• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • “just change the system” is easier said than done, which I suspect you realize of course, since if it were so easy, you’d have changed it yourself already. The difficulty in such change is that it requires a very large number of people to act in unison, which is quite rare, especially when most people aren’t literally starving, and have different ideas over what they want the system to be, some of which might be better, but some of which might be as bad or worse. It’s a bit like how libertarian types sometimes remark that, if everyone stopped paying taxes, the government would run out of money and be unable to enforce them anymore: technically true, but requires humans to act with uncharacteristic unity towards a singular goal, against pushback from established power. Not to say that it never happens, but it does not seem to happen reliably or in a way that can be readily forced to occur.



  • tbf, arent those border policies somewhat popular among some latino voters? Im not defending those policies as they dont align with my own views on the topic, but theres plenty of room for people that managed to get through the immigration system legally to look down of people who havent, or for people born in the country to dislike migration even if their ancestors did it, or for people that want to “pull up the ladder behind them” so to speak. Biden couldnt exactly expect Trump’s border policies to automatically win him that demographic either way.



  • Could one hypothetically make a single shot gun as as cheap and simple as possible so as to be disposable, mount it by some kind of claw grabber type device that can adjust pressure, and then loosen the grip until it’s just barely being held in place before firing, so that instead of the recoil force transferring into the drone, it just yeets the gun out of the drone’s grip instead? Could have a drone with multiple grippers in order to have multiple shots before needing to be reloaded.






  • I dont think I could live like these people even if I had the money; I feel like I hate the idea of having people whos relationship is purely professional going around in my space to clean things, but trying to clean all that space by oneself without hiring people to help sounds like a lot of bother.



  • I dont think Ive ever even pretended to think they are, for me children, especially babies and toddlers, give me a pretty bad case of the uncanny valley effect and look eerie and cause discomfort, as well as anxiety since Im even less sure than usual what they’re going to do and dont want someone’s kid getting hurt because of something I failed to notice. I dont hold it against them or hate children for it, its not their fault after all, but I do try to avoid being around them where practical.




  • Tbf, starship isn’t finished yet, if it were pretending to be a product ready for public use and was blowing up customer’s payloads, that’d be a fair point, but if you’re developing something by just flying it knowing it will probably fail, and then fixing whatever causes the failures so that it gets farther next time, until it eventually goes all the way, then being criticized for the test flights failing isn’t really fair unless you aren’t making any progress with them, which starship seems to have been making.


  • From looking up the numbers, it seems like a soyuz launch under the cheapest circumstances can get decently cheaper than a falcon 9 launch, however, it also carries significantly less payload mass, so the actual cost per mass to orbit is lower for falcon 9, which makes the comparison a bit like comparing a van to a semi truck; if you want to move something small enough to fit in the van, without any other cargo to fill the space, then the van makes sense. But if you’re running a logistics network and have enough cargo to fill whatever vehicle you’re using, the bigger truck is going to be cheaper to use.

    As far as them being a better rocket company though, Roscosmos has just been operating a group of designs that are quite ancient in terms of rockets, especially the soyuz which is an evolution on an original design that literally predates Sputnik. They’re not bad rockets per se, but Roscosmos didn’t develop them and they don’t seem to be innovating much beyond them, and so are quickly becoming out of date as more groups work on things like rocket reusability. SpaceX by contrast has been quite innovative in the space especially with regards to reuse, and has such a high capacity that one satellite constellation it owns accounts for a majority of operational satellites at the moment.