TeknOShEeP
17d ago
On the one hand, this is a horshit denial of 2nd ammendment rights based on bullshit case law that actively makes everyone involved less safe (its the same debate being had right now in the pilot community- when you punish people for seeking mental health care, no one is going to seek mental health care). The courts should be fucking ashamed, and the justices involved run out of town on a rail.
On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.
A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.
TeknOShEeP
14d ago
ThisIsSin covered it pretty well, the only thing I would add is GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.
Karl, on the other hand, at least by going off social media posts, rather vocally and militantly left wing, and not in a family friendly way either. (Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).
TeknOShEeP
17d ago
Yeah, I know exactly what type of gun owner the plaintiff would be, and its not good. One of those times when you wish this would be kept quite and the family could step in with a quiet word.
TeknOShEeP
16d ago
children were born without marraige
Er, you mean "within marraige"?
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.
Lol, lmao even. The competition is quite literally being left on the ground while SpaceX is by far the most advanced launch company on (and leaving) Earth. This (pdf warning) is a handy little summary of 2024 launch activities. There were 263 total orbital launch attempts last year, of which 134 were SpaceX Falcon 9s (132 standards, 2 heavies). 133 of those attempts were successful, for a demonstrated reliability rate over 99%. So more than half of all launches last year were SpaceX, and they are more reliable than anyone else. But even this number vastly understates the actual capabilities gap. While numerically having 50% of the launches, the Falcon family put more than 90% of the total mass into orbit because they can carry substantially larger payloads than any of their competitors (the Falcon heavy in particular can roughly double anything else's mass to LEO). Putting the very large cherry on top is the fact that no one else is remotely close to cost-competitive with Falcon 9 below $3k per kg and Heavy below $2k per kg, while everyone else including the Chinese who use ICBM boosters and drop their rockets into populated villages all north of $5k per kg.
So the current state of play is that the SpaceX workhorse, the Falcon 9, is at a minimum twice as capable in cost and capacity metrics compared to all of the competition, while being substantially more technically advanced. Its the only rocket currently active that incorporates re-use in any meaningful fashion, its the only rocket currently flying with engine-out capability, and its the only rocket currently flying that can do school-bus style launches where customers can buy a small chunk of the total launch mass and get their payloads inserted into independent orbits.
Everyone else is just playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 at this point, and having a hard time with it. Its fair to say SpaceX is at least a generstion ahead on the general launch vehicle front. But the hell of it is the Falcon 9 is going to be made obsolete by Starship, which will be even cheaper and have vastly more payload capacity. Are there problems currently? Yes, absolutely, the block 2 second stage seems to have some very big problems. But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling. No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform. The second stage needs some work clearly, but you get optimized platforms by experimenting, and thats what they're doing.
I guess this all seems like fanboying, but it is wild to me that one of the most technically complex and expensive markets ever developed by humanity is so wildly skewed towards one participant based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
TeknOShEeP
16d ago
Jimmy John's has superior cold sandos to Jersey Mikes, but no one can top the Big Kahuna cheesesteak from Mikey.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time. The day you disprove it is the day physics gets really, really weird and reality as we know it ceases to make sense. So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe, no amount of obesity cheerleading will change that.
B) The effects noted in the study are frankly not that big. Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%. So conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy, which is only a benefit if you live in a post-scarsity world.
"You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Just please, won't someone show the actual profit the company is making.
You are asking for non-public numbers that being a non-public company SpaceX is under no obligation to provide. The current best guess is that Starlink (and its defense version Starshield) account for roughly 2/3rds of the company's revenue, and since most of that is for actual services rather than hardware it probably has a decent profit margin, but everyone has their own assumptions.
I know Musk is one of the richest people on Earth, but even he doesn't have unlimited cash to throw at a failing endevour. Jeff Bezos is also one of the richest people on Earth, and his rocket company Blue Origin is actually older, but has done far, far less in that same timeframe. If I get to invest my own cash, I'd put it 100% with SpaceX.
TeknOShEeP
16d ago
I think that was definitely true for the first Trump admin, one of the many personnel problems it had. But my reading of the tea leaves is that Vance is absolutely being groomed as Trump's successor- he is being sent out to do the sort of foundational policy making that you wouldn't fob off on the average do-nothing VP. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference is one of biggest moments in international relations of the decade, fundamentally changing the relationship between the US and EU, and full of lines that I would imagine Trump himself would have loved to drop, and yet JD is the one doing it.
Also, Vance is low key probably the smartest (in terms of IQ) major figure in American politics today, which is always a plus for his future prospects.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.
The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.
But are controlled by Australia. So they get Australia's rate to avoid some enterprising schmuck setting up a nominal presence there to circumvent the tarrifs.
TeknOShEeP
16d ago
I do, but boomer-fuddville is convenient to me, so if i need to zero a scope or try a new build I can be in an out in under an hour instead of making it a half-day excursion. I make a point of loudly calling out all of these violations to the RSO, and they are pretty good about clamping down on it, but they shouldnt have to intervene in the first place.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.
