protections for many Afghans already in America, which could result in their deportation back to Afghanistan.
And it’s not the Sudanese people, of whom nearly 8.6 million have been internally displaced amid a conflict between military and paramilitary forces.
A subset of white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, are the only people Trump has newly admitted to the US as refugees. Trump has described them, without evidence, as victims of a “genocide that’s taking place” and anti-white discrimination, echoing rhetoric that has long circulated on the far right. And he’s sought to punish South Africa for that by cutting off US aid.
(The US government will have to admit some refugees from other countries who were already in the resettlement pipeline before Trump took office, per a court order issued in late March after the president tried to suspend almost all refugee admissions. But that court-ordered acceptance is a sharp contrast from the administration’s enthusiastic outreach to Afrikaners.)
Trump’s effort to label Afrikaners “refugees” is based on dubious pretenses. The South African government and even some white South Africans argue that, after the end of the apartheid system, which supported white minority rule in South Africa until the early 1990s, white people remain a privileged class. The typical Black household has 5 percent of the wealth of the typical white household. And police data does not show that Afrikaners, many of whom are farmers, suffer from disproportionate levels of violence that would amount to genocide.
As a small minority of the population, white people still own a majority of the country’s land. That hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from criticizing the country’s land ownership laws as “racist” against white people following the signing of a land reform bill earlier this year.
The law allows the government to seize property without compensation only in limited circumstances, including when the land is not in use or has been abandoned and if the owner is merely holding it as an investment in the hope that it will appreciate in value. Afrikaner farmers have argued that the law could be used to seize their land against their will, but the government has contested that claim, and there is no evidence that this is occurring.
Instead, the evidence suggests Trump is selectively plucking a white minority for resettlement, even as nonwhite people facing war and famine around the world have been shut out from protection in the US.
On Monday, the first group of these Afrikaners, 49 people in total, arrived in the US, where they will be offered a “rapid pathway” to US citizenship and receive assistance from a refugee office within the Department of Health and Human Services.
To learn more about the impetus behind Trump’s decision, as well as about the situation in South Africa, I spoke with Jacob S. Dlamini, a Princeton University history professor whose research has focused on South African apartheid. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Do white Afrikaners have a legitimate claim to refugee status?
I grew up under apartheid, literally under signs that said, “Whites only.” White boys chased Black folks for sport when I was growing up. This feels like a real kick in the gut.
There is no substance to the claim that Afrikaners as a group have been persecuted. These are not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. They are people who simply do not want to live under majority-Black rule.
Some of them will talk about crime. I come from a family of small business owners who have suffered because of crime. I’ve lost friends to crime. I’ve lost relatives to crime. Independent stats show that whites as a group are not disproportionately targeted. If anything, it’s poor people who bear the brunt of South Africa’s crime problem — and it is a serious problem.
In his executive order granting refugee status to white Afrikaners, Trump referenced the South African government’s recent land reform bill, which he claims allows the seizure of “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and is “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Does that square with the reality in South Africa?
The very first piece of legislation that Nelson Mandela signed into law when he became president in May of 1994 was a land reform bill whose job was to correct what is essentially South Africa’s original political sin, and that was the taking away of land from indigenous peoples and allocating it to white South Africans for exclusive ownership. For the past 30 years, the government has actually failed spectacularly on that front. That failure helps explain why today, in May 2025, whites still own more than 70 percent of farmland in South Africa. [Editor’s note: Only 7 percent of the country’s population is white.]
In fact, as white farmers themselves have been pointing out ever since Trump announced his plans to do this, no single white farmer has had land taken away from him, and there is no suggestion that that’s going to change anytime soon.
Do you think Trump’s policy is evidence of Elon Musk’s influence in this administration?
Musk is not the only South African who’s got Trump’s ear. There’s a whole cohort of white men who grew up, for some of their lives, under apartheid in South Africa. That is significant.
The mistake that the media in the US has been making has been to focus on Musk and to assume that it all radiates from him to Trump. In fact, there’s this whole cohort of white men who have yet to come to terms with democracy in South Africa, meaning that a poor Black person who has no prospects in life has as much say politically when it comes to elections as does a very rich white person. That’s what it comes down to.
They’ve lost their power, which is not the same thing as privilege. For example, it’s still the case that when you look at corporate South Africa, 62.1 percent of corporate leaders are white, and most of those are men. Only 17.2 percent are so-called Black African. And that is 30 years since the advent of democracy.
What do Trump’s policies mean for the South African government?
They’re in for four years of hell with Trump. But it is also, I’m hoping, a wake-up call for the current [African National Congress] government to take South Africa’s poor much more seriously. The incompetence and the corruption of the past 30 years have, in some ways, pushed the ANC off the higher moral ground that it occupied when Mandela was president.
Trump’s decision to treat the chief beneficiaries of apartheid as victims of a genocide taking place only in his head gives the ANC a chance to get back on that moral high ground by reminding the world just how criminal apartheid was.
The single biggest mistake that the ANC made at the moment of transition in 1994 was to assume that all that you needed to do to correct the injustices of apartheid was to create a Black capitalist class. All that this did was create this massive patronage system that had government contracts at its center. This made the Black bourgeoisie dependent on government business and encouraged corruption.
Looking back over the last 30 years, we can see that thinking that you could use government contracts to create a Black business class was just a terrible idea. Ironically, the ANC copied the idea from successive apartheid governments, which used government patronage to build an Afrikaner business class. There is not a single Afrikaner [billionaire in US dollars] in South Africa today who did not get their start on the back of apartheid government contracts.
Corruption is endemic, and it’s a huge problem. Of course, the thing about corruption in South Africa that we forget is that it’s non-racial, it cuts across racial lines. Because you need these cross-cultural and racial networks to move money around, to launder money. It’s a national enterprise.
Who has suffered because of the incompetence and the corruption? It’s all South Africans, especially the poor. White Afrikaners as a group have not suffered exclusively.
How should we think about Trump’s decision to welcome white Afrikaners as refugees in the context of his gutting of US refugee admissions broadly?
It is bitterly ironic that he has stopped the processing of refugee applications for everyone except this group of privileged white South Africans.
Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the US for pointing out the basis of Trump’s animus toward South Africa, but there is no mistaking the white supremacist underpinnings of this. There is no mistaking the crude racism at the heart of this. You have here an administration that has and is punishing people who really need all the help they can get, who are coming here or are here for better opportunities for their kids and for themselves, but it will stop at nothing to take this very privileged group of white South Africans and turn them into refugees, when, in fact, they’re anything but refugees.
I grew up under apartheid. My mother went to her grave without having voted in the country of her birth. I grew up fighting the system.
I now find myself in 2025 having to relitigate whether apartheid was wrong. That is what this amounts to: taking people who benefited and continue to benefit from this awful system called apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is communicating is that apartheid was right. That is morally repugnant and just plain obscene.
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