[observationist]

>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit

Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.

This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.

[eru]

You can only move so 'fast and break things', when failure can land you and your family in jail or get you killed.

That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.

[danesparza]

They originally wanted to make a helicopter. (Not kidding)

[eru]

More like a ultra-light plane / helicopter hybrid or so, isn't it?

[ahartmetz]

Sounds like an autogyro, indeed one of the lightest and cheapest ways to build a plane. They are basically planes with a free-spinning helicopter rotor for lift.

[assaddayinh]

The private mechanics and electrical hacking culture that is the base for German engineering . Tûftler in jedem Schuppen..

[asdfman123]

I enjoyed learning about the town of Bad Kissingen

[ahartmetz]

As a German, that name makes me think of pillows (Kissen).

[lostlogin]

Completely agree - although the shine has rather worn off the ‘move fast and break things’ approach.

[bboygravity]

SpaceX is doing fine woth that approach?

[lostlogin]

Great example.

But when Musk took that approach to DOGE, chaos.

And some of the approach hasn’t always gone well at Tesla either.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/06/01/elon-musk-wan...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-...

[inglor_cz]

Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.

But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.

In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.

[K0balt]

This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.

Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets

A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.

A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.

The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.

Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.