"Amateur hour" is basically their theme. They were swept in on a wave of distrust for people who know what they're talking about. They were elected to tear down Chesterton's fence, even (and especially) the parts holding in the face-eating leopards.
To mix the metaphors further, they (the politicians and their supporters) fancy themselves the kind to dream of things that never were and ask why not. Why not have a war in Iran? You won't know until you give it a try.
Meatbags are versatile but really, really expensive. They require a really vast support system, and it has to be highly redundant because the cost of a loss is so high.
You can send up a lot of less versatile bots for the price of one meatbag.
I don't think Starship has gotten to orbit yet. It's gotten to altitude but not speed. That's a very big deal, because slowing down from that speed is a massive challenge unto itself.
Orbit is scheduled for the test after next, if all goes well.
They don't really need Starship just for orbit. They've already got ships that get to the ISS and back. They really do need to get Starship to orbit or their plans really will be hosed.
>I don't think Starship has gotten to orbit yet. It's gotten to altitude but not speed.
I'm honestly kinda curious how you came to this thinking after watching the launches, like the last Flight 11 [0]? They have the velocity listed at all times right there in the bottom corner. It's peaking over 7.4 km/s, seems pretty clear they were stopping just barely short and maintaining a ballistic path on purpose exactly as they said they would in the flight plan they filed ahead of time with the FAA for deorbit safety purposes, not because they couldn't have technically squeezed out another few hundred m/s and different trajectory if that was the goal. It's a hardware rich program, and their testing sequence has been reasonably careful about controlling the space of out of bounds scenarios (on the scale of rocketry). What has lead you to believe that they can do 7.4+ km/s with Raptor 2 and Block 2 but v3 won't be able to do ~7.8 (or that they couldn't have done it with v2 for that matter)?
AFAIK they are just cutting the engines off some seconds before they would achieve full orbit, and they have already demonstrated deorbut burns. So I don't think a proper orbit will be a big hurdle for SpaceX.
We (the US) put a high bar on it because the Crown was using it as a way to attack political enemies and we didn’t want to follow suit. It is such a high bar in this country that it is effectively dead law, as nobody has been tried for it since soon after WWII, and very very few people have been convicted, and of those several had their convictions overturned.
The current administration does, however, throw the term around against its political enemies quite a bit, as have people in general pretty much throughout history.
The Constitution put a pretty high bar on a lot of things. They put an enormous thumb on the scale of the status quo, which benefits some and harms a lot of others. Especially since the proponents of the status quo get to now put their hands on their hearts and say "gosh, I'd like to fix that injustice, but the holy Constitution means I just can't."
You don't think starting a war apparently to distract the media, then lying about peace talks solely to drain money from the markets is treasonous?
How about when combined with all the tariffs, which seem designed to be market levers and/or just vindictive acts?
Pushing businesses to the edge, plunging people into poverty, so your cronies and you can drain money from the stock market?
Or taking bribes using crypto? Or ...
They all seem treasonous - actively harming your own country to enrich yourself.
Even if you don't find them treasonous, you have to admit they're in contravention to the emoluments clause; so Congress should still impeach the evil bastard.
And we haven't even started on his crimes beyond the simple financial ones from the last year!
Treason means something very specific in the US, intentionally. It’s one of only a couple of criminal acts defined in the constitution.
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
So no. None of those things is treason. This administration throws the word around loosely, like many authoritarian regimes, but the founders had direct experience with a dictator who used treason charges as a political weapon and tried to ensure that wouldn’t happen here.
I do feel as if threats to apply the crime of treason while are, if not treasonous, crimes themselves. Threats are a criminal act, and there is a long precedent to disallow "I wasn't really gonna do it" as a defense.
For the administration as a whole... Honestly, as disgusted as I am, I can't think of a case where a significant fraction of the country looked at a treasonous action and said "yeah, I'd vote for that again".
When his supporters turn against him he will be impeached. Until then, it's just the suicide pact called the Constitution.
The personalization component takes this a step above. Making something very broadly appealing is one thing. Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.
So if social media removed personalization from their algorithms and only applied them broadly across large demographic groups you'd be fine with them? (Genuine question I'm curious)
Maybe. It's hard to know what kind of world that would result in.
I could well see it being so much less effective as to not be a problem. Or maybe they'd be even more effective, and if we caught them explicitly knowing that they were harming children, it would still potentially be tortious.
This would be great, yeah. Disable infinite scrolling and page caching (so that you’re not infinitely scrolling horizontally) and video autoplay too. Also add opt-out time limits and breaks.
Imagine a feed that actually just ends when you run out of posts from people you follow instead trying to endlessly keep your attention by pushing stuff it thinks you might like
If I've read all of the posts from my friends I would prefer to not see anything else, but that doesn't maximize engagement for ad platforms so
But the psychotic President was elected by popular vote, pushing the psychosis back to that level.
Perhaps one could say that this psychosis was introduced by people who were not themselves psychotic, but rationally pursuing their own goals spreading propaganda. That propaganda broke the ability of a large swath of the public to tell the difference between truth and fiction.
As I understand it, a heat pump is an AC unit that can be driven backward. In heat mode, they are air conditioning the already-cold outside, which works as long as the compressor can chill the refrigerant lower than the ambient outside air.
They even use the same refrigerant, usually R-410A and R-454B.
To mix the metaphors further, they (the politicians and their supporters) fancy themselves the kind to dream of things that never were and ask why not. Why not have a war in Iran? You won't know until you give it a try.
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