With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though.
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
75% of divorces are initiated by women in the US. If college educated that number jumps to 90%. Divorce as an mechanism, is almost entirely used by women.
Women absolutely want the divorce more once they come to conclusion some aspect of relationship is over (typically the emotion part but simply spending less time together or feeling most of the burden of raising kids is enough).
Most guys can suck up now-loveless marriage trivially if kids are fine (after kids come, this is pretty standard path for marriages), heck we can still enjoy sex greatly in such situation. Most women, not so much. I know it sounds sexist, trust me I would be very happy if this wasnt true but when I look/ask/listen around it is.
As an cca older guy at certain age the patterns start emerging left and right, and my own marriage can see some of it, just like most other marriages around us.
Some make it, some don't. When it fails its mostly mixture of personality resilience of both sides rather than some objective measure of (lack of) quality of relationship. Its easy to judge but please be kind to those who are going/went through, they may have been a better partner than ie you and still it wasnt enough to sustain it.
Also it’s often fear of stepdads. My mom dumped my dad so she could date a string of abusive assholes. It would give me pause before leaving a marriage that wasn’t utter misery.
Anecdotally, men are a lot more content with marriage. Women want a lot more. The whole “healthy relationship” ecosystem in contemporary times is almost entirely women driven.
A lot more men than women are able to be content with the comfortable mediocrity that is bringing in the paycheque, doing the chores, getting laid once or twice a month, but otherwise not really feeling much passion or enthusiasm or joy with their partner.
It's not the life you hope for, but there's a lot of social messaging that that's just the way it is, it's what you signed up for, you would be selfish to leave, the grass won't be greener, and also it's probably your fault anyway for not being a better husband. The messaging to women in romcoms and the like is much more toward you deserve better, be brave, junk the loser, go get the life you want.
As a guy who was in a mediocre marriage like this for many years, I basically got my emotional needs met elsewhere: through work, family, friends, time and activities with my kids, etc.
Of course they're correlated but it's obvious to anyone who has had a long term relationship unravel that the causes are always complicated and multi-layered.
I (man) was the one who pulled the trigger on my divorce but that followed years of conflict and withdrawing from both sides and ultimately you can point to specific milestones (who killed the bedroom, who opened a separate bank account first, who stepped out first, who wouldn't come back to counselling) but it's actually better for healing not to be preoccupied with the blame game and instead focus on where one's own growth opportunities are.
This does not surprise me, as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters. Almost without exception, they come out ahead in every measurable metric.
This is not always exactly true if you dig into the details - for example, something like 20% of fathers get custody - but it's something like 90% of fathers who try to get custody get some.
How many don't even try though because them assume it is hopeless. Some custody includes things like 1 weekend a month - if that is all you get it wasn't really worth the bother.
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.
On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.
But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.
Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.
> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.
Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.
The “% of the federal budget” comparison is mostly a rhetorical trick. It can matter politically, sure, but it’s a terrible way to compare programs across time. Apollo happened before a bunch of Great Society-era spending and later expansions in the federal budget. Comparing shares across radically different eras is basically apples-to-elephants.
I spent some time trying to get solid numbers because I was actually interested in this.
Inflation-adjusted averages:
Apollo-era NASA average (FY1961–FY1972): ~$44.2B/year (2024 dollars)
NASA average over the last ~20 years: ~$25B/year (2024 dollars)
So over FY1961–FY1972 (12 years), that’s roughly $44.2B × 12 ≈ $530B in today’s money for all of NASA.
And what did that buy?
A NASA that was basically inventing the modern space industry:
- building launch sites (LC-39 etc.)
- building huge test facilities and stands
- building control centers / mission operations
- building manufacturing capability at scale
- building/expanding NASA centers
- building DSN and deep-space comms infrastructure
- massive amounts of fundamental research and basic engineering research
- building multiple human spacecraft programs (Mercury → Gemini → Apollo)
- developing major new engines (F-1, J-2, and a bunch of others)
- building multiple rockets and variants
and flying tons of missions, including 6 Moon landings
But of course, NASA wasn’t only Apollo. Even though Apollo dominated, NASA also did a bunch of major non-lunar work: Mariner, Orbiting Solar Observatory, Echo / Telstar / Relay / Syncom, X-15, and the beginnings of Skylab, etc.
That article’s Apollo-only number is around $257B (in 2020 dollars) depending on what you include. I used 2024 $ above for budget. But its close.
Now compare to Constellation and its children (Orion + SLS).
A fair estimate for the cost to get to where we are today is around ~$90B (not counting suits or the SpaceX / Blue Origin landers). And what did we get for that? So far, a few test very incomplete flights.
