I would’ve been inclined to agree with you as of 10 minutes ago, until I read this Wikipedia article saying Starship refueling will require 10 or more launches. Damn, that means at least $1b to leave LEO assuming each launch is around $100m, so not really all that much cheaper than expendable stages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Propellant_Transfer_Demonstration

I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.

Edit:

This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.

It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.

Edit 2:

Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles

This seems plausible, whereas Starship shuttling between Earth and Mars to “build a colony” does not. More like Starship is a shuttle to LEO and then something like the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian that remains in space and uses ion drive would be what actually transfers humans to Mars orbit, with perhaps Starship also doing the shuttling between the surface and low orbit. It seems we are a really long way off from what The Martian depicts, though it’s possible the first human may step foot on Mars in the next couple decades.

If you’re not gay, you must prove it by wearing a birthday tiara and listening to nothing but Judy Garland the whole day.

AFAIK, the service module is European, built by the ESA, so this is not 100% an American accomplishment.

While Whitey’s on the moon

At least the crew for this mission includes a black guy and a woman, unlike the 24 white dudes who crewed the Apollo missions.

SLS has gotten a lot of well-deserved hate for being an expendable money pit. All that aside, damn, it lifted off with humans in it and off to the moon! There’s no other currently available rocket that can do that, including Starship.

The coal miners were told to learn to code, but maybe software engineers should be learning coal mining at this point. With all the AI data centers being built, there sure is going to be a lot of demand for coal.

Yep, I’d really like to stick to SoCs in the future as well. I’m holding off on hardware purchases until 2027 when AMD’s RDNA 5 will be available. Apple Silicon is amazing, but I’d like a less expensive alternative that has broader Linux distro support. RDNA 5 will bring true RTX cores, which is critical for my Blender rendering workloads, and is the main reason why I couldn’t justify AMD GPUs in the past for anything other than a dedicated gaming machine (e.g., Steam Deck).

My friend was part of the layoff and said they are providing 2 weeks of benefits. So, no health insurance after 2 weeks. It’s barbaric that access to healthcare is tied to employers in this country.

My kids’ devices are blocked from internet access in my OpenWRT firewall and I run a Squid proxy on my server with an allowlist of domains they can access.

Rahhh, shove it, shove it, shove it!

Glyphosate has also been linked to gluten intolerance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/

Maybe at some point, all the “gluten free” products will switch to “glyphosate free”. Until then, I’ve been buying imported flour from Italy, where its use is significantly more regulated than here in the US, although not entirely banned.

This movie gets horrible reviews, but I always found it hilarious.

Is the US, KitKat is made by Hershey, so not sure if the Nestle version sold in Europe is any better. The US version just tastes like “number going up”. That’s the best description for how a lot of American food tastes. It’s so sweet that it makes my throat and tongue go numb, which mostly drowns out the chemical aftertaste, but not quite.

It makes sense to distrust the American for-profit healthcare system where treatments that might work don’t get funded if they can’t be patented and monetized. Cancer is also a huge cash cow.

At the same time, taking unproven treatments is a risk. My father had stage 3 cancer and tried alternative treatments while getting periodic PET scans. When nothing decreased the tumor size, he finally got chemo and radiation. He’s still kicking almost 20 years later, but the radiation caused a lot of issues. He’s lucky it didn’t metastasize.

Yeah, Bazzite is great for anyone already using Steam. My main personal reason for not using Bazzite is the fact that Steam can’t be easily uninstalled.

I run k3s and use Argo CD at work, but it always seemed overkill for my home server. I also would want to use self-hosted Forgejo instead of an external service, but I don’t care to spend time on a setup that bootstraps Forgejo, PostgreSQL and Argo CD, then has all of the above managed by Argo CD.

We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.

Yeah, didn’t realize this myself. Android TV is just something I’ve been tolerating. I also have a Linux living room gaming PC running Pegasus Frontend and it’s annoying that I often have to break out a mouse and keyboard. Linux HTPCs and couch gaming PCs haven’t really been a great UX so far, so I’m excited to see Bigscreen finally release.

I did previously try Steam gaming mode, but it doesn’t work with a USB remote from my tests. It also treats non-Steam games as 2nd class citizens that can’t be cleanly organized and categorized. Another huge downside is it’s proprietary and collects data.

At least there would be more eye witnesses to help debunk Joan Rivers’ conspiracy theory.

That’s a good idea; I’ll be sure and pre-flight next time. Also my mom is dead, so I doubt she would mind. Just one extra worm wiggling around in there.