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They were always the most likely buyer if you were paying attention.

I admit to being pretty disappointed at the confirmation though. Blue Origin would of done just fine without this merger and 3+ companies competing for US space launches instead of 2 would of been healthier.

Maybe Tony Bruno will launch his own space company? I always thought Boeing and Lockheed were holding him back.


Why would BO have done fine? In 24 years, they haven’t gotten one gram to orbit. Something appears very wrong over there.


They are close to finishing New Glenn, their next rocket that is better than ULA's Vulcan in pretty much every way. They will probably launch this year. Currently they are testing the launch hardware. There is an update from today:

https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-origin-debuts-new-glenn...

Yes, ULA will have finished Vulcan about a year earlier, but otherwise Blue Origin seems way ahead of ULA in terms of technology. ULA didn't even develop the Vulcan first stage engines, the most complex part of a rocket. I really don't see what Blue Origin expects to get out of ULA. Blue Origin doesn't need Vulcan, they will soon have something that is better in every way: New Glenn will have a reusable first stage and a higher launch mass.

> In 24 years, they haven’t gotten one gram to orbit.

ULA has launched a lot, but mostly with over 20 year old rocket designs that are based on even older rockets.


>> In 24 years, they haven’t gotten one gram to orbit.

> ULA has launched a lot, but mostly with over 20 year old rocket designs that are > based on even older rockets.

by that metric the butcher around the corner here is better than ULA. He makes model rockets as a hobby and just tested one he just build and designed last year. And since it was designed last year and not a decade ago its also a newer design than New Glen. so its better?

Yes if New Glen works as designed and they can launch it it will probably better than what ULA now has. But that doesn't change the fact that BO has nothing yet.


It still seems pretty likely that New Glenn will be launching relatively soon. Within one year probably, despite them not having launched an orbital rocket ever before. That wouldn't be far behind ULA's Vulcan, which first launched in January. Though Blue Origin also has a lot more employees than ULA: 11,000 vs 2,700.


sure - probably yes. but blankly giving them the benefit of doubt and just saying that they actually are better if they haven't lauched anything to orbit when comparing them to another company that launches stuff is not wise.


Yeah happy hour stories about their very methodical, glacial pace of development + decision to make a really big engine from Day 1 abound.

BO is Old Space wrapped in New Space.


Blue isn’t doing fine on their own and part of me suspects this is Jeff’s elaborate ploy to hire Tory Bruno.


I think ULA did a good enough job of that on its own. They’re like the US Steel of space. A great combination with Blue Origin’s own massive expenditures on recapitulating aerospace sclerosis. :)


I hope Tory goes to rocketlab and works on their neutron rocket


The broad frustration against pharmaceutical corporation isn't simply because they're for-profit. It's because they're not actually taking on the risky business development that profit seeking is supposed to be good at. If we can stop the free riding happening, for-profit pharmaceutical corporations would be just fine.


The inability of wrist trackers to identify deep vs light sleep might cause frustration to some, but their automated sleep journaling is actually more than enough to help change the lives of people with insomnia.

For some reason we had to slap complicated sleep scores and sleep classification on these things to take them seriously when all you needed was simple data gathered consistently over time.


I'm pretty skeptical of the given reason of “cost growth stemming from evolving Lunar Gateway architecture and mission requirements combined with macroeconomic challenges". IMO this is more indicative of Northrop not having the needed engineering talent to run their programs.

The article goes on to mention that Northrop took part in creating the design and architecture of the lunar Gateway under an earlier cost plus contract, which seems at odds with the idea that architecture cost growth was out of their control.

In the end, this is why you hire and retain skilled IC talent. So you can utilize their experience and insight to discover hidden issues and better technology paths before things leave the drawing board.


I was confused by this post because I'd never heard of a Fort Detrick before but I found these articles explain well what's happening: [1]

Domestic propaganda push in china is leaking externally, including posts by a non-existing Swiss scienist that has the Swiss embassy protesting. [2]

With the Wuhan lab theory we at least have independent confirmation of gain of function research at the lab and knowledge that covid virus fragments were sequenced from the area before the real outbreak started.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58273322 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58168588


I guess the Chinese didn't think Switzerland is able to check who exists and who doesn't but the Swiss are quite on top of that.


