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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Semi drivers require a commercial license, and special training. They’re monitored way more closely than your average American driver.

    And side mirrors only let you see what’s behind the car to the sides and at a distance, not what’s immediately behind the car. I don’t want some idiot in his $80K battering ram to roll over me because I happened to walk behind his death trap and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear view camera to come up.

    Not being able to see what’s immediately behind the vehicle is a safety hazard, especially in suburban areas or parking lots where most people are reversing out of a space with other people walking around.




  • Nuclear bombs are pretty precise affairs.

    Even the relatively simple “gun type” fission bombs require a precisely sized core of nuclear material to be encased in a neutron reflector to get an explosion instead of just a ball of hot uranium.

    An implosion type bombs is more powerful but requires conventional explosives to be set off in a sphere around the core at exactly the right time, this compresses the sphere, increasing reactivity, and making it explode.

    If the shape or timing is wrong, you just get a nuclear meltdown, not an explosion.

    So bombing a nuclear bomb isn’t likely to set it off, it’s only likely to make the area it’s stored in uninhabitable for a few thousand years.

    Either way, not a very good idea. Also, pretty sure bombing any kind of nuclear facility is considered a war crime, as it will horribly wound or kill way more civilians than anything else.





  • Nope, they were awarded 3 billion dollars to develop the Human Landing System, which is the Starship they’re supposed to use for the moon landing.

    Why 3 billion dollars?

    Because Kathy Lueders, the interim director at NASA at the time, called SpaceX and told them if they could get their proposal down to 3 billion, it would be approved. No other contractor was given this call. When SpaceX submitted the revised proposal, Lueders unilaterally approved SpaceX for the contract.

    Kathy Lueders is now the manager of Starbase Texas, SpaceX’s private launch facility. She was hired six months after she approved the contract.

    Oh, and recently the Government Accountability Office released a report that the Raptor engine, which powers starship, does not have the performance required to do the mission anyway. But this has largely gone unmentioned, because the GAO is largely a toothless organization.

    You’re right in that the contract is Fixed-cost, so if SpaceX blows up too many rockets and burns through that 3 billion, they are left holding the bag. But SpaceX did receive that money and are spending it to develop Starship.

    I love Space, it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I love learning about space, and learning how all these launch vehicles work. Rockets are really fucking cool. I want the Starship to be everything they say it is, it would be a powerful tool for making Spaceflight cheaper and easier. But the more I’ve learned about the history of spacecraft development, and the more I’ve learned about Starship in particular, the more concerned I’ve been. Starship is ludicrously complicated, even compared to a similar vehicle like the Space Shuttle. And the fact that it looks like SpaceX was awarded the contract to make Starship not on merit but though a corrupt deal where the director of nasa called and told them the price tag, and then took a job from SpaceX less than a year later, just makes me incredibly jaded with the whole project. The develop approach is concerning given they are spending US tax dollars, the design of the craft is concerning given the complexity it adds to an already complex mission. Everything comes together to make me think that because of this, we may not have humans back on the moon anytime soon. We need someone at the GAO or NASA to take a serious look at what SpaceX is doing to develop this lander, why it’s failing to test all of the hardware needed for the Artemis mission, and why they are now several years behind schedule on a multi-billion dollar contract.


  • It’s not about converting the car.

    I have a 2009 Chevy with an automatic transmission. I’m order to convert it to electric, the ECU would have to be replaced so the car knows when to shift to a higher gear without a combustion engine.

    Because of environmental reasons, ECUs are pretty tightly controlled by the government. I don’t know if any company even exists that can sell an aftermarket ECU. There’s plenty that can hack or reprogram ECUs, but even that is becoming increasingly regulated and legally questionable.




  • Oh they definitely did.

    Before the pandemic, I’d see one or 2 highly questionable moves in a drive.

    Now it’s like a dozen.

    I see people making lefts on red, cutting off semi trucks, weaving in and out of traffic, driving with absolutely no lights at night, and my god the speeding.

    A few years ago it was normal to see people doing like 5 miles an hour over the limit, now it feels like half the people want to do 10 or 15, even on surface streets.

    I wonder if it’s that most people drove less during the pandemic, the fact that cops around here were told to only pull people over if they were a direct threat to the public, or if the social isolation just made some people way more self centered. But driving has definitely gotten worse since the pandemic.




  • I honestly don’t consider starlink to be a SpaceX product.

    I’d technically owned and operated by them because SpaceX owns starlink LLC, but they did it that way to boost their launch contracts for their one viable product: falcon 9 launches.

    So since they wanted to split starlink off into its own company, that just so happens to rely 100% on SpaceX for all contracts, then I’ll give it to them. Starlink is its own company. Which means SpaceX still only has one product.


  • The worst part is we could definitely have a mars base with today’s technology.

    It’s just not economically or scientifically necessary to set up. Robots can do 99% of what a human can on mars, scientifically speaking, and if they break we can just build another one. If someone dies on mars, it’s gonna global news for weeks.

    And mars doesn’t exactly have a huge open pit of platinum or something we want to mine, so there’s no economic incentive to set up a colony.

    Musk just wants to sell the sci-fi vaporware fantasy to shareholders because SpaceX has one viable product and he’s desperate for no one to notice that.



  • The fact that they didn’t scout the location at all just kills me.

    Like someone went there ahead of time to setup the podium and speakers, for a White House press conference, and didn’t call their boss and say “are you sure I’m supposed to set this up at a landscaping company?”

    I can be a little apathetic at my job, but I’ve never been that apathetic.

    And then when they showed up, they could have redirected the reporters to like a nearby park or something, but they just stuck to it.


  • EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.

    Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.

    Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.