domain:web.law.duke.edu
Oh, no, they're definitely trying to go to orbit. Basically every use case they have requires it. Starlink satellites use low-acceleration argon ion thrusters to change their orbit after a launch, but they have to start from a low parking orbit that won't decay for weeks or months. (One time a series of solar storms reduced that to "days" and actually brought down a batch of satellites.) Starting from an orbit that reenters within 45 minutes is out of the question. Artemis missions and Mars missions have to refuel in Low Earth Orbit, and that again requires weeks or months of orbital stability, at a minimum, for the propellant depot Starship. These barely-suborbital flights are the best way to test everything, but even barely-suborbital is not suitable for an operational launch.
Their problem is that they're trying to get to orbit with a ridiculously huge payload (which is requiring redesign after redesign to make things more powerful and/or lighter) and then get back from orbit in good enough shape to reuse (which will require redesigns to make things more robust and thus potentially heavier), and so even when they have successful tests (the last version-1 flights, 4 through 6, were awesome) that doesn't guarantee that a major redesign will still be successful (the first version-2 flights, 7 through 9, were awful, and they had one v2 that didn't even make it to flight).
[Edit, to sum up the problem in one sentence: They can't safely go to orbit until they can safely go to orbit, and it's hard to both achieve and verify "safely" with a design that's still a rapidly moving target.]
My guess is that they'll go for a full orbit in the same flight that they attempt their first ship catch, which Musk claims will be 13 if everything goes right with 12 (the first v3 launch). They've got one last v2 launch for flight 11, and if they had a NASA milestone for orbit then I think they'd try to check that box then, but they don't (the next milestone is for ship-to-ship docking and propellant transfer, requiring two launches to orbit) so 11 will probably be another "fix stuff that broke or wore too badly on the previous flight and pick new spots to weaken to see what else they can push to the breaking point" suborbital like 10 was.
If everything goes right with flights 11 and 12 then 13 would probably be around December. I wouldn't bet on that, since even Elon is suggesting that they might end up waiting until 14 or 15 for a catch. And if the first v3 flights are as much of a regression as the first v2 flights were then the catch+orbit attempt would be flight 16 and wouldn't be until next summer. Even that would still win you your bet with months to spare, but the implications for the already-implausible Artemis 3 timeline would be awful.
As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").
I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
Tim Roth was the bantering hitman in Tarantino's best movie, Pulp Fiction
Wasn't he one of the dumbass cafe robbers? Pumpkin and Honeybunny?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
I feel like I'd be really good at money laundering. The part that seems hard is the millions of ill gotten gains that I need to wash in the first place.
Am I doing something wrong that I don't have access to millions in ill gotten gains??
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Are there any rationalist discords/meetups etc in NYC?
The semiannual Astral Codex Ten meetup list has just been posted. It indicates that there are meetups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, and Newark.
@Southkraut: Are there any in southern Germany?
There are meetups in Erlangen, Freiburg, Mannheim, München, and Stuttgart.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Yeah I may have been confused in making the bet, as @roystgnr mentioned above it seems they may never go “to orbit” and instead do suborbital velocities.
No.... Roystgnr was making a rather nuanced point, I assure you SpaceX is planning to send Starship to a proper orbit. They literally say this during the stream from the last test flight, when they were testing the engine relight (around T:+37 minutes, I think). It's just that they're not confident it's safe to do so yet.
Starship was stable enough to release a dummy payload so I’m assuming that’s as far as they’ll go!
That makes no sense. They want to use it to launch satellites. To do so, they need it to go to orbit. The dummy payload was there to test if their deployment mechanism works, and to see how well the ship performs under actual load, but on the current trajectory, it either burned up in the atmosphere, or crashed into the ocean right after the Starship.
Not trying to weasel out of the bet here just genuinely above my pay grade, hah.
I am kinda starting to feel bad for getting you sucked into this. We can downgrade it to a gentlemen's bet, if you want. Honestly, all I wanted was for Elon stans to plant some flags, and tell me what future achievement I should exoect from him, if he's such a genius.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
According to the Peter principle people in a hierarchy tend to rise to the level of respective incompetence. Since it is apparently so important to have competent sergeants, I'd guess the command would prefer them remain sergeants rather than be promoted to officers.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
This post is barely coherent and seems like a pretext to wedge a lot of unrelated viral ragebait into a general 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' rant.
