Tar_Alcaran

It’s Norman, who will absolutely give up the presidency, but right now is bad timing.

NATO is terrible for not helping secure shipping!

Three days later

NATO is terrible for helping secure shipping!

Using your logic, I could drive to the next town over commit some crimes and have the same effect.

Correct. It’s pretty well known that this skew per capita statics in small-scale analyses. It’s also why you shouldn’t do per-capita analysis on very local scales

In the US our census counts residents, not citizens.

No. It counts residents who cooperate with the census. Guess what undocumented immigrants won’t be doing?

Going door to door to count people is a terrible method of kering track of people, which is why most places stopped doing that, using running registries instead. It’s pretty stunning that the US only has the vaguest concept of who lives there.

I don’t think Dragon has 200m/s when it also has to push the entire ISS. Dragon’s “Boost Trunk” provided a whopping ~1.5m/s to the ISS late last year, and that thing is about as big as the Dragon capsule itself.

They’ve made a free, state-owned, anonymous age-verifcation API for this purpose right? They’re not requiring Meta to confirm your real identity, riiiiight?

And the outlook tech support

Assistant (to the) manager

Oh yes, calling me “liege” is going to be amazing once I stop laughing.

Fair point. 1.5/2 and pending

They’re getting within 6500km of the surface, after travelling 385.000km. So they’re going 98.3% of the way to the moon.

So that’s like going from Beijing to the grand canyon, and staying in the western suburbs of Las Vegas.

2 out of 2?

The entire mission structure is stupid. It sorta-kinda makes sense for Mars, and viewing Artemis as a trial run for Mars makes it almost-sensible. Except that the Mars landing was entirely predictably cancelled.

I do workplace safety, and it’s incredibly hard to work with (manufactured) stone in a safe way. The dust gets everywhere, and you basically have to take the same safety precautions as with asbestos remediation.

Every resin-based material is friable after the resin decays. That’s one of the major problems with asbestos roofs, the resin holding the asbestos is breaking down after decades of sunlight.

What do you think most brake pads are made with?

Today I learned the US allowed asbestos brakepads till mid 2024. Jesus fucking christ people.

Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years?

Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn’t. It’s been falling on the ground since forever, but it’s accelerating more and more.

Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I’ve basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it’s a much smaller fraction of the population.

For all the panicky people:

Microplastics are bad, but they’re not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they’re quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.

Gylphosate is bad, but it’s mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.

Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)

But, I’ll happily add something that’s bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.

Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that’s been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you’re growing food.

I’m kinda selfishly hoping for a scrub, because I have to be up at 4am (+1 GMT) and REALLY can’t watch live :(

Makes you think how any of the old plants were ever built.

Experience. The first one you build will have massive teething problems, but then the second one will just be a copy of the first.

The problem nowadays is that we in the west go “Oh no, learning stuff was expensive! Lets not use any of that and instead never do this again!” then, ten years later we start over again.