I really think the reach and importance of Twitter for public discourse outside the terminally online has always been overestimated. So the acquisition might have been intended as a political tool, but I don’t think it will be very effective.
“We’ve hesitated from labelling tech billionaires as oligarchs because the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey wielded their political power gently. Asking oligarchs to be accountable for what their platforms permit is straightforward and entirely possible.
I think it’s more because oligarchs is what “they” have. You know, the “other”, the “less developed”.
“We” have billionaires who are “innovators” and “wealth creators”. “They” have oligarchs who just monopolise something and watch the money roll in.
And yet when I see a super yacht in our harbour there is no way to tell whether it’s an oligarch’s or a billionaire’s. They look identical and googling them leads to identical matryoshka doll structures of offshore companies as owners.
FTA:
The report from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) came five months after the Environmental Protection Agency also notified SpaceX that it had violated the Clean Water Act.
Prediction:
SpaceX will pay some fines to TCEQ, and then SpaceX will keep on doing exactly what it has been doing already. In the article, it is mentioned these problems have been going on for years despite lawsuits and scrutiny.
SpaceX takes the deduction for payment of fines above the line, come tax time, as a mere cost of doing business.
If SpaceX is then shown to be violating state regulations again/more due to its “economic activity” (as Texas deems it), SpaceX will simply pay more fines, if they are held accountable at all. It’ll be… a… process… At best.
If the Texans who are interested in environmental justice at the federal level attempt to go after SpaceX for violating The Clean Water Act in addition to the lawsuits already filed against SpaceX re: its actions endangering endangered species (as mentioned in the article), they’d better hurry. Mercury pollution from the launch site is the very devil to remediate, and it’ll kill biota in the Gulf even faster.
Yee-fkn-haw.
And maybe stay away from seafood originating in the Gulf of Mexico.
ETA: grammar
Not entirely sure on that. Will they try to invoke Loper?
ETA: That’s from the middle of a live Tweet/Skeet/Whatever it is on bluesky thread of the interview.
Oh FFS. The main reason that the world has seen a remarkable, historical decrease in war ever since the end of WWII (despite popular perception to the contrary) is that every sane person is rightly terrified of nuclear war. It’s the one and only saving grace of atomic holocaust and this idiot wants to take it away.
TCEQ does have its own (non-federal) water quality regulations:
IANAL but… AFAIK, on the state level, a protestant who argues that they/she/he has been harmed (or property of same has been harmed) by the actions of oh y’know someone like SpaceX etc., can ask the TCEQ to enforce its own dang regs, which usually start out with citations and fines [which can escalate with repeated violations]. FTA and I know y’all have read it, but hey lookit its a white-hat engineer ridin’ herd on the bad bad actors launchin’ rockets in Boca Chica, and I really feel we should be celebrating what he (Roesch) is trying to do:
Environmental engineer Eric Roesch, whose ESG Hound blog focuses on business and sustainability, predicted SpaceX would need a water deluge system at the launchpad even before the first test flight of Starship. He was also among the first to call out SpaceX for using such a system without proper permits.
Once the agencies had informed SpaceX it was in violation of environmental regulations, continuing with launch operations at Starbase put the company at greater legal risk, Roesch said in an interview.
“Further wastewater discharges could trigger more investigations and criminal charges for the company or any of the people involved in authorizing the launches,” he said.
Holy Chicken Mole, Roesch can write an angry sarcastic screed with receipts and I can see his point:
Looks like he is leveraging Loper or Loper-adjacent stuff.
His post is from 2023.
However.
This post of his (also from 2023 but later) does call out TCEQ regs:
It’s worth reading. He’s spreading his anger and sarcasm with a shovel it’s so heavy, and I am here for it.
Now, I ain’t sayin’ that TCEQ will gallop toward doing the right thing with all speed, but there is half a chance that it will fine SpaceX, even with the FAA (again, mentioned in these articles/posts) seemingly exerting some kind of pressure on various agencies to back off on enforcement. In Texas we’ve seen that TCEQ often has to be pushed (the ol’ “litigate to enforce” problem, which means hiring lawyers and spending Real Money) to do its dang job.
wouldn’t put it past them to ask nasa to cover the difference
aww, donnie brought it back on track (sort of);
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” Trump said. “The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”
(where is my headscratcher emoji?)