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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Slight correction, he only drove about 30 minutes. Wikipedia says he left Antioch IL which is 5 miles south of the state border to go murder protesters.

    Only way he really went out of his way is if he road the Metra commuter train from Antioch to Kenosha since each are the terminus of different Metra routes, and this was probably outside of normal Metra operating hours. Plus he doesn’t strike me as someone who would take a 5 hour train ride to travel 20 miles

    Note: I just picked the Metra stations in both Antioch and Kenosha for the below map. I don’t care enough to bother getting more accurate than that








  • I support their rights, they are people

    the genitals only mader in bed

    These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity

    I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”

    What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society



  • I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”

    Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!



  • I have mixed feelings on this front. On one hand, a locked down computer encourages either extreme compliance (so no learning how to do new things) or encourages the kid to figure out a bypass which might be far worse than if they had an unmanaged computer to begin with.

    Right now my oldest isn’t reading yet so I have controls primarily to enforce a time limit particularly for dopamine-heavy media apps, and to prevent how much she can accidentally do by clicking without a clue of what she’s clicking on and just clicking the colored button. I’ll play it by ear for how much control is necessary to ensure my kids can develop to be the best adults they can be. The one thing I’m not looking towards is that my oldest is only about 4 years away from the window where I’ll need to have “The Talk” with her, because many men in this world suck.



  • As a kid I was effectively given unlimited screentime, and that definitely shaped me into adulthood for better and for worse. My wife has severe insomnia so she often sleeps until 11am, and my 4 year old always gets up around 7:30am so before she started school we setup an old phone with a managed google account with a 2.5 hour screentime limit, and a 30 minute limit for the YouTube Kids app (grandma got her hooked on YouTube of course so no putting that cat back into the bag) to encourage more enriching content (I preinstalled the PBS Kids apps, as well as a number of age-appropriate games) She’s at an age where she’s extremely impressionable and without locking things down will end up installing things by clicking ads or watching weird stuff she probably shouldn’t be watching.

    In the near future my plan is to gift my 4 year old an old ewaste laptop I acquired off a friend and a Minecraft account since she’s really been getting into Minecraft when she gets to play on my or my wife’s computers, and I’ll probably play it by ear for when to raise the parental controls, but right now she’s simply not ready for unrestricted internet access. I probably won’t limit screentime on the computer other than telling her its time to do something else when she’s been on the computer for too long, but we’ll play it by ear.


  • Starlink doesn’t monitor the weather, in fact it could actively impede that soon given the amount of frequency noise they’re creating

    Correct, and I wasn’t talking about Starlink, I was talking about the various GPS, climate and weather satellites spaceX has launched recently (and that’s just the missions I can remember off the top of my head), and their capabilities to continue launching satellites for any purpose at an incredibly cost effective and potentially less destructive manner than with single use rockets

    Plus this isn’t just a matter of SpaceX good/bad. SpaceX proved 98 times this year alone that reusable rockets work, something that before them was theoretically possible but appeared to be too technically complex and too costly to be a worthwhile endeavor. Now other space agencies have a proven model to point to when choosing whether or not to invest in their own reusable rocket designs. The US Federal Government could even simply compel SpaceX to license it’s designs and software for reusable rockets if it felt so inclined

    Oh and you’ve moved the goalposts in your Elon-hate because first you were complaining about rockets using fossil fuels instead of being electrically powered and now that I’ve pointed out how uninformed that is you’re complaining about Starlink, which is unrelated to the original point. Yes I agree, Elon is an ass to say the least, and Starlink poses a hell of a danger to the world’s ability to continue studying anything in the sky. But let’s be honest with ourselves about what we’re talking about and the facts of the technologies we’re discussing.

    If your argument is simply that “the CO2 emissions from accessing orbit aren’t worth the global services that they enable” guess what that’s an opinion, which everyone is entitled to. But let’s form these opinions based on an accurate understanding of the industry you’re talking about


  • Bruh, global spaceflight contributes less than 0.01% of global CO2 emissions and enables climate resiliencey through weather and climate monitoring satellites, plus technological skunkworks (many of the challenges in the microclimate of a space station happen to be the exact same challenges of the macroclimate of the Earth, plus there’s a proven path of technology developed for space directly improving lives on the ground here on earth)

    If you can build an orbital launch vehicle that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, please do! Seriously that is a greatly needed technology and you’ll have earned the wealth and fame that would bring you. But until then I’ll take the next best thing which is having a space program and compensating for it’s (absolutely tiny compared to basically all other industries) emissions in a larger global climate plan over not having a space industry



  • The problem with fossil fuels is that they’re incredibly energy dense. Gasoline has about 12000 Wh/kg of energy density compared to about 250 Wh/kg for lithium ion.

    Space is hard, and the paradox of launching a rocket is that you need a lot of fuel to fuel an engine for long enough to escape the Earth’s atmosphere and achieve orbit. All of that fuel adds weight so you need more fuel to compensate for more weight, which adds more weight meaning more fuel. Burnable fuels have the advantage of depleting as you burn it, so as you get higher your rocket gets lighter and therefore requires less fuel to pilot.

    In case that’s not enough challenge, in the vacuum of space there’s no great way to propel a vehicle on electrical power alone. Wheels ain’t gonna work and neither will propellers, and while solar sails appear to work, they offer such incredibly low specific impulse (thrust basically) that realistically no manned mission that isn’t a generation ship can use solar sails

    So in short, space is going to require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we as a species can find the technology to make a fully reusable and renewable space program at some point, but until then we’ll have to burn chemicals get vehicles off of this planet.

    Additionally, right now, until another organization actually builds and launches reusable space vehicles (and can demonstrate the competence and safety record) SpaceX is the world leader in reusability. SpaceX is one of two members of the exclusive “has relaunched a space vehicle” club, shared only with NASA’s space shuttle program which ended over a decade ago