lol.
Elon has near the patience of Job. no wonder he’s so successful.
And this my friends is what will lead to the end of western civilization. Unbridled bureaucracy pursuing petty, meaningless rules and regulations because they can.
It’s amazing that we get anything into space anymore. I think the nature lovers would be happiest with humans back in caves.
I have no doubt of this story. It’s what happens when bureaucrats grab legalese as twisted through their fantasies. The key word here is “harass,” which is not permitted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The term then conflates with anything one chooses to deem harassment. Is it mild annoyance?Is it any reaction at all? The thresholds become a matter of virtue signaling, with metrics increasingly minute. The more minute the granularity the more it costs and the more insane become the means of making that determination.
I am reminded of the last time a process I had invented needed an air quality permit. The minute threshold was one pound of VOC per day. It didn’t matter if the process machinery was the size of a city block or a kid with a spray can. Worse, the bigger the process the more likely it would fail, but for the error in the test! I determined that the error in measurement was big enough that if I tested the process enough times, would eventually get a zero result. Bingo.
Never mind that an average tree in that area produces about eight times the maximum threshold. It’s called “phytogenic VOC.”
It is not just the governmental bureacracy that has lost its collective mind. Have you dealt with an insurance company lately? Or any other organization that is not a sole proprietorship? Stupidity and ineptitude play a starring role in every last outfit in the country where there are more than a handful of people. Any time you hear “It is our policy that ...” you know that you are dealing with people who are too stupid to make a decision on their own. Now when you have to deal with “an organization” you get a choice of an AI programmed by an idiot, or an actual idiot who can barely express themselves in standard english.
.
Before anything was sent through the headphones, putting the seal through all that nonsense I think would stress it the most.
California... that explains everything.
-PJ
What if a whale hits the rocket? Did they ever think of that?
-PJ
well, the simple fact that not a single person has been hauled in for any of fraud you found heading DOGE, many of the people would simply tell you to have patience!! It takes time to investigate these things!!
This been going on for decades .. Doing missile launch test from aircraft we had to get EPA approval and it was extremely hard sometimes especially doing test shots in a maritime environment. You had to do checks on whales and other marine life in the area on the actual day of the launch. Didn’t matter if it was an inert or live warhead.
Our government is rife with idiots.
"I would like a rocket license, please?"
“ It’s the least lucky whale ever.”
Except the whale that met Arthur Dent and a bowl of petunias.
When a human is strapped down for tortuous purpose it’s called “waterboarding”. When a seal is strapped down similarly is that “landboarding”?
Seriously though, the irony of the government environmentalist’s horrible “testing” seemed to fly right over their heads.
But consider this for getting qualified people back into the space industry:
Memo to all DEI hires of the past ten years to voluntarily assemble on the launch pad of the next scheduled launch for a pep talk with Robert DeNiro, Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand.
Once they’re assembled close the entrances and conduct the lunch. If those celebs are there it’s a win-win. This should free up a few hundred slots immediately.
It’s california, what about the snail darter?
Do the snail darter next...
There was an episode of Star Trek where the ship was traveling through a galactic void so vast that they would not pass a star, moving at Warp 9, for years. The crew had to go into stasis for boredom.
Then, in the middle of the void, the ship had to wake them up. The ship was being attacked by some invisible, undetectable alien race because somehow it was polluting cold, dead, empty space. It was, of course, the humans fault, along with the idiot aliens, robots and AIs that hitched their wagons to hatefully stupid human civilization.
The reason real space is great is because there are no seals or snaildarters or any other form of life out there. One of the reasons Elon want to go there is to get away from the idiocracy that is metastasizing on Earth.
Back in the days when we were serious about anti-missile defense, environmentalists wanted to stop the program because of fears the missile interceptors exhaust would poison the atmosphere. They should have been concerned about the effects of the Soviet thermo-nuclear warheads impacting the US.