Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    11 days ago

    Elon Musk in the replies:

    Have you read Asimov’s Foundation books?

    They pose an interesting question: if you knew a dark age was coming, what actions would you take to preserve knowledge and minimize the length of the dark age?

    For humanity, a city on Mars. Terminus.

    Isaac Asimov:

    I’m a New Deal Democrat who believes in soaking the rich, even when I’m the rich.

    (From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      11 days ago

      Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about “actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn’t predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it’s all fucked!”

      For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don’t know that he actually read them.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        10 days ago

        It also has interplanetary coal trade. (predating the netflix cut of Rebel Moon by decades), which considering the tech levels of interplanetary trade, and the energy density of coal is quite silly, and def not to be taken literally. (This is a little bit important as it shows how much the space civilization(s) in the Foundation series are not really constrained by real life resource constraints, a thing which would be a problem if you were to take the series literally and were to say create a city on Mars intending to reboot civilization)

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          10 days ago

          I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter’s use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.

          https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Twice-on-a-Harsh-Moon.html

            • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
              3·
              10 days ago

              I’d say it’s essential Heinlein. Whether you believe Heinlein is essential is another matter :D

              • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                2·
                10 days ago

                Due to the discourse around helldivers, warhammer and the movie I reread starships troopers, and it was interesting how much worse the experience was when I was older.

        • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
          3·
          10 days ago

          @gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you’re almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.

          TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.

            • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
              4·
              10 days ago

              @gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues’ idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that’s not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)

              /1

              • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
                3·
                10 days ago

                @gerikson @techtakes

                Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I’d bear in mind it’s in the regolith because it’s part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you’re not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.