$tsla @elonmusk - has battery technology improvements stopped? There haven’t been Tesla EV range increase announcements for the last - 3 years. @ARKInvest what is happening to the Wright’s law?
84 years ago today, a pilot running out of fuel made a decision that won the Pacific War. Most Americans have never heard his name.
June 4, 1942. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's navy is undefeated. Four of the carriers that burned Pearl, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, are steaming toward Midway to finish off the US Pacific Fleet.
At 7:52 AM, Wade McClusky launches from USS Enterprise leading 32 Dauntless dive bombers. Here's the detail nobody mentions: McClusky is a fighter pilot. He'd been given the air group weeks earlier and had barely flown a dive bomber in combat. Now he's leading every SBD the Enterprise has at the most important target in the Pacific.
9:20 AM. He arrives at the intercept point where the Japanese fleet is supposed to be.
Empty ocean. Nothing for miles.
The Japanese had turned. Nobody knew where. And now McClusky owns the worst math problem in naval aviation: his fuel is bleeding away, and every minute he keeps searching, he condemns more of his own pilots to ditch in open water where nobody will find them.
Doctrine is clear. Turn back.
McClusky keeps going. He works a search pattern, squeezing miles out of dying fuel tanks.
9:55 AM. Far below, a single Japanese destroyer is cutting a white scar across the ocean at flank speed. It's the Arashi, racing to rejoin the fleet after depth-charging the American submarine Nautilus. Think about that. A failed sub attack is about to give away the entire Japanese navy.
McClusky reads the wake like an arrow and follows it.
10:02 AM. The horizon fills with the entire Japanese strike force. Four carriers, their decks crammed with planes being refueled and rearmed. Fuel lines snaking everywhere. Bombs stacked in the open.
And here's the miracle: the sky above them is empty. Minutes earlier, American torpedo squadrons had attacked at sea level and been annihilated. Torpedo 8 lost all 15 planes. One survivor, Ensign George Gay, watched what came next while hiding under his seat cushion in the water. Those doomed pilots dragged every Japanese fighter down to the waves. The door upstairs was wide open.
10:22 AM. McClusky pushes over from 14,500 feet. Both squadrons follow him down onto Kaga. It's actually a mistake, doctrine said split the targets, but Lt. Dick Best catches it mid-dive, pulls out with two wingmen, and goes after Akagi alone. His single bomb pierces the flight deck into the packed hangar. It's enough.
By 10:28, Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu, the third hit simultaneously by Yorktown's bombers, are floating infernos. Six minutes. Three carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor, gone. Hiryu follows them to the bottom that evening.
The cost of McClusky's gamble was real. Many Enterprise bombers never made it home, some shot down, others swallowed by the sea when their tanks ran dry. McClusky himself was jumped by two Zeros on the way out, took five bullets through his shoulder, and still flew his shot-up Dauntless back to the Enterprise.
Admiral Nimitz said McClusky's decision "decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway." Japan never won another major battle.
One borrowed pilot. One destroyer's wake. One choice to keep flying when every gauge said go home.
GOLDMAN SEES SPACEX AI REVENUE EXPLODING TO $322B BY 2030
Goldman Sachs projects SpaceX AI revenue rising from $3.2B in 2025 to $322B by 2030, a ~100x increase, forming the core justification for its $1.78T IPO valuation. Total revenue is forecast to reach $474B, with Starlink at $144B and rockets at $8.3B.
AI segment growth is tied to aggressive market assumptions despite current losses and execution concerns around xAI. Overall EBITDA is seen surging to $352B by 2030.
@Reuters Training officers to believe and jump at every single cry of “racism” or “transphobia” or “islamophobia” or whatever - has meant ‘minorities’ have learnt to weaponise saying it - even in the mainstream world.
Get rid of all UK hate crime laws. They are badly worded tat.
The West has created an utterly evil state religion where an accusation of “racism” is the gravest offense that can be committed, even worse than rape or murder!
So if police show up at a crime scene and a British boy is bleeding out and an immigrant says the British boy is racist the cops will cuff the dying British boy.
The Nowak case clearly highlights that we need to stop treating racism as an ~infinite evil, not because Nowak was racist (no evidence of this) but because any time you create a social superweapon like accusations of racism are now, it’ll be misused horribly.
What is racism? Ask 10 people and you’ll get 12 opinions. Historically, it meant someone who treats people badly in interpersonal interactions because of their race. Which is just, like, kinda annoying and slightly boorish. It’s not the apocalypse. There are many personal traits that are equally or more annoying.
