The heightened interest in space is going to benefit the military industrial complex more than ordinary people.

Funding will be poured into the war machine in an attempt to maintain the existing world order.

Those resources should go toward a #GreenNewDeal

— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) June 5, 2019

I don’t understand how and why so many leftists think so poorly and non-systemically and ahistorically. I mean, they try, but they are utter shit at it. Just worse than toddlers. I need to ponder this more because I have difficulty with understanding how this can be the case.

I like this person, but false dichotomy here, among other issues. Not only is base assumption utterly incorrect, but DARPA was a result of space funding, and from DARPA and other related space-race-caused funding we got:

*ARPANET (direct predecessor of the internet)

*Video conferencing, the mouse, the GUI, hypertext (look up Douglas Engelbart if you don’t believe, and yes, we was receiving directly and indirectly government funding at the time)

*Siri and other personal digital assistants

*Unix (and therefore Linux), and many, many other computing innovations

*GPS

I could go on, but is that not enough?

Not that all of these were funded directly for/by space research, but funding for anything societally useful tends to move in a cluster. See here for more info.

As Fishman points out, while the U.S. government was funding moon rockets, it was also thinking big in social policy: the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, Medicare and Medicaid. When it withdrew from space, it pulled back from such initiatives, too. Public investments of all sorts tend to sink or swim together.

I agree with her that it’d be better that it were not done under the oversight of the military-industrial complex. But in the US, that’s about all there is. Who else will do these things?

As I said, I like her, but when an argument is incoherent and obviously fatally flawed in some base assumptions or concerning very-recent history, no reason to agree with it. I just don’t value comity or being liked that much.

While the new Mac Pro is not something I’ll ever buy, people who say it’s already a failure don’t understand the market they’re aiming at.

This is not for home users and not for casual video editors. While I too wish Apple had released an expandable computer for the home market, that market is shrinking and cynically speaking, people were generally too dumb for home computers.

The Mac Pro is aimed, in other words, at TV and movie production studios that are required to provide output in 4K or above. This “expensive” device (including monitor) is replacing hardware that costs 10-40x as much, often. In this market, it’s a bargain for the capabilities that you get. It’ll be far faster in less space than what 99% of studios now use. It’ll pay its cost back almost immediately — even the monitor.

Yes, the stand is ridiculous, I agree with that. But too many people don’t understand what they are commenting on when they snark about this topic because they’ve never needed to edit a dozen 6K* video inputs and handle audio syncing with that, etc.

*Many professional movie cameras capture in 6K and this is down-converted to 4K. Looks better and preserves more fidelity that way.