Category: Technology

This is long and geeky, Elon Musk’s latest presentation on Making Life Multiplanetary. One of the reasons I enjoy Elon Musk as a CEO is when he’s discussing this stuff you can tell that he really knows it. His throwaway lines amuse me:

It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now, what’s going on?

The quick takeaways from the presentation are that SpaceX plans to send two rockets to Mars in 2022 to land cargo and four of them in 2024, two of which will be manned to establish a base.

And in typical SpaceX fashion, it dawned on them that if they get so good at launching and landing rockets such that the cost drops dramatically, there’s no reason you can’t take a rocket from NYC to Shanghai in 39 minutes (jump to the 41 minute mark of the video).

From SpaceX, a blooper reel of the failed attempts to land a rocket…

I first heard this via a political writer on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/907967027448598529

In response to:

https://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/907952827858911232

He followed the first tweet with more amusing snark, but then I read John Gruber’s post, Jackasses of the Week, on Daring Fireball:

I don’t write much about “Silicon Valley” as a culture, because I don’t live there and, frankly, I don’t care. But the fact that this startup is being taken seriously is absurd. It’s a company named Bodega, and Fast Company’s headline says it all: “Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete”.

First, all they’ve done is make a fancy vending machine. That’s great. Vending machines are a real thing, and maybe there’s a market for better ones. But better vending machines are still just vending machines.

Second, what kind of sociopaths are these people that they want to put mom-and-pop corner stores and bodegas out of business? Local family-owned stores are what make for great neighborhoods. They’re good people running good businesses that people love. Good startup ideas are things that replace products or services that people hate. Taxis suck, for example. That’s why ride sharing services are so popular and successful. Bodegas and corner stores are great.

Third, as Helen Rosner argues in this thread, they’ve got a crummy business model.

Fuck these guys.

Can’t top that.

“Fontgate” is an amazing story if you are a font nerd, threatening to bring down the daughter of the Pakistani Prime Minister (of course now a hashtag, #fontgate).

Documents claiming that Mariam Nawaz Sharif was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London flats, are dated February 2006, and appear to be typed in Microsoft Calibri.

But the font was only made commercially available in 2007, leading to suspicions that the documents are forged.

At least it wasn’t Comic Sans…