Fair, I was assuming that their unease was moral not safety.

Ok, but their other options are Boeing and Russian Soyuz.

I make no claim of long-term planning.

Longtermism is a philosophy that Musk has been writing about for many years.

Elon isn’t one for careful planning.

He is one for careless disregard of short-term consequences while seeking what he has determined to be a long-term good.

I have personally argued for restoring the central valley swamp ecosystem in California. Doing so should be a delicate task, because the valley is no longer hydrologically or morphologically tuned to swampland. The entire overland water transport hydrological system in the valley was redesigned by humans to support farmers in a dry basin decades after the cotton farmers drained it.

Just dumping water into what used to be the lakebed is reckless. It is an action taken with no long-term planning for rebuilding an ecosystem that emerged from the last ice age thanks to careful maintenance, gardening, and stewardship by indigenous peoples; building this ecosystem required human ingenuity and careful planning; so will rebuilding it. It is an action taken without even short-term planning for what happens to the water next as it refills a basin now adapted to dry conditions; it is one of our nation’s agricultural powerhousen.

I believe that he thinks that just putting the water in the right place without anyone helping develop the new swamp ecosystem is enough to restore California’s wetlands. Maybe he’s right, on a long enough timescale. I think we should prefer to be careful and to work with the various relevant communities in that area to ensure that any further changes we make to this ecosystem are done responsibly.

Because the water would go where they want it to go. You just don’t understand where they want it to go or why.

You think they want it to go to where the fires are. That’s wrong.

They want it to go into the central valley to refill the giant lake and swamp ecosystem that used to be there.

They don’t care about the short-term needs of people who need to drink or put out fires or grow crops. They are making decisions entirely from the perspective of longtermism. They see restoring the central valley’s swamp ecosystem as the overwhelming long-term good, regardless of any short-term consequences.

Right idea, reckless implementation. It’s also not clear that just dumping as much water as possible into the central valley is the best way to restore the swamp ecosystem. So much of the valley’s hydrology and ability to retain water have been damaged since the cotton farmers drained the lake after the civil war. This is a restoration that needs to be done slowly and deliberately, both to not kill people who currently rely on that water and to manage the environmental impacts on the basin of suddenly reintroducing water that it’s spent 150 years adapting to live without.

I wasn’t lying if I was honestly mistaken. Thanks for the correction.

Oh sorry, I didn’t realize that blowing up the launch pad because they didn’t bother to calculate if it could survive without a sacrificial water barrier to boil away counted as a success.

Everyone hit by that debris had it coming like the whales, right?

Wikipedia says 4 successes and 4 failures. The first two block 1s failed. Now the first two block 2s have failed.

I still get to give spacex shit for their failures consistently causing damage and chaos and disruption to the rest of the world. They are menaces that don’t think through the consequences of their actions.

The whale had it coming. Did the airport?

Second failure

Uhh, that title is wrong.

As is clarified in the body of the article, this is test number 8 for Starship. Zero successful flights. 4 failures, 50% success rate. Like a coin flip.

Yoga and canning beans are both great hobbies. You pick weird things to use as examples of the worst way getting sucked into QAnon could go.

It may have just been a meme dump, or a place to vent and get support.

Maybe someone is asking how well insurance covers a procedure or how to ask the doctor. Maybe someone is asking what is considered proper etiquette post-transition when they’re in a new social role. Maybe someone is asking who wants to get drinks after work.

I doubt it was gorey or pornographic. As you say, it’s work.

Spy work requires a fair amount of social skill and socially being aware of your partners and their ticks and habits and personality. Like in many professions, socializing is part of the job.

The firings stem from out-of-context chat logs leaked by far-right commentator Chris Rufo on Monday. Sources tell Erin in the Morning that the chat functioned as an ERG-adjacent LGBTQ+ safe space, where participants discussed topics like gender-affirming surgery, hormone therapy, workplace LGBTQ+ policies, and broader queer issues. Rufo, however, framed these conversations as evidence of misconduct, claiming that “NSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss genital castration” and alleging discussions of “fetishes, kink, and sex.” To Rufo and his audience, merely talking about being transgender and the realities of transition is enough to be labeled “fetish” content.

I just watched the Jesse Waters clip linked in the above quote. He claims that the chat was pornographic and uses as justification an out-of-context quote from one trans woman saying she gets euphoria every time she pees after her bottom surgery, and that it’s easier than it’s ever been. No details, not even a “because I have a vagina now” or a “because I don’t have a penis”. She only said that peeing is now easy and makes her happy.