So why did Fort Detrick shut down in 2019?


Wikipedia says they failed a safety inspection. Do you believe something different? It's since been re-opened with limited capacity after retraining.


Wikipedia says they failed a safety inspection for breaches of containment. What were they failing to contain and what was the effect of the breach?

I mean, the argument of the comment at the top of this thread seems pretty straightforward to me: if it's a norm to explain what's going on at biological research labs with links to the military, then that norm applies to everyone, not just China. The world deserves to have a detailed and open accounting of what went on, even if the accounting is "Nothing relevant." And in a practical sense, if the US abides by the norm that public reports on military bio-warfare labs are expected, it gives the US a much better bargaining position when asking other people to abide by that norm.


Because they were not disposing of dangerous waste according to protocol.

Also the CDC limited information about the shutdown due to "national security concerns".

Archived NYT article from August 6 2019:

https://archive.ph/oosEz


They failed an inspection and mishandled waste byproducts - but also after an "unknown" pneumonia-like respiratory disease starting spreading in the area around D.C

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/health-officials-to...

https://patch.com/virginia/burke/another-respiratory-outbrea...


That's not weird at all...


The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election.

>Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1]

A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome.

Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere.

[1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems


Yeah, one of the things you are expected to accept right off the bat going into the conspiracy "evidence" is that all of these companies are essentially the same entity: Diebold, Dominion, Sequoia, SmartMatic, and Edison Research. Once you buy that, you'll also buy that they're all owned by communist China.


I thought it was Venezuela?


Same thing, as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned.


That is a critically important point. Their willingness to conflate entities that are distinct to other people gives them a broken worldview that is very hard to understand.


Not every server is useful for gathering intelligence on a nation either it seems.

Thinking about it, if you want secret information by definition only a tiny fraction of the networks out there are going to have it— anything most of them have wouldn’t be a secret anymore. So any attackers are going to focus the majority of their energy on exfiltrating data from the most likely/productive extreme minority of their infiltrated networks.


I wonder if the wealthy leaving California to avoid state income taxes now that the federal government penalizes states collecting it will finally be the impetus it needs to reform it's terrible property tax system.

And make make no mistake, if there's a large outflow of the moderately well off and up out of Califonia in recent years, it's probably because our last Congress capped the state tax deductions they could take.[1] Effectively making Bluer states pay for the most recent nationwide tax break.

Kind of a moonshot, but it's nice to imagine states leaving income taxes to the federal government because of this and just switching to land value taxes.

Some kind of fairer sales tax like a VATS are another alternative, but I hear too much about the trouble people have with them (added bureaucracy, carousel fraud) to actually like the idea.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/salt-deduction/


>I think I would of agreed if I hadn't read a larger quote giving the actual context here. It's very hard to brush it off in the same way:

BANNON: Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone -- time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right.

JACK MAXEY (CO-HOST): You know what Steve, just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia, these were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated if you will with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.

BANNON: That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.

>The call to replicate actual specific events in the American Revolution really makes it feel real, along with the mention of a civil war being on.


Thanks — I agree that’s a bit worse. But it’s still pretty clear he’s speaking in the context of what the President should do, and obviously the President can’t have his enemies’ heads displayed Tudor-style on the White House fence. He’s not bringing up Tudors as a sincere suggestion, he’s arguing that any (realistic) punishment would be mild by historical standards.


So he’s calling for the president to murder a person and your defending his position by saying “obviously the president can’t have people murdered”.

Let’s say someone was calling for the gassing of Jews, would you also defend their position with a sentiment of: “ but that’s ok, because obviously a state can’t just start rounding up Jews and gassing them”?

Or perhaps his speech should be judged on his stated intent ?


He's also clamouring for civil war, in addition to dreaming for murder, instead of just firing everyone not licking their boots. This is a direct threat to civil discourse, democracy and fairness. It is evil.


I guess I don't see that much of a difference between someone picking what are the best articles, news and videos to show by hand and someone designing an algorithm to do the same function. Their organization still has responsibility every time they choose to show some content over others.

I don't believe that when an algorithm is used, the output is suddenly not a function of human nature or human design. That suddenly no human has any responsibility for it.


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