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The Democrats don't need to destroy Dilbert Stark, he's got perfect aim with his rocket-firing foot-gun!
(The immigration service will be side-eyeing him by now, and USSF/USAF/NSA must be jittery about trusting their classified payloads to a Putin fanboy: I suspect his security clearance is Going Bye-Bye soon. No need to take his money, just make him delegate control then ship him off to a compound in South Africa where he can prep for the apocalypse in peace without annoying the neighbours.)
Elmo's one smart move was tro bring in Gwynne Shotwell to run SpaceX. She, in her turn, built Elmo a little Potemkin Village to manage, a treehouse out in the back where he can stomp around and act like he's in charge.
Stop worrying about those NSA payloads, Elmo's nowhere near them.
@tuban_muzuru I invite you to contemplate the geopolitical implications of Russia deploying Iranian-manufactured drones with Starlink terminals in the Ukraine war. Elmo—as a private citizen—is playing a very dangerous game.
I, in my turn, invite you to consider the nature of geopolitics and commerce. For all these milquetoast embargoes we have placed upon Russia, their economy is firing on all cylinders. Those embargoes are a pitiful sop: as with Iran (and with their connivance may I add), Russia has worked around them al, especially oil - and the West has done nothing.
Yes Elmo is not supposed to sell to Russia - he's not. Those Starlink units were shipped through Dubai and sold along via proxies
@tuban_muzuru Russia is running a resource extraction economy (with a sideline in artillery shells). They're a petrostate that's failed to modernize even as much as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Meanwhile the rest of the world is in the middle of the biggest energy transition since the early 1900s and the move to oil. That's what's causing all the instability: existing energy cartels fighting back against their inevitable demise.
(The geopolitics of a solar-powered world will look rather different.)
@cstross @tuban_muzuru
> The geopolitics of a solar-powered world will look rather different
That sounds like a very interesting question. Those desert dictatorships won't have the oil wealth, but they will still have lots of sunshine. So will big bits of the southern USA and Mexico. We may see energy-intensive industries relocating equatorwards. Or if better ways of shipping energy around get developed, maybe not.
@tokensane @tuban_muzuru The obvious thing about photovoltaic and wind power is that they're harder to ship around—you can do it with a supergrid, but it's expensive and connects stationary end-points. (Unlike gas/liquid fuels.) So the obvious first step is that energy intensive industries may migrate towards energy rich regions. Which, with PV, will eventually mean Equatorial Africa and Central America/northern South America.
@cstross @tokensane @tuban_muzuru Leaving aside hypothesized "electron tank" versions of room temperature superconductors, synthetic shippable fuels (ammonia, methanol, that Australian liquid battery approach, etc.) have two important functions. The one that doesn't get mentioned is arbitrage between "habitable" and "efficient", since the equator isn't going to be habitable and lots of places are going to get abruptly less habitable when the hurricane-driven floods mud up the solar panels, etc.
@cstross @tokensane @tuban_muzuru So we're going to have (should we pull this off) a bunch of layers; local solar PV, local storage, some amount of grid, some amount of shippable fuels, and lots of remote production of shippable fuels and energy-intensive goods like aluminium. The remote production gets pushed into mobile forms by sea-level rise; coastal infrastructure with an unpredictable lifetime mostly doesn't get built.
None of it matters a jot if the food problem doesn't get solved.
@graydon @cstross @tuban_muzuru The term is "technology stack". And China is investing heavily in all those things.
Food starts to look a lot easier if you assume plenty of cheap energy. And in many parts of the world the population is actually decreasing as people get wealthy.
@tokensane @graydon @tuban_muzuru Interestingly crop yields and farm animal welfare seem to rise when they share fields with overhead solar panels: it's like multicropping, only for electricity as one of the crops (and free shade for the animals).
@tokensane @cstross @tuban_muzuru Sometime before 2050, field agriculture will have failed everywhere.
What fraction of the population's food needs can be met with zero fossil carbon inputs and zero field agricultural inputs in geographic areas that won't experience black flag events?
That's not absolutely zero (someone, somewhere, is gardening with a stick) but it's effectively zero. It needs to be nigh-everybody BEFORE the field agricultural fails, and that's already collapsing.
@tokensane @cstross @tuban_muzuru I would question "starts to look easier"; yes, solar and water pumps and so on make three-sisters style intense gardening easier, but that doesn't solve the thermal excursion problem or the erratic weather problem. Somebody has to be in significant local surplus to ship food around when the local supply collapses in any particular year.
Getting off the "oil is food" situation we're in would be brutally difficult without climate change.