Tag Archives: space

Fire Chasies

Posted by xaminmo

It was embarrasing. We had firechasies loose on the ship. One or two were annoying. They liked to toy with people, maybe singe hair. They were psychic, and imbued people with a little fear. They thought it was funny.

But this was maybe 40 or 50. The richies who rented the ship thought it would be good fun, but of course, the chasies got loose. This was a real hazard. We would have to vent the ship.

But did we? Were we just playing into their silly littly game? How long could people last with the cabins purged, Could we cram everyone somewhere safe and keep the chasies out?

I went to the cockpit, and looked out the window. Beautiful. We were low over a thick dust ring around a gas giant. Anyway, back to the plan.

I needed to make sure that others were safe if we lost control of the ship. Only one ship nearby.

“Pegasus, how many on board?”

“Pegasus Crew Transport, 51 souls on board.”

I could see them now. They looked like a lolipop with two long pontoons. Reminded me of the Precursor ship on Star Control.

They were moving fast, lower against the dust rings. They had to be hitting pebbles, but they were gone in less than a minute.

OK. We have 3 minutes of venting. Any longer, and we won’t have enough air left. Hope we can get all of the chasies out.

I feel a twinge of guilt. They’re sentient. Not overtly evil. Some people even keep one as a pet. But there’s no other choice.

And then I woke up.

I don’t always remember dreams. Sometimes not as much detail, but sometimes very elaborate, multiple scenes, etc. Usually not vibrant, like me visualizing or remembering when awake. Usually happens when waking, and usually gone if I go back to sleep. I remembered more when I was younger. Probably because I had untreated sleep apnea in my 20s. (UPPP/Tonsilectomy did wonders for sleep quality.)

I have others in text files, livejournal, wordpress, facebook, reddit.


Anti-Wealth vs Anti-Corruption

Posted by xaminmo
These space races bring technology and cost reductions to everything we do in the world. Consider we were struggling to maintain GPS (as in, we had outages in some places in the US and around the earth), but now it costs 10% to launch GPS satellites, and SpaceX has had 5 launches.
 
People complain about internet access all the time, but now you can pop up high speed internet anywhere on earth, meaning you can move out to the country and still be connected. Monthly is about $100.
 
Branson and Bezos space launches are $250k per person. The extra seats were auctioned off, and raised $28m which was distributed to charities. It didn’t cost $28m for a launch, though there has definitely been a lot of research money spent. Research money spent doesn’t trickle down to the poor, but it does pay salaries, and pays for manufacturing, mining, etc. This literally pulled extra money out of a lot of wealthy people and gave it to charities.
 
A recent complaint meme was a zinger that “these billionaires should be competing to solve global warming, not go to space.” We all know how to fix global warming. It’s about being more efficient in everything we do, which is what these technologists are motivating people to do. But, a billion dollars, or even 100 billion does not “fix it”. A billion dollars would provide solar power for 25k homes. Barely a scratch. But a billion dollars can drive the creation of a lot of technology, and motivate a lot more change and improvement than you can buy off the shelf.
 
What’s happening is that they are transforming technology and the way society works. That is more valuable than buying something now, today. You might think buying food for people would help, but it would be better to work on sustainable technologies and things which help make food production possible. If you buy up all of the food now and give it to people, you just shift money to other pockets, and make food so costly that others can’t access it. You shift the problem, not solve it.
 
As to their money, these guys don’t have $200b. They own companies that other people want to own. If you have 1 million shares, the first share sold at the highest ask price, and multiply that out, that’s how people come to their prices. But, if you started selling them (to whom?), the price goes down, because not everyone wants it that badly. And eventually, as you start giving up real money, you find that the pressure is 30+ times the actual value of the company. For a small company, you could buy the whole thing, but for some of the largest companies, the valuation is so artificially inflated that the supply of money becomes a problem.
 
They do have multiple billions in assets, but they don’t earn billions. The memes saying “They made $16m today. Pay your taxes!) They didn’t make that money. That money doesn’t exist. It’s an artificial valuation based on the whims of people deciding whether they like a company or not. You want to tax someone highly on something they own being increased in valuation, then you have to refund them when the real value is less. This is why you tax people when they sell assets. Otherwise, your house went up in value. Why didn’t you pay 28% on that increase?
 
What’s happening here is that people see “He has money. I want money. Gimme.” It’s a propaganda war against people owning things and being a threat to other people who own things. Aim your frustrations at the real problems. It’s not someone owning property that other people want to buy.
 
Fight their anti-union stances if you want. Fight for higher wages and better benefits. Fight for higher minimum benefits, and protections against price gouging in pharmaceutical research. Fight for no more superPACs and no more lobbyist bribes and fight for ranked choice voting. Real things, not “big money is big bad.” It doesn’t mean anything coherent to say that.
 
Fight for changes in the way the economy works if you want. If you want no private ownership, be honest about that as well, but consider what happens when you have a horrible boss and no other job prospects. That’s what you’d be setting up.
 
It doesn’t make sense to say “ah, stop improving aerospace technologies. Liquidate their assets and spend it all right now.” Because then you don’t have the company doing the improvements, and you don’t have the money or assets for the next time you want to spend someone else’s money. But you would have all of the power of ownership consolidated into a much smaller group, which would have even less incentive to consider anyone else’s needs.

Spacetime Dream

Posted by xaminmo

I had one of those dreams during waking that was both vivid and meaningful. It was in a village, with many people around. Standing inside, but near the lip of a basin. There were trees, complex terrain, but not a lot of big rocks. Everything was lush and green in the late afternoon, early evening. Before dusk, but no direct beams of light seen.

The basin wasn’t actually a basin. It was curved spacetime. Gravity did not “feel” strange, but it did “look” like we would walk down into the basin to go forward. Left and right seemed normal. Perhaps the Earth had become a Mobius Strip in spacetime, not a torus. We were looking across the gap from the inside.

There was no Sun in this universe. It just became brighter and darker over time. Shadows were always towards the center of the strip, but if you looked behind you, you would see the curce of the Earth going upwards.

We were looking up at the moon. The moon was physically smaller, but seemed much larger because of how close it was. It took up maybe 5-10 degrees of arc worth of the sky. The moon travelled perpetually in the center, because really, it stayed stationary. The Earth’s surface rotated continually, almost flowed, across the Mobius, dragging atmosphere with it.

Left to right, there were lots of cirrus clouds, with a thick line of them. You could see the clouds striking and billowing against the line of clouds. No dust was coming off of the moon, and it was very dense — more massive than IRL.

In the distance, instead of blackness, or stars, it was the darkest blue. You could see the lights of night-time, creating an outline of the entire continent of Africa, isolated, without Europe nearby. It was almost directly across it seemed, but it was also up vertically because of the curvature.

We understood, all of this in a way, because we had grown up with it. This was still an amazing sight, just like IRL how people get excited for a solar eclipse, or a blood moon, or a comet, or a meteor shower, or any other less common movements.


Cleaning up Google space

Posted by xaminmo

If your Google quota looks to be filling up, and you’re considering buying more space, check your usage first.

Drive and Mail has Trash folders, but they count against your quota. Drive doesn’t automatically delete things either. I found 3 year old cruft in there. YMMV

See your Google usage here:
https://www.google.com/settings/storage

Drive Trash is here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/trash

GMail trash is here
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#trash
Alternate accounts will be /u/1, /u/2, etc.

Jumbo non-trash emails are here:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/larger_than%3A10mb

Videos and Movies in “Photos” are here:
https://photos.google.com/search/_tv_Videos
https://photos.google.com/movies

You cannot sort Photos by size,
but you can find them in your drive, sorted by size here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/quota