Archive for 2024

MORE MEDIA MALPRACTICE: The media has been repeating the pro-Hamas caucus’s claim that it achieved a great victor by getting 13.2% of Michigan Democrats to vote “Uncommitted.” Media coverage has been suggesting that all of these voters voted Uncommitted based on Biden’s refusal to force Israel to stop fighting Hamas. Almost no one bothered to look up what happened in Michigan the last time a Democratic president was running for re-election, Barack Obama in 2012. That year, Uncommitted received 10.7% of the vote, even though Obama was generally much more popular and inspirational to Democrats (and he also wasn’t pushing 80). So, likely only a small fraction of the 13.2% Uncommitted this year were specifically voting about Israel/Gaza. But the pro-Hamas folks ran a nice pr campaign and the media, wittingly or otherwise, went along with it.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China Announces Name of Spacecraft Landing Crew on Moon.

The capsule is called Mengzhou, or “dream vessel,” while the lander is called Lanyue, or “embracing the Moon,” a reference to a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1965, as CNN reports.

The almost 30-foot-long Mengzhou spacecraft will weigh in at a whopping 22 metric tons, per the announcement. The lander is big enough to house two astronauts and a 440-pound rover. According to the statement, their development is “progressing well.”

It’s a highly ambitious plan, but given the country’s progress — including becoming the first to land a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon in 2019 — it may just have a shot at pulling off its goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2030.

When is that next Starship test flight?

DEAL OF THE DAY: Columbia Clothing. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I’m Glad Richard Pryor Isn’t Here to See What Woke Is Doing to Stand-Up. “Stand-up used to be rewarded for its boldness. The woke mob wants it neutered, censored, and easy to control. The feds who used to lurk in Lenny Bruce’s audiences have been replaced by woke idiots with too much Twitter/X time on their hands. They’re all trying to force state-approved entertainment on the public.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle.

SpaceX noted that the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket performed nominally, with all 33 Raptor engines on this massive rocket igniting successfully. The booster then performed a full-duration burn to reach stage separation. At this point, the upper stage executed a successful “hot staging” maneuver in which the Starship stage separated from the booster while some of the booster’s engines were still firing.

For the Super Heavy booster, the next step was to perform a series of burns to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of the initial burn, 13 of the rocket’s engines were intended to fire.

“During this burn, several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster,” SpaceX said. “The vehicle breakup occurred more than three and a half minutes into the flight at an altitude of ~90 km over the Gulf of Mexico.”

The problem was subsequently linked to a problem with supplying liquid oxygen to the Raptor engines.

“The most likely root cause for the booster RUD was determined to be filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxidizer turbopumps that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in loss of the vehicle,” the company stated. “SpaceX has since implemented hardware changes inside future booster oxidizer tanks to improve propellant filtration capabilities and refined operations to increase reliability.”

OK, let’s get to that third test flight.

THIS ALWAYS SEEMED LIKE A BAD FIT FOR APPLE AND ITS 40% MARGINS: Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Ending Decadelong Effort.

Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people.

The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.

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The Apple car team also has several hundred hardware engineers and vehicle designers. It’s possible they will be able to apply for jobs on other Apple teams. There will be layoffs, but it’s unclear how many.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, declined to comment.

The move came as a relief to investors, who sent Apple shares climbing Tuesday after an earlier decline. The stock was up about 1.2% to $183.37 at 2:33 p.m. in New York after Bloomberg reported the news.

Not even Tesla makes anything like the kind of margins Apple earns from computers and consumer electronics, and I’m not sure there’s anybody but Tesla turning a profit on EVs.