299 karma · joined May 1, 2021
That would make me a hypocrite, but it wouldn't make me wrong. Pointing out hypocrisy to 'dunk on' people is rarely a persuasive rebuttal.
Of New Shepard development, wikipedia tells me "Prototype engine and vehicle flights began in 2006, while full-scale engine development started in the early 2010s and was complete by 2015.[5] Uncrewed flight testing of the complete New Shepard vehicle (propulsion module and space capsule) began in 2015."
Well SpaceX was founded in 2002, giving them what, a 4 year head start on New Shepard? That 4 year gap has grown much wider since then.. SpaceX got to orbit 6 years after they were founded, while Blue Origin is at 21 years and counting.
It's a popular saying but a lot of people don't seem to recall the parable. A slow and steady tortoise only wins the race if the rabbit sprints a little bit but then gets too cocky and decides to take a nap and rest for a while (or gets stuck for some other reason.) If the fast rabbit keeps moving forward unrelentingly, then the slow tortoise doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.
So far, SpaceX has been a rabbit that doesn't stop to take breaks. In scenarios like this, "slow and steady" becomes little more than a lame excuse for moving slow, not a legitimate plan to get ahead.
I don't think technology is the solution to these problems. Not this sort of technology anyway. At the end of the day police will still have to physically interact with suspected criminals. And in America, where common people often own guns, that means risking their lives. But just how risky is it actually? I think we need more training to put these risks into perspective. The odds of any particular cop ever getting shot are quite low, but cops who consume cop media on cop websites and hang out on cop facebook groups or other cop echo chambers created by social media algorithms will naturally be exposed to more headlines about cops getting hurt. I believe these fear-mongering echo chambers induce an unjustified level of fear in the police officers who participate in them. Giving the police more high tech toys won't assuage these irrational fears; if anything I think it will might validate those fears. If you're a well-meaning cop who spends half your weekend watching videos of police in shootouts with criminals, then on monday your boss gives you a bunch of high tech body armor and drones, wouldn't that validate your perception of having an exceptionally dangerous job?
> I want most influential civilian paper work like silencer tax stamps and the NFA to be invalidated, too.
Here we agree, particularly with respect to silencers, which are safety devices. But for as long as those laws exist for the common people, I oppose police having exemptions to them.
And you might think it's sad, but I'm not shedding a single tear for the police who don't have access to $50k missiles and air support. This too, is coming from a 2A supporter.
> "If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement"
This in particular is a strange claim. Most cops spend the bare minimum time at gun ranges that is required of them. If there is anyone that is well trained with any sort of grenade, I expect it to be soldiers not police officers. And on that note:
> Methods: Ten years of data were extracted from Dallas Police Department records. LEOs who were involved in a shooting in the past 10 years were frequency matched on sex to LEOs never involved in a shooting. Military discharge records were examined to quantify veteran status and deployment(s). Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of veteran status and deployment history on officer-involved shooting involvement.
> Results: Records were abstracted for 516 officers. In the adjusted models, veteran LEOs who were not deployed were significantly more likely to be involved in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Veterans with a deployment history were 2.9 times more likely to be in a shooting than non-veteran officers.
> Conclusions: Military veteran status, regardless of deployment history, is associated with increased odds of shootings among LEOs. Future studies should identify mechanisms that explain this relationship, and whether officers who experienced firsthand combat exposure experience greater odds of shooting involvement.
I don't like it when police get exempted from these laws. Why are they allowed to buy post-86 machine guns? The rest of us have to buy machine guns registered prior to 1986 or get a machine gun manufacturing license. Pre-86 machine guns are very expensive at auctions, but since the police are exempt from this they are allowed to buy comparably dirt-cheap machine guns brand new. Make the same rules apply to them, and if that means they can no longer afford machine guns, so be it. And all the better if that excess paperwork stops them from using grenades too.
Say what you want about stellar kinematics, but measuring meters simply is not so fraught as this.