The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.
But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
the problem for actual conservatives is what is there actually to do here?
Really, the problem for "actual conservatives" is more along the lines of "how can we claw anything of any relevance back?" The "real conservative" party is dead, Trump killed it, and publically so. Being a William F. Buckley fanboy is the surest path to a dead political career, and frankly good riddance.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
"building bridges"
One of the Pope's formal titles is Pontifex Maximus, which literally translates as "supreme bridge builder," and along with the Keys of St. Peter bridges feature heavily as motifs in papal proclamations, bulls, teachings, etc. So generally very on-theme for a new Pope.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Formal recognition of Crimea is probably a non-starter for Ukraine
Why? Crimea is, and has been for the past two centuries, culturally, linguistically, and economically Russian. It was only part of Ukraine because Krushchev did a Kruschev in the 1950s and it didnt matter as they were all part of glorious Soviet Union. It became awkward after the fall of the wall, but they hashed out a compromise where Crimea operated as an autonomous region of Ukraine instead of a integrated one, the state that persisted for 30 years until Russia formally annexed it.
I don't condone the whole "starting a war" thing, but Crimea has never been Ukrainian in any but the most nit-picky sense, and blowing a peace deal over it would be catastrophically stupid.
TeknOShEeP
13d ago
did he actually do this
There's a FB video of it somewhere, amongst all of the other Satanist content (not derrogatory, he is apparently a practicing Satanist). Lacking a FB account, i cant actually log in to find the specific one. But he posted it himself.
Now i personally dont give a fuck what he does, but for branding purposes he's sort of pigeonholed himself into a very specific niche that a) most gun owners and gun curious people probably dont align with, and b) would definitely affect the squeaky clean image Gun Jesus cultivates.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
What could possibly go in the blank such that a court would permit the prosecution to move forward? I am confident that a court is not going to permit an investigation into a President's state of mind to try and determine a pardon's validity.
The question is more basic than that- Presidential powers are only valid if they are excercised by the President. The claim at this point is straight up fraud and forgery- someone (the NY Post and a few other outlets claim to know exactly who this "senior staffer" is) in the Biden whitehouse is alleged to have issued Executive Orders, using Biden's autopen signature without any discussion of the matter with Biden exploiting his diminished capacity. So the claim has nothing to do with Biden's state of mind in signing the pardons, its that Biden did not in any legally relevant way actually sign the pardons. Given that a) it is indisputablely an autopen signature on the orders in question, and b) Biden's mental decline was such that he either didnt remember or was completely ignorant of his LNG export EO when discussing it weeks later with the Speaker of the House, there is perhaps more merit to the claim than appears on first glance.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
The US space program started out as a massive government push, and during the heyday of the Apollo program NASA's budget went as high as 4.4% of the entire federal budget. It definitely got results, and its the reason any space program exists at all. Lots of bad behavior has definitely snuck in since those days, but without the whole Space Race thing there is zero chance we have anything like the industry we have today.
Looking at the rest of the globe there is a strong correlation between "has an actual space industry" and current or prior national level "Space Race"-tier efforts. I.e. Russia and China have actual launch capabilities, their direct geopolitical adversaries in Japan and India have developed fledgling capabilities in response (as has Israel due to similar threats), and then you get giant blocks of highly educated, wealthy, sophisticated nations that have somehow managed to produce what is recognized in official policy documents as more of a jobs handout than actual space program, mostly due to a complete lack of any initial kick in the butt.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Nothing? Trump is not invalidating anything, because if the allegations are true, the pardons were never valid legal instruments to begin with. If the allegations are true, the President did not issue any such pardons, and since the President is the only person who can issue pardons per the Constitution then no such pardons exist (and also some staffer is guilty of fraud, forgery, and a large number of other crimes).
Trump has talked extensively about his pardons, and is on camera signing (and posing with!) the relevant documents.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.
I think it is a serious error to assume the MAGA coalition is held together by a desire to "own the libs". Thats what some figures may cathartically tweet about, but the actual voters that matter care about their jobs, the cost of groceries and morgtages, and their kids education. On all of these the proggo left has failed misrably the past few years, which is why in 2024 the GOP, not the DNC, won the lion's share of the working class vote.
TeknOShEeP
5mo ago
At first I was horrified, but then I read up on what the department of education actually does (allocate funding per the whims of beurecrats and congress critters, in that order) and now I am horrified it existed at all.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
... its not this one. All of those IRS agents are now looking to pump up their numbers in order to keep their jobs. Busting Average Joe for some transparently obvious evasion is an easy win for them.
Next year, when the turnover is settled however...
The middle ground is modern medicine is good enough to save people who 10 years ago would have been pronounced dead almost immediately upon arriving at the hospital, but even fully replacing a humans blood capacity several times over can't save them from brain death.
More options
Context Copy link