Feeley believed the most famous line from Thucydides’s account of that war – “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” – explained Trump’s bully-boy worldview.
“[He’s doing it] because he can – because the asymmetry of American commercial and military power is so incalculable in relationship to Mexico, Central America, Panama, even Brazil, Argentina. They can’t really do much other than suffer the consequences. And so I think, in a sort of mafioso way, he is very adept at reading relative power,” said the former diplomat, who attributed his 2018 resignation to how Trump had “warped and betrayed … the traditional core values of the United States”.

So he’s not Thucydides, he’s the kind of politicians that Thucydides was describing…

“He’s a velociraptor … He kills anything he perceives as a threat.”

We know nothing about velociraptor hunting / social / behavioural habits. Maybe they were friendly and social and trusting which enabled them to hunt in packs?

I’m sorry but everything this guy says just smells like bullshit.

If you use as your psychological paradigm [for Trump] a combination of Tony Soprano and Thucydides

Thucydides has been dubbed the father of “scientific history” by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.

How is Donald Trump anything like the guy whose biggest contribution to the field of history was to be the first to rigorously outline and (arguably) apply the standard of “make sure you gather evidence before making a historical claim”.

Even leaving aside that Tony Soprano is not the right mobster for comparison (and it’s been too long since I’ve seen the show to propose another with confidence), the other half of the asserted psychological profile for Trump makes absolutely no sense.

This is the former ambassador to Panama? Yikes.

Word to the media: don’t bother us with this shit until they have a working idea on how to monitor and regulate the shit so we can all have flying cars and not just one dude’s stupid prototype. The hard thing isn’t making a car that can fly. That shit is relatively easy. The hard part is figuring out how air traffic would work if everyone was up there. It’s already a PITA and there aren’t a helluva lot of planes compared to cars.

If they’re all automated and coordinating, NASA has put a lot of effort into researching how to coordinate a swarm of airborne agents with diverse goals.. I’d imagine that these prototypes have gotten further development and a reality-collision as drone systems have been deployed and evolving in the Ukrainian theatre. The tech for this might actually finally be ready.

would have to be fixed in the driver, or at least ALSA or PipeWire

coppwr

Set up a dummy device whose input is a monitor of the HDMI out, and make the dummy device’s output the headphones.

Used to use pactl for pulse, but coppwr makes pipe wire configs very visually accessible.

heart to sun
see it and run
what they say is a screen
they’re lying to thee

\

they show their hand
while insisting again
no you did not see
no not never nazi

steam locomotive

rolling down the track

Prior to Trump’s orders, NASA was named as one of the best employees in the U.S. for diversity in 2023. NASA’s workforce is composed of approximately 35% women and 30% minorities, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General. Still, the agency had more work to do to improve inclusion amongst its workforce. A 2024 report concluded that “despite support from Agency leaders and multiple initiatives to increase diversity, we found NASA has made little progress in increasing the representation of women and minorities in its civilian workforce or leadership ranks,” NASA’s Office of Inspector General wrote. “Specifically, over the past decade NASA’s overall workforce demographics have stayed roughly the same, with small increases (1 or 2 percent) for some groups.”

After decades of improvement, our strategies were stalling and starting to either hit diminishing returns or backfire. Instead of reflecting and listening and learning how to bridge the final gaps, we are going to forget and eliminate all progress made so we have to do it again and start from scratch.

Academic freedom is freedom of speech.

Coming next season on FOX!

America’s newest cop drama:

IMMIGRANTS ON ICE!

I’m sure that the ratings will be fantastic and help to fund some new tanks or whatever for ICE to use in season 2.

If I still had my federal academic grant, my University would get paid a lump sum up front at the beginning of February covering their disbursement of my paycheck for the next four months. Most federal grants in my field operate on this lump sum model, and most people earning grant money have that money pass through their institution before it gets to them.

These grants pay for researchers, TAs, student loans, and so many of the little bits and pieces that go into making a university run under the hood.

Extrapolation:

This one week stay, in this particular critical week, will determine whether some universities relying on grants paid out on the February cycle can afford their spring semester this year. If it’s honored, then there are several months to prepare. If not… well this is probably the big lump-sum bill that Trump probably is trying to avoid paying. His MAGA cronies probably think that shutting down the university system is funny.

If you know anyone at university in the US, make sure they have a backup plan if this semester blows up.