Casey Handmer

You can now enjoy a colored relief map render of this dataset streamed through Google Earth. Download the .kml file (drive.google.com/file/d/1bS1R9M…) and open it in your Google Earth Pro client. Enjoy!

@tszzl Shots fired

the dune movies were doomed from the start to be good and not great due to the casting of chalamet as paul. he does not have the gravitas for a child-god and is much better suited for kind of silly coming of age movies

@demystifysci They're better than they look.

people on here love christopher alexander and I finally went and looked at the guy's buildings and, uh, it feels like I'm missing something

@EdwardMehr The key is speed. @Vernon3Austin

BTW don't confuse this with 1 offs. Surprisingly China is better than us in volume of 1 to 100. More skilled labor and relatively more cost effective who can do bespoke products. The middle is where economics break for both US and China.

Everyone is fighting over scale. No one owns flexibility. The hardest problem in manufacturing is 1000 to 10,000 units. Not enough volume to amortize. Too much to do manually. China won’t optimize for it. They’re built for mass. We should. That’s the wedge

I was able to visit Transastra recently and was very impressed by the rigor of their engineering and what they've been able to build with relatively sparse resources. But perhaps it's not so unusual that running lean tends to result in a tighter build. I will be interested to see them bag an asteroid and I think we should be devoting more effort to tracking and potentially diverting asteroids.

@paulg @TurnerNovak Wow, disowned.

@TurnerNovak Those aren't mine. Those are the Collison brothers.

If you have multiple kids you might be surprised by how different they look.

Your entire contention is that Cuba was dealt a bad hand and socialism was the best bandaid for that problem. My contention is that Cuba voluntarily took a whole bunch of unforced Ls driven by socialist precepts, abandonment of truth as a core value, and that it's harder to imagine a clearer set of evidence that socialism betrays and fails everyone.

@CJHandmer somewhat accurate or reflect some real outcome?

I have visited Cuba and this is total bullshit. The entire place reeks of poverty and wasted human potential, a small repressive kleptocracy ravaging an otherwise rich island, for eternity. Imagine how shit your economic system has to be to have lower GDP per capita than Britain in 1850, and going backwards! The "special time" in the 1990s was a protracted famine, on a tropical island where food sprouts from the ground. This starvation minutely reduced the comparative ravages of metabolic disease, relative to the US, as though being unable to feed people is something worth celebrating. Even in Havana, which is relatively wealthy from tourism, people are "housed" in crumbling century old multistory slums, where on every block at least one is on the verge, or actively experiencing, catastrophic structural failure. Sure, you're not homeless. Your communist house is missing 3 floors and a roof and power and water and you share it with 40 other dirt poor people, and expressing this fact is a capital crime for which you can be disappeared without trial.

@GeorgeE33179 Those claims are based on unfalsifiable metrics that beggar belief in the face of copious documented evidence to the contrary. In other words, Cuban regime propaganda.

@CJHandmer But again that’s like circular argument. “Cuba has less functional markets compared to non socialist countries”. Ok. The original post is making the narrow claim that Cuba has achieved much better social outcomes on key metrics than other countries of similar GDP.

@SciGuySpace @NASASpaceflight Berger's law!

@NASASpaceflight I like the confidence ("The Gateway will be assembled this decade") but I don't share it.

ESA just published a boilerplate "Gateway blueprint" page on their site and mailed it to their media list. Not sure that's still happening, however. #msdynmkt_trackingcontext=d9760013-6d85-4779-adda-31ab69710300" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">esa.int/ESA_Multimedia…

@macson_g That's probably preferable to attempting surgery in Cuba.

@CJHandmer I'm not saying it is great, absolutely not. But I met more than one people from the US, usually doing blue collar jobs, that claimed they performed minor surgeries on themselves or their relatives, and that they would be afraid to call an ambulance.

@scottmari @GovPressOffice This has been talked about for more than a decade.

@CJHandmer @GovPressOffice Wildlife bridges save lives and billions in insurance payouts—smart money, but 5 years? That sucks. Get it done!

MAGA's outrage over a project that literally SAVES LIVES tells you everything! This freeway project, grounded in decades of research, restores a critical wildlife corridor and reduces DEADLY collisions on one of the busiest highways in the country — protecting both drivers and animals. FACT: The cost estimate held until last year when inflation — in part driven by TRUMP’s TARIFFS — increased construction costs. The increase is vastly LOWER than the 67% national average increase in highway construction costs. FACT: The timeline shifted by just ONE YEAR largely due to severe weather last year — five years of work is far from a “boondoggle.”

@GeorgeE33179 No. There are similarly poor countries with much more functional markets.

@CJHandmer But anyways we can go back and forth. Do you not believe the central claim that Cuba has better social outcomes compared to other countries with similar GDP per capita?

@GeorgeE33179 That's bullshit. Cuba's primary trading partner is Canada, whose primary trading partner is the US. Stop making excuses. Every attempt at communism devolved into crap growth kleptocracies with appalling human rights records.

@CJHandmer You are saying poverty in Cuba is a result of socialism. Well for that claim you have to compare to other countries with similar history AND control for US embargo (which includes all countries that trade with US!).

@GeorgeE33179 The entire system is a lie. I was there in 2017 and retain numerous friends, many of whom have since managed to escape.

@CJHandmer When did you go to Cuba? What did you see that contradicted these statistics besides general signs of poverty? Because the claim here is that they have decent social outcomes despite poverty. So pointing to signs of poverty doesn’t disprove that.