I guess you could make some kind of culture war point about the wrestling incident, though it would be nice if your point was broader than "Look what this black guy did to a white guy, black people suck." But that seems to be the only point, and the Indian truck driver has no relevance at all other than being a member of another ethic group you despise.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Weed might suppress the latter two but it definitely doesn't suppress neuroticism. Paranoia is a notable side effect of both smoking weed and the hangover from it.
While writing wish fulfillment stories about it is a little silly, I do think it's a real phenomenon that women in love start having a halo effect feeling towards their partner's appearance. "I want to have a baby with your deep blue eyes and your cute nose and your bright smile" is a completely realistic thing you might hear from your girlfriend or your wife. Maybe not for a pot belly -- but obviously that's not exactly a genetic trait. It's not so much a statement of "they're so HAWT and SEXXXXXY" as it is a statement of "I want to have children by you in particular," which is just something that women say when they really love you.
I can say that pair-bonding with a woman also gives a halo effect about her appearance, where individual features that might not be the most attractive thing in the world dissolve into the gestalt of someone you love. You start finding her distinguishing features attractive because they're hers. I'd assert this is a symmetrical feature of human pair-bonding.
The unrealistic thing about the comic's depiction of this is that it happens so quickly, which is partly a joke I think.
Throwaway05
2d ago
Mmm fair. You can find good Mexican food in the NE but it sucks except for random places. Pretty much only in Texas/SW/Cali tho.
Indian wise that's an interesting point. Maybe blame Edison?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2d ago
And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.
What people who know about these never seem to see is the vast distance between edgy performative jerkwads and conservative-liberal values.
roystgnr
2d ago
Caffeine has evolved independently like 5 times. It may attract bees (and enhance their memory of where they found it!?!) and deter herbivores (including insects) and inhibit growth of nearby plants of other species.
There's a bunch of other examples where humans find chemicals evolved to be toxic or unpleasant and consume them for fun, too. Nicotine and menthol and sulphur+allinase (in onions and garlic) were supposed to defend against herbivores, capsacin against mammals, morphine against microbes and insects, cinnamaldehyde against fungi... And there's others (like persin in avocados, an antifungal that can sicken pets and kill birds) where we just don't even notice the toxin is there.
I want to see a "planet of hats" sci-fi show where the humans' hat is "the race that eats poison for fun". "My guacamole is extra spicy, but there's some mint chocolate chip ice cream for after." "That's five different toxins in one meal!?" "... how about a margarita?" "Is this just a mix of ethanol and acid???"
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2d ago
Yeah I may have been confused in making the bet, as @roystgnr mentioned above it seems they may never go “to orbit” and instead do suborbital velocities.
Starship was stable enough to release a dummy payload so I’m assuming that’s as far as they’ll go! Not trying to weasel out of the bet here just genuinely above my pay grade, hah.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
Mexican food can be pretty disappointing as a category in NYC. There are of course exceptional places and you can find extremely sophisticated low brow regional Mexican cuisine in Queens but I can't really say "go enjoy Mexican food in NYC".
Indian food is kind of like this too. Indian food should be top of its class in NYC but it surprisingly doesn't compare to the Indian food in London, for example.
Cuisine won't automatically be mind blowing just because it's in NYC, is my caveat.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
Put simply, por que no los dos? Why does the fact that the shooter was active on Nazi fora automatically exculpate the trans community? Why am I required to believe that the Nazi fora was what done the radicalisation, and participating in online trans communities was incidental? Why exactly is that the null hypothesis?
The Nazi/rainbow overlap is even well-known enough to have a Stonetoss comic about it (the redditors refusing to understand the joke are icing on top).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
and for some reason called "going mustang"
MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
I think the military usage came first, but am not certain. I recall it being used for the character Sharpe in the eponymous books, but that may have been an anachronism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Presumably it would mean something like "set up a new government in Afghanistan that has some sort of stability, and doesn't hate the US, or at least doesn't hate us enough to sponsor terrorists."
That very clearly was not their definition of a victory condition from the start. Even your far more limited goal very clearly was not possible to do, and I think the evidence shows that the people in charge clearly knew it wasn't possible to do from fairly early on. Like, even if they could output something like the above as an abstract mission statement, there never were concrete variables in the real world to plug into those abstractions. The Taliban were the best chance by far for stability, there were no significant runners-up. Moreover, long before our involvement there ended, my understanding is that we ourselves were once more providing cash, arms and training to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.
In hindsight we probably should just destroyed Al-Qaida but left the Taliban in charge and left. But with them gone we were kinda commited to putting up a new government so it wouldn't just turn into an even worse breeding ground for terrorists.
