Whatever you might think abut his stupid car tunnel, or his baby’s ridiculous name, or even his unwelcome attempts to insert himself into the rescue of a group of Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, you’ve got to give Elon Musk credit for one thing: he’s also a huge jackass on Twitter, perpetually tweeting “politically incorrect” quips like the aging edgelord he apparently thinks he is.
Musk’s highly improbable gender-neutral-friend — the musician Grimes –gets fed up with his Twitter nonsense like the rest of us. The style icon took him to the virtual woodshed some months back for an confusingly unfunny tweet mocking trans folks for having the temerity to want to be addressed with the pronouns that are most appropriate for their gender identity.
And then there was the whole red pill fiasco, in which Musk ended up being told to fuck off by none other than one of the inventors of the now sadly ruined metaphor.
You might wonder why or how Grimes manages to put up with what I imagine must be unending bullshit from that guy. But for whatever reasons they not only remain together; Grimes is willing to defend him on social media.
Last night Grimes posted a video of “sword dancing” on TikTok, but some of the commenters weren’t interested in discussing the artistry. Nope.
“GRIMESSS. HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS AND ACTIVELY SLEEPING WITH THE MAN WHO [IS LITERALLY DESTROYING] THE PLANET AND HUMANITY,” one commenter demanded,.
Grimes replied by singing his praises. Dear sweet Elon isn’t destroying the world; he’s trying to save it. “His whole career is about making travel/house power etc. sustainable and green,” Grimes wrote. “It’s worth a deep dive.”
(Though preferably not in the tiny submarine Musk wanted to use to rescue those soccer players in the cave.)
Another commenter asked a question that you never want to hear asked of someone you love: “Bestie, can you confirm he’s not a men’s rights activist? Some people online have been saying that & I’m concerned.”
“He’s not,” Grimes replied, “Def he’s been very immature at points on Twitter but for ex the president of spaceX is a woman, as is his right hand at Neuralink etc.”
I’ve been thinking about that response and I have to say that “he’s been very immature” is probably the best defense one could possibly give for someone who’s started to sound like an MRA. That at least suggests he’s not some unreconsructed misogynist but rather a dickhead going through a phase. A phase that, like all phases, has a possible ending date.
That is, if he’s capable of changing, If it turns out to be more than a phase and more like a deeply entrenched personality defect the only advice I have for Grimes is to GET OUT and take your swords and your weirdly named baby with you.
H/T — TakedownMRAs
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Additional note: design factors of safety are usually based on the average material strength. That’s why they have such a huge range. With natural or synthetic fibers which tend to have more variation, the FOS will usually be larger, because the FOS is meant to protect the end user from that variation.
So, just because a climbing rope is constructed to NFPA standards (generally 15:1 for synthetic rescue lines) doesn’t mean that particular rope is actually good for 15x the rated load. Or that a strand of 5:1 wire rope is actually good for 5x. Or generic 10:1 recreational climbing rope is good for 10x.
Please, follow the rated loads! And care instructions, because inadequate chafing, embedded dirt, and improper exposure can all make things weaker than they are supposed to be.
I made a mistake in using rope as an example, and I am now a ball of stress.
In my class, the boys were the ones most derisive about the shoddy engineering of the EDS company, and the most creative about figuring out exactly what hardware could be stripped out. The girls figured out what supplies and furniture could be done without. One of the boys leapt up and began making a list on the chalkboard. It was a very long list, and probably came to twice the weight of the girl. Kids hoisted the classroom furniture to estimate its weight; if a boy and a girl could pick it up or drag it, that much weight could go
Everyone was equally aghast at the shipbuilding (“They have a CLOSET? Throw the closet door out!”) (we’d grown up seeing Apollo) and at the terrible security. No locks, no armed guards, no nothing. We all knew to lock the house and car doors, even though it was probably okay if we didn’t. Our dads locked their office doors at night.
This was in an upper-middle-class, almost all white, fairly conservative suburb, so it’s not like it was a bunch of tree-hugging liberal kids.
But in one 45 minute session of brainstorming, a bunch of 15-16 year olds would have gotten the serum, the pilot, and the girl to that planet. They would have been hungry, thirsty, sitting on the floor (or floating) and mostly naked, but everyone would live. No murder needed.
Clearly a Republican-run system in that story.
On a whim I decided to look the story up on Wikipedia, and found this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations
Amongst other things, people have been criticizing the engineering of that ship since the story first came out, and Campbell’s reasoning (if I understand it correctly) for not allowing the girl to live seemed to be that letting her live was ‘a gimmick’ based on the idea that human sacrifice was unacceptable, and that the story would be better if the audience was forced to accept it, at least in this case.
Meanwhile, I am now stuck wondering just how much this girl actually weighed, or how much Campbell thought the average 18 year-old weighed that the pilot couldn’t have found enough ‘stuff’ to jettison to balance her added weight.
Or maybe I’m just really bad at envisioning what ~200lbs. of assorted junk might look like, and if an actual spaceship would really have that much junk to spare like that.
@ Redsilkphoenix
Well, 1 square foot of 1” thick steel plate is about 41.8 lbs/square foot…
So, just under 5 square feet of plate steel! Or 10 square feet of 1/2” plate!
If they had a 1/2” thick interior door/hatch they could live without, that’d do it. Like, I dunno, maybe the weird unnecessary closet door?