@shaunmmaguire @elonmusk I've been roasting you about this for a decade, welcome to the club!

@elonmusk I’m embarrassed to say this but my wife and I had never owned a Tesla until one month ago We haven’t lived in one place for more than 6 months in 8 yrs and charging was too hard We just got our first Tesla delivered (because FSD got so good) And we already bought a second!

Try Tesla FSD (self-driving)!

@QuantBro Good q.

@CJHandmer when should we see Terraform start pumping natural gas

Some thoughts on destruction of oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf. It is not exactly a new insight that modern economies operate on oil. Oil access, synthesis, and interdiction was a major theater of WW2. 100 years ago oil-poor nations spent heavily and participated in terrible wars over oil. See, for example, the Combined Bombing Offensive, Operation Tidal Wave, and the destruction of the Leuna synthetic fuel plants, not to mention the effectiveness of the submarine war in the waters around Japan. In 2022, energy producer Russia invaded Ukraine, instantly throwing into stark relief the idiocy of European energy policy, where an unholy alliance of heavily regulated energy contractors and astroturfed "green" activists managed to get Germany to shut down their nuclear industry. Even as solar panel production, largely initially developed and funded in the West, grew to overwhelming proportions, Europe insisted on sending roughly $1b *per day* to Russia for access to their oil and gas. If Europe had adjusted course in early 2022, then they would be able to support their power grids and probably some synthetic fuel production by now. The US built nuclear weapons from scratch in 2.5 years in the 1940s in competition with other national priorities at the same time. It's been more than four years since Ukraine's invasion. But no, they did sweet fuck all about ensuring energy sovereignty. Indeed, they even went in the other direction. Britain concentrated government resources on cracking down on free speech and stopped drilling for oil. The continent continued their ill-informed blanket ban on fracking, and working age people continued to pay the price, in the form of ever higher costs, ever higher taxes, ever poorer public services, ever dropping fertility. What about the rest of the oil importing developed world? France and Japan maintained their nuclear industry, their navies, their shipping industries and the fungibility of their supply - to an extent - even as they continued to actively burn up their economies in other more insidious ways. New Zealand shut down their last refinery. Australia exports a lot of crude and gas but mostly lacks the ability to close their supply chain in their own borders, and fuel prices have almost doubled. California continued to ban new drilling and continues to wage open regulatory warfare against their oil refineries, perversely increasing oil-related air pollution in the state from foreign oil tanker imports and pushing gasoline prices ever higher. More of the world has attempted to switch to natural gas supply, with investments exceeding $1t on gas import and export terminals, as though it's some fundamental law of nature that hydrocarbons must cross an ocean before they're used. As though the US fracking boom will last forever, or Asian demand growth won't see European prices continue to increase, further crushing their economic dynamism. I have been in the room with various Asian and European energy ministers and have asked them point blank: What's your plan? I have never gotten a better answer than a shrug, as though they'll muddle through and soon it'll be someone else's problem. The best time to get serious about domestic energy supply chains was four years ago. The second best time is today. The pain will ease just as soon as you say the magic words: I must increase my own energy supply! And yes, it is totally possible to produce synthetic oil and gas pretty much anywhere that people live with a solar-based process we've spent four years developing at @TerraformIndies, it is future proof, it is strategically robust, it is price-linked to solar manufacturing cost, which continues to fall like a rock. It's not entirely trivial to do but, given that Europe spends about 100,000x more on Russian oil and gas imports than they do on (privately funded) synthetic fuel development, I am on safe ground when I accuse Europe's leaders of committing gross capital misallocation. Imagine what the synthetic fuel industry could achieve with $1b/day! If you are an energy minister, now is a good time to reflect on fates worse than losing an election. Get back to work!

@FlonSolutions Given how incapable most countries are to secure their own supply chain, I predict mostly atomization.

Directionally agree on energy sovereignty - but the optimisation target might be wrong. It’s not “domestic energy,” it’s security of specific molecules. Switzerland case: - strong electrons (hydro/nuclear), - weak molecules → focus on e-methane (winter), e-kerosene (aviation), minimal distillates. Curious: in your model, do countries converge toward full synthetic self-sufficiency, or a hybrid : (domestic critical molecules + imported bulk from best geographies)?

@TopherBR @EverestBrady You're off by a factor of 1000.

@CJHandmer @EverestBrady So 10 million b/d? As per economist.com/finance-and-ec…, the US exports 4 million b/d of crude. Your estimate sounds like a LOT. Did I misunderstand something?

If you believe Cuban data on how wonderful their education health care nutrition data etc is then you're the target audience. I have seen it with my own eyes. They are shockingly poor and getting poorer because socialism breaks the fundamental incentive alignment structure needed to get people and organizations to build wealth. They are similar in size and superior in natural resources to Taiwan, but their GDP is 20 times lower. They are a failed state.

@CJHandmer Cuba is not poor because they are socialist. They have decent social outcomes despite being poor because they are socialist. They are poor because of US embargo which made them overly dependent on a few trading partners.

@GeorgeE33179 @jasonhickel @grok This is absolutely insane. "Exceptional social outcome" in this case means less food availability on a tropical island paradise. It's hell on Earth.

@CJHandmer @jasonhickel @grok Absolutely stupid response. He is saying that due to socialism Cuba has some exceptional social outcomes considering its low GDP.