Now the definition has been ludicrously expanded to include a bunch of things even less objectionable than that, including belief in very plausible scientific claims and policy preferences that were near-universal for almost all of human history.
Racism just isn’t a big deal. We have to take it off its pedestal. If Nowak had said something racist, it would morally change exactly nothing about the horror of what happened to him. He didn’t, but I feel over-focusing on that distracts from the fact that it wouldn’t matter if he had.
Murder is worse than racism. Hell, shoplifting is worse than racism. Enough. Who cares.
An elderly lion in his final hours.
Photographer Larry Pannell captured the heartbreaking final moments of an aging lion in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, where the exhausted predator took his last breath after collapsing beneath a tree.
Half of all male lions die before they turn one. Most who survive never make it to old age. The starving lion in this photo did the rarest thing a male lion can do. He got old.
Being born a male lion is brutal from day one. In his first year, hyenas, snakes, sickness, and plain hunger kill about half of all cubs. The biggest danger is other lions. When a new group of males takes over a pride, they kill all the cubs the previous males fathered, which gets the mothers ready to have new cubs sooner. That one thing causes about a quarter of all cub deaths.
Get past that, and at around age three you get kicked out of your family to wander alone. You drift along the edges of land run by bigger, older males who want you dead. Most of these young drifters never see ten.
If you live, you fight to take over a pride of your own. Win, and you keep it for just two or three years before a younger gang shows up and takes it from you. Lose that fight, and you're thrown out again, older now, your teeth worn down, hunting on your own.
So the normal way a male lion dies is young and bloody. Killed in a fight. Gored by a buffalo. Most often, killed by people: poisoned by farmers for killing cattle, shot, or caught in a wire snare. In Kruger, where this lion lived, the number of lions in the north has dropped fast from poaching and fewer animals left to hunt.
He got none of those endings. He grew old instead. Stronger males pushed him off his land, the way almost every old king gets pushed out, and his teeth were too worn to catch food anymore. A photographer named Larry Pannell found him lying under a tree, his chest barely moving, and sat a few feet away so he wouldn't die alone. Pannell has photographed people who lived through earthquakes and fires, and he said he had never seen anything sadder than this. One last twitch of an ear, and the lion was gone.
The photo looks like pure loss. A king brought down, starving, alone. But growing old is the hardest thing a male lion will ever do. It means he outlasted the cub years, the years alone, the pride fights, the buffalo, the snares, and every younger lion that ever came to kill him.
He didn't dodge the fights. He just won enough of them to die of nothing but time.
She says from a literal red carpet, surrounded by armed security, completely insulated from the horrors on our streets that Angelenos and their kids have to suffer through every day. I’m glad she doesn’t have to suffer the consequences of Karen and Nithya’s failures, but she’s in an elite minority and the rest of us want change.
Both men said “I can’t breathe”, but only one man’s death was covered relentlessly by the media.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the legacy mainstream media is incredibly, hatefully racist against Whites.
We go where we need to be, and today that was @NASAKennedy.
Some of my senior engineers and I spent time at @blueorigin with @JeffBezos and @davill, speaking with the workforce and seeing the damage at LC-36 firsthand. I appreciated the opportunity to hear directly from those working through the aftermath and better understand the challenges ahead.
There is a lot of work to do, but this is exactly why people choose careers in aerospace, whether at NASA, Blue Origin, or across the industry. The talent in this field thrives under pressure and performs at its best when solving the toughest problems.
We have been saying for months at NASA that we are not going to sit on our hands and wait for the capabilities necessary to achieve the nation’s most pressing objectives. We are going to take an active role alongside our partners, just as we did in the 1960s, to overcome setbacks, remove obstacles, and deliver the intended outcomes.
@NASA is committed to helping the Blue team recover, continue to advance their lunar lander and get New Glenn back to launching as soon as safely possible.
America’s greatest achievements in space were never the result of avoiding setbacks. They came from overcoming them. We have done it before, and we will do it again🇺🇸
SpaceX is "orders of magnitudes ahead" in the launch industry globally, says early SpaceX investor and XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis https://t.co/R52gPOawEt
"Elon Musk is probably doing more for America than any other American. He's single handedly bringing manufacturing back to America. SpaceX is in some ways the most important defense contractor in America. What he's doing with Starlink is amazing for the world. He's creating all of these blue collar manufacturing jobs which is a goal of a lot of liberals and good for America. He's done more than any living human to decarbonize the world. And if you're upset about data centers on earth for environmental reasons, here you go - he's putting data centers in space" - @GavinSBaker@patrick_oshag