Artemis/SLS is not doing Apollo-style clean-sheet propulsion development. It mostly reuses Shuttle-era propulsion (RS-25 + solids) with restarts/updates, rather than developing new engines like Apollo had to.
Looking forward gets fuzzier, but current projections suggest roughly:
~$20–25B more before the first crewed lunar landing (assuming the schedule doesn’t slip again)
then for five more landings, under optimistic “one per year” cadence assumptions, maybe another ~$30B or so
So you end up around ~$150B total if everything goes right from here. And note: this assumes huge savings because SpaceX and Blue Origin are spending lots of their own money rather than NASA building its own lander in the Apollo style.
So very roughly:
~$150B (Constellation → SLS/Orion → first 6 landings, optimistic)
vs
~$250B-ish (Apollo-only, depending on inclusion choices and dollar basis)
And my basic point still stands: Apollo had to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and the foundational research base from scratch. A gigantic amount of that 1960s infrastructure is still in use today, and 60+ years of engineering and technology progress should matter. That alone should be worth well over $100B in “things you don’t need to reinvent.”
In pure execution terms, it’s hard to argue Apollo wasn’t on a totally different level.
By your own data, Apollo had 65% more money than SLS/Orion.
My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.
SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.
So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that. The reason is that nobody cares about going to the moon. That shows in fuzzy requirements and much less money for it.
BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.
> By your own data, Apollo had 65% more money than SLS/Orion.
I would say by my own data Apollo has to do 800% more work given the point on where it started.
> My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.
This isn't true. The Apollo program had many more objectives and was continuing and was about to do many more things. The politics around it just changed.
If it was a single goal, then they could have stopped after Apollo 11.
And of course after moon landings stopped, Skylab and other post-Apollo programs continued. Much of the Apollo hardware continued to operate for quite a while longer.
> SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.
Yeah but those changes in plan don't actually change the hardware of the rocket itself. Its always the exact same rocket. It just gets new mission that are designed to work for it, not the other way around. So you can't really say SLS/Orion was delayed because of chaining requirements.
> So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that.
The very fact that the requirements are fuzzy and the political process is a shit-show that gets nothing done and provides bad intensive is exactly the civilization level failure. Just as much as when you try to land on the moon or build a high speed rail line.
> BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.
NASA and government is pretty good on this and lots of people have done work on this, specially Casey at the Planetary Society. So I do not deserve all that much credit.
And for SLS I have been following the program for 10+ years and have been arguing since 2015 that the only rational plan is canceling it. But the congressional alliance behind it is just incredible.
And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
Actually less than half at best were behind Apollo and most thought it cost too much and that social programs were worth supporting more, and after the landings succeeded we didn’t continue anywhere because even that support waned.
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.
Orion was never aiming for anywhere. It was always meant to be a flexible module that could be used for whatever some future plan would come up with. It was developed as part of the Crewed Expeditionary Vehicle program explicitly as a flexible platform. Orion block 1 was originally supposed to be a shuttle replacement for transit to the ISS. The constellation program under which Orion started to be built ostensibly had ambitions beyond just going to the moon, including missions to both Mars and Near Earth Asteroids, but those follow on targets were never really fleshed out. The SLS was created after constellation was cancelled with no clear mission defined; its intent to keep supplier contracts going was clearly stated at the time. Artemis was a program created to give the SLS destinations to go to, none of which are Mars.
I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction?
Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
How many of those traffic accidents could have been prevented if traffic engineering was a serious engineering profession and road deaths were not simply accept as a 'fact of live'.
How many lives would have been saved if a bridge for trains instead of cars were designed?
Sure and sometimes you just need to actually issue safety equipment and install a fall net.
The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.
What is it then? What is real? It has to be environmental and safety regulations, long running environmental studies, general bureaucracy and NIMBYism holding construction and infrastructure back right? That’s what held up the high speed rail in California (along with funding factors). We’ve always had unions so that shouldn’t be it.
I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
This complete nonsense. The Apollo team was much, much, much, much larger then any V2 team. And mostly Americans.
And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.
> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.
So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.
> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.
It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.
Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
This is just nonsense. First of all, the companies in the 1960s were all there for profit and all made profit. And the politicians in power back then also tried to get contracts to companies in their districts. Why do you think the NASA control center is in Houston?
SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.
By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.
In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
It isn't a fixed-price contract. They've been granted multiple "milestone" extensions as well as new contracts for things they're not capable of, clearly. One thing is for sure, no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves while telling the rest of us we need to be "more hardcore" and preach more austerity bullshit.
Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.
>In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?
