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way too modern for me
also, some excellent shots of vintage Vegas in that Starship video…lol
I doubt Starship will carry people for a while. There’s no launch-escape system, and I don’t think anyone really knows how risky in-orbit refueling is. It seems really easy to shuttle the crew up on Dragon after Starship is launched and refueled, so I suspect that will be the path of least resistance until they have dozens+ successfully unmanned launches under their belt.
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Excellent title change. Grace Slick approves.
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I fell for the marketing hype. From the SpaceX site:
SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket – collectively referred to as Starship – represent a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.
There is a “planned” but not scheduled crewed Starship for something called Polaris. Automated FTS is a pretty new thing but probably fine and I’m just biased. Like I would still be hesitant to let a Tesla drive for me. It feels like a trolley problem where the trolley decides your fate. On original Star Trek, you needed three officers to provide codes to initiate self-destruct. That’s more my style.
Starships… were meant to fly…
Elon had a similar comment on a bullshit graph that listed black on white crime as being the scourge of the earth.
She makes good points, but fails to discuss population breakdown. Shouldn’t the fact that America is 58% white and 12% black be a huge factor in this misleading race driven chart?
Also, fuck elon. He is such a dumb piece of shit who seems to be continually spiraling downward. I really hope he’s an irrelevant bad memory in a few years time.
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Probably the biggest problem with that chart is racism is determining charges. A Black person pushing a white person is probably a lot more likely to be charged and convicted. That chart shows the B/W ratio for violent crime is almost 10. But for homicide, which is less subjective than “violent crime”, the ratio is 2, which is much easier to expect based on poverty, incarceration, and educational opportunities.
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I don’t think charges and convictions really come into play as the NCVS is done every year by interviewing people (age 12 and older) and analyzing their self-reported responses.
Also I think only non-fatal violent crimes are included.
This is the 2018 survey (37-page pdf) that includes the data Elon’s chart is based on.
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I think he wanted to keep the critique general, not necessarily redo the chart. We don’t even know if the numbers are real. I doubt Elon checked. But that aside, my first thought was to start as you suggest. What would it look like if crime was random?
Interesting…but still similar. Is a white person more likely to report the same thing as a violent crime when a Black person does something to them as vice versa?
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That chart doesn’t simply indicate that there are 6x as many white people in the US. It could indicate that white people commit fewer crimes as a percentage of their population. Not counting cops, I expect a pretty small percentage of any of these crimes are primarily racially motivated.
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I never get past the first step on anything any more. 
Exactly, there’s all kinds of problems with self-reporting of somewhat subjective events.
I’d hope that the statisticians at the BJS are aware of all this and doing what they can to handle these kinds of biases.
My takeaway from the stat guy’s tweets was mostly that the obvious and deliberate exclusion of same-race violence leads to an implicit inference that these across-race crimes are primarily racially motivated and that’s the dangerous/dishonest part.
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