Color me skeptical. Whenever I see this come up in a social media feed it's a UFO influencer. It's leaked out into the legacy news presenters who have great haircuts and no critical thinking skills.
Maybe he wants to frame it as the scientists being abduced by aliens. We now know that the whole UFO narrative of the 90s was a government psy ops to distract people from stealth fighter testing and dismiss the sightings as 'aliens'.
The critical thinking skills you need are that they were connected to nuclear research. UFO is a distraction. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the deaths are connected.
The critical thinking skills you need are the understanding that people die sometimes, and the question is how it compares to the normal rate of death among this population.
And not just rates, but also how they died and whether malicious actors were particularly likely to bother about disappearing them in a way which are actually really much harder to stage than happen naturally like disappearing someone trailwalking in mountains with friends, or whether someone so incompetent they were arrested on the retired professor's property a couple of months before he was shot and then caught still driving a car full of the victim's stuff after the murder was discovered is particularly likely to be part of a big cover up.
An disappearance of a retired major general without his personal possessions and someone committing suicide whilst due to testify in court, sure those things warrant an investigation even though those things happen as the result of mundane crime or mental breakdowns as well as conspiracy. But another thing entirely for the "nothing much to see in those Epstein files" FBI to spin the grand narrative that connecting all these dots is a legitimate question because UFOlogists on YouTube.
> The FBI now says it “is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists,” adding that it “is working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state … and local law enforcement partners to find answers.”
> Separately, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Monday it will investigate ...
So, do we not want the news reporting what the government is doing? That's the FBI, DoE, DoD, and the House Oversight Committee putting effort into this.
Like, no, i want this reported, not because there is anything that will come from it, but because we should report one what the government is doing.
Why do you think CNN should NOT report one what the government does?
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
I guess being an asshole is just the standard now on HN? How is this attitude acceptable? What did I do to you? I didn't even realize it was paywalled until you mentioned it. But don't let that stop you from being a dick to somebody who's just trying to help fight misinformation. I guess I'll just go fuck myself.
Unfortunately, this is a sign of the times we live in now. Nobody extends a little grace to others. They assume every act is an intentional slight.
There's no room for mistakes or even differences of opinions, and it's tearing us apart.
Part of it, I think, comes from the anonymous nature of online communications, and little to no ramifications to bad behavior. It's the end result of "I can do whatever I want, the established rules and societal norms don't apply anymore."
Michael Hastings was on DMT, smoking weed, and having a manic episode. His family was so worried about his erratic behavior that his brother had flown out to try to get him to check into rehab.. His brother met with Michael the day before he died and realized he was going to need more help, so he called his other brother to fly to LA to try to convince Michael to go to rehab or check into an inpatient psych ward. Michael snuck out in the middle of the night while they were waiting for their other brother and crashed his car into a tree.
In his brother's own words, "I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn't been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't in danger from any outside agency."
It's an exceptionally dumb conspiracy theory among many other exceptionally dumb ones.
Unless that agency is a mob culture who manifests as the voices in our heads.
Remember those navy seals who were murdered by schizophrenic brothers of girlfriends?
Look into all the research of “voices in our heads.” And I’m sure you’re impressed by how well “gang stalking” and “targeted persons” is handled. Crazy crackpot schizophrenic conspiracy theories. And signs of a truly diabolical secret war upon us all.
I know, take meds and get help. That’s the byline of those who consider themselves sane.
Go watch gangstalked people on YouTube. It is as close to 100% mental illness as you can get. They light holograms on fire. Find me one that doesn't look and act cuckoo and link it here.
“They”? You act like those disorganized persons have similar backgrounds or training.
I was gang stalked for years before being “press ganged” into a hooligan army or Power. I know Americas secrets, you just won’t listen. Like Cassandra, such are the most genuine prognostications among the incredulous.
The crazy people are those driven crazy. Look for those stories where otherwise normal people were “gaydon”. That where random people pretend the subject is “gay” even though they are not. Those sad people sometimes shoot up gaybars or gaybash because “they have the devil inside them.”
The “true” conspiracy of conspiracies is that we are not alone in our own minds and entire subcultures are dedicated to screwing with us. Everything these unfortunate peoples experience is sheer insanity. Their mental illness is cultivated.
And if you don’t “believe in” extra sensory perception (more apt term than the alternatives), then why do you know what “gaydar” is? Manipulating the sexuality of others (gender dysphoria) are among the games these so empowered love to play.
Hidden within the silliest things are occult secrets belying an unnatural order among us.
I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
This behavior is strongly incentivized by the fact that recruitment and on boarding and training costs don't show up in the quarter, or maybe even the fiscal year, where layoffs are made. You can also hide a bit of age and wage discrimination in layoffs and intentionally dumb down your organization to goose up the quarter a bit more.
Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.
I hope those steering wheels are for software developers, not remote support for cybercab. Actually remotely driving what's supposed to be an autonomous vehicle is dangerous. Waymo support never actually drives a Waymo. They pick from a menu if possible actions, or they leave the vehicle where it is and dispatch on-site help.
> all while consuming very little capital or engineering resources.
... If you ignore Starship. SpaceX is operating on a $20 billion bridge loan which, if the IPO struggles at all, adds to the risk. Starlink depends on becoming a telco scale mass market ISP, but it's operating in a shrinking TAM, squeezed by increasingly cheap terrestrial wireless infrastructure, and the fact that high income customers are a minority in areas rural enough for terrestrial wireless to be an uneconomical.
Tesla is spending more than the market cap of Rivian to become the Allbirds of the car industry. They're gonna blow their capex on robots and AI without refreshing the car line.
Another commenter remarked that Elon's fame is a failure of skepticism. I've been a skeptic for a few years now, starting with skepticism about agile rocket development, which sounded like bullshit to me.
Well, Starship is going to add another order of magnitude to an already overwhelming domination (SpaceX launches 80+% of all payloads by weight, even corrected for orbital energy). This isn't cheap and it did a lot of things that seemed impossible or unlikely already.
There is no reason to say that its development is slow. Falcon 9 took 8 years from concept to first flight and another 8 years to high cadence, reliable reusable flights. Starship is now only 10 years in development and already went through several iterations.
Rocket companies aren't high value. The vast majority of Falcon 9 lunches are for Starlink. They're not bringing in outside money. There are lots of financial shenanigans in the capitalization of satellites with short lifespans, and hiding the football on Falcon 9 refurbishment costs. "Dominating" the launch of your own payloads makes AI circular market participants blush.
Well, but at least it shows his engineering and management skills. Both US incumbents and Russians struggled to create new viable launch vehicles and Russians even lost capability to produce old ones (Zenit, then Proton). SpaceX seemed to have no problem doing it.
Falcon 9 refurbishment costs can't be high because whole thing takes under 2 weeks with less than a week spent in hangar for any refurbishment work... There may be no refurbishment at all on many flights, just some checks.
And yes, they ate entire worldwide commercial launch market and it wasn't enough... So there's Starlink. They appear to have no war around creating demand for themselves with their own payloads because others are not up to that task - there is too much rot and dysfunction everywhere in the space business worldwide except SpaceX, so they are kinda forced to vertically integrate.
The claim was that all Teslas with version three of their onboard computing would become fully self driving. That's now definitively untrue. But, it isn't as if upgrading to the version four hardware will guarantee that you can get fully unsupervised self driving. No Teslas no matter what hardware in them is ready for fully unsupervised self driving. It's just a new gamble. You pay your money, you take your chances.
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