I think you are just talking out of your ass. Please provide some sources.
The milestones and options are all defined in the original contract and each milestone is assigned some monetary value. There were a set of extension option that add milestones for a second lander that NASA choice to pick up. All this was specified in the original contract.
Starship won one small additional contract that I know of, that was about liquid transfer in Orbit, but that just one of 20+ minor contract about space operations.
> no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves
If it fails SpaceX will not get the money covered in the milestones. So if it fails it will 100% be SpaceX that pays. Why are you making stuff up?
Also, SpaceX has been the most successful NASA contractor in the last 20 years and its not even remotely close, so your confident that it fails is just bias.
NASA own estimation is that the SpaceX lunar program will cost more then double what they are paying SpaceX. SpaceX is giving the government an absolutely insanely good ideal and building a lunar lander for like 1/10 of the cost the lunar lander estimates were during constellation. SpaceX will be LOSING MONEY ON THIS DEAL.
Same goes for BlueOrigin, they can only bid because its Bezos hobby project, they will not make money from the lunar lander anytime soon.
All the contracts are public, if there are contracts that SpaceX got for Starship beyond the original lander contract and the minor demonstrator contract I mention above, please link them.
> Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.
Kathy Lueders has fantastic reputation with everybody in the know and has worker for NASA for 20 years. Its also wrong to say that it was just her, there is a whole team doing the evaluation with lots of experts involved.And after her the report had to be approved by a whole bunch more people.
If you have any actual evidence of wrong-doing, please come forward.
Funny enough Boeing did actually get caught cheating, a NASA executive was actually fired because he was giving Boeing details about the contract and giving them chances to re-submit the bid.
BlueOrigin's 'National Team' and SpaceX received the same technical evaluation level while SpaceX was only like 50% of the price.
There is really no question that it was the only sensible selection. Anybody would have done the same selection. In fact had Kathy Lueders not selected SpaceX she might have been fired for bias and wrong doing.
It was then followed up by lobbying on the side of BlueOrigin where they got their senator from Washington involved and forced an increase in budget so they could also participate, but they were forced to lower the price by a huge amount as well.
So the result is NASA gets two lander program for about 1/4 or cheaper then was expected 20 years ago during Constellation.
If that's not an amazing deal I don't know what is.
> How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?
Its so crystal clear that you don't know anything about rockets and you're only goal is to perpetuate anti-SpaceX hate.
SLS 'first' flight is literally 95% things that already existed, doing something very conventional. It is literally using engines that were built in the 1970s. And its using solid state boosters form the same factory as those of Shuttle. Its literally just a bunch of old parts in slightly different configuration.
And its already cost 50 billion $ in development without even having to design anything new. The launch cost are absurdly high, so high that NASA can barley fund a SLS any anything else at the time. Notice how during Constellation they never even started to build a Lander, they never had the budget for it.
Starship on the other hand is a completely new architecture, with brand new engine, brand new infrastructure, brand new manufacturing sites and so on. And its trying to do much more then SLS. Its trying to be reusable and support distributed launch, and be a lander.
If all NASA wants is a simply rocket that can launch stuff, then SLS shouldn't be compared with Starship at all. SLS is more like Falcon Heavy or New Glenn, just 10-50x more expensive. Notice how Falcon Heavy also worked the first time it flew, because it was just parts of existing rockets in a new configuration. Its almost like its easier if you build with components that have flight heritage. Crazy how that works.
If NASA wanted just a simple big rocket they could have gotten there much cheaper then SLS. So the whole SLS vs Starship comparison doesn't even make any fucking sense in the first place. The goal of Starship was never to be SLS. Falcon Heavy is already 90% of SLS and if NASA had wanted to, they could have paid SpaceX to boost its performance a bit (something that had been studied 15 years ago already). And now between Vulcan, Falcon, New Glenn there are plenty of options if all you want is launch.
Honestly what kind of idiotic engineering evaluation is it to say 'X worked first time' so its forever better then anything else that didn't work the first time. That's not how we evaluate engineering projects ever even if you were comparing the right things in the first place. This argument just proves that you are not seriously trying to engage with the issues of Artemis program.
I feel like these need to be run against case histories from already determined cases, not cases were the doctors set up the scenarios, knowing they’re going to be run against ChatGPT.
The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.
The Ellisons already own Star Trek, and I shudder to think what they will do with it once the current shows are out of the pipeline. Now they get to do it to DC Comics and their characters. Which is I guess good news for Frank Miller, bad news for the rest of us.
I’m sure this administration has some plan to fund this. They want to turn our airwaves in far right propaganda machines, they’ll find a $100 billion somewhere.
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