I was following along when all this got rolling. I remember that the Taliban sent a last-minute offer to hand over Bin Laden just before the invasion kicked off, but Bush turned them down in favor of invasion. The reason, as I understand it from the events I observed, is that a large part of the theory and strategy behind the GWOT was that we could in fact engineer these Islamist theocracies and dictatorships into modern liberal democracies. That was never going to happen, hence all the lies told over the next twenty years to cover up the fact that it wasn't happening.
I can see how the low-level soldiers didn't want to do dangerous things when it would have been much safer and easier to just "shoot first, ask questions later." But the basic logic is sound... if you do that, you're just creating more and more enemies in a never-ending cycle.
If you shoot first and ask questions later, you "create more terrorists", but you live. If you ask questions first and shoot later, you run a significant risk that they shoot you while you're trying to ask questions, and then recruit more terrorists anyway on the grounds that they're national heroes killing the hated infidel occupiers. Spare me the COIN cliches: I'm already quite familiar with them, and I observe that the people promulgating them have not actually delivered a victory to establish the reliability of their model. So if you kill 9 insurgents and one civilian... why are you confident that the 9 insurgents you killed aren't better recruitment material than the one civilian? Why are you confident that the harm those 9 inflicted before they were killed wasn't better recruitment material than the killing of the one civilian? Why are you confident, in short, that the problem was how the soldiers on the ground did things, and not the orders and policies those soldiers were dutifully carrying out?
In the show, the grunts aren't even trying to be careful. They seem quite happy to kill anyone they can, including women, children, and injured prisoners. They have a running competition to see who can kill the most. When their Afghan allies get killed, they just laugh. The main character keeps a collection of body parts as war trophies. At one point he and another character take turns raping the corpse. I realize this is just fiction, but it seems to show what a lot of vets wish they could have done in the war.
Sure. This is war as soldiers prefer to wage it, prioritizing their own agency above all, as opposed to war as soldiers actually wage it, with strict discipline and execution of orders from those far away. One of the things I've pointed out before is the madness of our demonization of the idea of "just following orders". Humanity has spent literal millennia trying desperately to get soldiers to "just follow orders", and to their credit, everything I've seen indicates that in Afghanistan, our soldiers did in fact follow orders fairly well. That doesn't mean they have to like it, and their discontent finds expression here.
I realize this is just fiction, but it seems to show what a lot of vets wish they could have done in the war. They really hated the Afghanis... not just the enemies but all of them, in a very racist way, and wish they could have committed genocide. That's pretty disturbing to me.
Again, I emphasize that, based on numerous vet accounts, it was common knowledge for US line troops that the Afghan army units they were training and fighting alongside were routinely conducting the organized rape of children, right there in the camp next door, and it was again common knowledge that they were not supposed to interfere with this conduct. These were the Afghans with whom they could be expected to have the best relationship out of any in the country. I'm given to understand that it was common knowledge that a great many of the rural civilians were openly engaging in poppy cultivation to feed the global heroin market, and that a considerable portion of them were tacitly or enthusiastically supporting the Taliban. These were the people they were expected to fight beside and for, enduring daily misery and constant threat of sudden, violent death, possibly from their own allies, in pursuit of an obviously impossible and pointless mission.
I'm not what you might call a genocide enjoyer. I think genocide is pretty bad, and if anyone reading this is considering genocide, please don't do it. If you wanted to figure out a way to get a person to support the idea of genocide, though, the above seems like a pretty good way to do it. I do not think this is a moral failing of American vets; I think this is how humans naturally respond when you trap them long-term in a deplorable environment.
Throwaway05
2d ago
My delta is NYC actually sucks at some food
Out of curiosity which ones? Unless it's all
plays. It's astonishing how bad a lot of places are but they're still viable just because they are in a lucrative location. You have to worry about this a lot more in NYC, IMO.
Throwaway05
3d ago
The liberty bell is basically a tourist trap.
I don't disagree but I feel like this is most America history items.
I think we might have different tastes, especially once you had the context...The Barnes is just an exquisite museum.
celluloid_dream
3d ago
agree that there's some "in-the-water" progressivism in LiS, but it all felt pretty natural to me. It is indeed hard to point to specific examples without spoiling things, but there were also some obvious fake-outs where you think a character is supposed to be a tool to hammer home a message, and they're not, or are actually the opposite. I would also say "the good ending" feels thematically conservative to me (almost Christian?), but can't really say more without spoiling it.
I had to quit LiS 2 for the same reason. I can handle a character being preachy just fine, but when the game itself is preaching to me without any room for nuance, that's too much.
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