Why though? Why dollars in a particular year, rather than dollars in general? Sure the value of a dollar changes from year to year, but the value of a dollar also changes constantly in any given year too. Over the past year, the value of a US dollar relative to a Euro has fluctuated by more than 10 cents. In fact the relative values of currencies fluctuate constantly, near-enough to instantaneously. But this isn't reflected in the pricing of most consumer goods; the price of common household goods in a grocery store might vary a few times a week, but not thousands of times an hour. So in one context the value of a dollar seems to vary constantly, but in another context the value of a dollar is substantially more stable. So a dollar doesn't even have a set particular value at any instant in time; it depends on what kind of store you're standing in.
If happiness is a metric with units even worse than this, then I see little hope for any scientific study of happiness.
I'd guess the replication crisis in biology is not evenly distributed among branches of biology; for instance I guess it's much worse in biomedicine than it is ornithology. And even within one branch of the biology, I expect the replication crisis is not evenly distributed. Studies about the behaviors of birds probably reproduce less than studies about the distribution of birds (particularly since the introduction of photography, which removes a lot of ambiguity from the later but not necessarily the former.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentilla_indica
Incidentally: from a botanical perspective, strawberries are not berries. Nor do they even taste like straw!
> "The default green is 0xb9ca4a [which is actually yellow](https://www.color-hex.com/color/b9ca4a)."
While I agree that 0xb9ca4a is not a good choice for a default green, I disagree with the claim that it's yellow. In fact, the website that user cited for their "which is actually yellow" claim doesn't say what that user claims. That website says:
> Color #b9ca4a contains mainly GREEN color.
To my eyes, it's puke green. And the shades and tints of this color shown on that page make it clear that this is green.
Don't you have this completely backwards? If I want my application to have special custom decorations, then it makes sense for my application to draw the decorations. But if I want my application to have the standard decorations of the system, why should I want my application draw them?
GNOME supporting SSDs would not diminish the ability of GNOME's applications to use CSDs. So objections about the utility of CSDs imply a false dichotomy.
Realistically? Yeah, I think they'd die. Even if the Mars base had a trauma surgeon, which is a big 'if', would they really be equipped to handle something that severe? Would there even be enough medical staff to support a surgery that involved? If so, that's must be a very developed Mars base. If the Mars base has facilities more comparable to the ISS than an aircraft carrier, I think anybody in that situation would die.
HUGE caveat here: They only allow eye surgery if they were the ones that did it. My brother had eye surgery when he was 3 years old, signed up with the Navy to be a pilot and only learned about this after he was signed. His vision is fine today and they let him be a naval flight officer, but they will never let him be a pilot.
You got me curious so I looked it up. NASA requires that astronauts be at least 62 inches (5'2", aka 1.57 meters.) So they already permit astronauts to be substantially shorter than average. They wouldn't take people with dwarfism I guess, or people without legs.
If I had to guess, these requirements exist because they need people who are compatible with existing equipment. For instance, astronauts on the ISS do not get personalized EVA suits; they pick one that fits from those which are already up there. Perhaps somebody without legs could fit in a suit with legs just fine (stuff the legs with some towels maybe, if the legs flopping around is a problem?) But for somebody with dwarfism or a related disorder, I can see this being a legitimate problem.
Incidentally, NASA also discriminates against the tall. For the Mercury program they wouldn't take anybody over 71 inches (5'11") and today they won't take anybody over 75 inches (6'3"). This doubtlessly is due to equipment that isn't sized for taller people.
Trying to sell games to mobile/casual gamers is fine, but they probably should have invented a new brand for the purpose (like they did with Hearthstone) instead of burning an old brand for little gain.
This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have been able to foresee, the old customers were indeed alienated and the new customers never materialized.
At work, documentation gets written when the boss isn't looking. Corporate culture makes writing documentation taboo. The examples of great documentation I am most familiar with are written for open source projects where managers aren't around to hassle people for writing it. Particularly: mpv, ffmpeg, racket, emacs. In my career I have yet to encounter a commercial software project with documentation at this level.
> An hypothetical entity with special abilities postulated for the sake of a thought experiment in philosophy or physics.