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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I agree that going to the Moon then was a waste of time, a fundamentally ill-conceived PR stunt. But it was executed very well! They had to invent just about everything they needed, including computers. They faced far more constraints than the Artemis program in terms of materials, technology, doing things for the first time. However progress on Artemis has been very slow and not that cheap either.

$93 Billion has already been spent (in contrast to $200-250 billion on Apollo) and nobody is on the Moon, it doesn't seem that NASA has gotten any more efficient, despite enormous advancements in the last 60 years. SpaceX of course is a different story.

I think it's a little like consumer computer software. The hardware gets enormously more powerful but the software runs just as slowly due to shoddy practices and bloat piling up. There is no excuse for Microsoft Word to lag for several seconds as I load a 2800 KB document on a very fast PC but it does anyway!