Comment by sega_sai
4 months ago
Obviously it's pointless to try to make any reasoned arguments. These people don't care, they just want to destroy for the sake of it. In the past I wondered how great civilizations collapse and how this could happen. It is just becoming clearer and clearer every day.
Yep. History of humanity is littered with stories of super powers crumbling under their own foolishness. Very strange to actively witness the death.
I think "Why Nations Fail" is highly relevant in the current context.
True, but you'd think that Musk, given his background and aspirations, would have greater appreciation for the JWST.
According to Sam Altman "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it", this (and a lot of Elon's actions, see for example the Thailand cave incident) seems to perfectly fit that assessment.
[and to be clear, my quoting of Sam Altman is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of Sam Altman, but I suspect he has decent insight into Elon]
That is interesting, and pathological if true. Thank you for the insight.
What background? Buying other people's dreams and aspirations (aka their companies, their ideas, and their motivation)?
This isn't shocking but rage inducing.... We spent forever building this thing and successfully getting it up and operational... I know people who have worked on this... Elon musk isn't even a real physicist, he is a business and hype man that is able to get young engineers with dreams of contributing to a great dream to work for him with a terrible work-life balance.
JWST launched on an Ariane
he is not profiting from it so…
That Musk is dead.
Doubt he ever really existed, he was just better at keeping his psychopathy under wraps.
The assumption is that there is a way to do JWST at far less money at far greater scale. Apply same logic to everything. It won’t always hold. Those places become mistakes to be fixed.
Elon and Trump might be evil. But I don’t really believe in evil. And I keep underestimating both of them. It’s no longer a matter of choice; but if there is a positive possibility, I like to imagine it and make it a plausible pathway. Tons of bad things can happen; is there a path where the current direction could be very very good?
As someone who’s worked on NASA projects, I can assure you they could cut 20% and things would probably run more smoothly, since less people would be standing around bored looking for things to do
No.
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Then tell me how you have gained from the this telescope or even how it has furthered NASA's knowledge of the universe?
There's a section about this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Sci...
But I suspect you're not asking the question because you want to know the answer.
Are you kidding? There have been so many discussions about the JWST's output on HN that if you haven't already heard the answers to your questions then you must have been actively ignoring them.
In any case it's partly aan impossible question at this stage because it hasn't been up so long. A lot of the research that came out of Hubble took years to complete and the datasets there were much much smaller.
I think someone like Musk would care deeply about our future in space. I’ve worked on NASA projects and they’ll assemble a massive team, always larger than needed, to build and engineer something, and then nobody ever gets laid off when it’s done. Some move to other projects but many sit on their hands doing nothing. I’d bet you could cut 20% of funding and have the telescope run better than before because nobody is standing around looking for work
NASA does not directly operate JWST anyway (AURA does that via STScI), but the idea that NASA is bloated and Northrop/Ball/L3Harris are not is hilarious. If you know of people getting paid to 'sit on their hands' at NASA, you should report that to the OIG: https://oigforms.nasa.gov/wp_cyberhotline.html
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
JWST is part of NASA, they surely hire out contractors but those contractors would still report to NASA and probably work in a NASA building. I'm not sure what your point is.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
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