Aerospace engineer, history enjoyer, Lutheran, avid board gamer, and all-around geek.
Way Out In The Desert, CA
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Alright, I'm finally going to collect all of my military history book threads into one master thread-of-threads to pin for easy access...
Starting with, of course, the Franco-Prussian War.
In my efforts to understand WWI, I have decided that I need to go back further. So, this is next on my docket. Anyone read it already?
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Most controversial stories are like this now. There are completely distinct narratives that deliver a distinct set of facts.
It's bad and it's getting worse
I've stayed far away from the radioactive Cornell discourse, but I do want to make one meta-observation.
I spend a lot of time in different corners of the internet, and the two 'sides' of the Cornell story are living in separate universes. Entirely different facts, wildly separate narratives. Spend time in different social media spaces and it's like they're describing two totally distinct incidents.
There's almost no shared reality whatsoever, and that strikes me as really dangerous.
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This is why militaries used to hang, rather than shoot, criminals like this: It stripped them of their soldierly dignity and made an unsightly spectacle that was harder to admire or respect.
Shooting was for otherwise honorable soldiers who had merely gone astray or failed in their duty, and offered a way (by facing the bullets bravely and accepting one’s punishment) to reclaim some honor.
I’m torn on this.
Not that he is being executed. It’s the closest to justice that the victims and their families can receive.
What I don’t like is that we are setting him up to be a martyr for his evil cause and those that are our enemies.
If I got to choose, I would have already fitted him with a pair of cement shoes and would dump him into the ocean in an undisclosed location.
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🧵
this is probably obvious to others, but the intuition i get coming away from this thread is that the eurozone is effectively a financial suicide pact, and it's likely that immigration policies have fallen the way they have because EU leadership sees that falling birthrates are baked in already, and thus the only thing that might possibly save their asses is importing a labor pool to shore up the welfare state
somewhere along the way they missed that it's not only enough to expand the labor pool - they have to grow the number of _net contributors_ - but given how often politicians confused a thing with it's signifier ("working age people" vs. "people working") it's no surprise they're failing
While it lacks the "sex appeal" of nons rioting & burning down beautiful new schools, the biggest news in France has been the financial headlines. France is bankrupt, with annual interest on the national debt being 3X greater than the real growth in GDP. No way out.
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There is a Bible School in LaGrange. I knew a guy who attended that and while there airsoft was popular with the male students. So they all went out with the kit and camo and had a little airsoft match. Not considering that there was a missile silo over the hill.
The Air Force boys are out servicing missile silos again on Highway 88 going towards La Grange, Wyoming. They’re fully armed this time, but no Humvees the soldiers are stationed around the silo perimeter along the highway in the back of pick up trucks. Weird.
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It’s possible that the First Space War has already started and they’re just not telling us.
LeoLabs has detected another debris-generating event in orbit. This is the latest in a series of events we've seen over the last 6 months. Together, they point to a worrying trend for space safety and security, and underscore the critical need for persistent sensing.
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committing emotional terrorism by wrapping copies of Bell Curve and Camp of the Saints in this getup and planting them in unsuspecting bookstores
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Replacing tactile physical buttons with laggy touchscreens just so you have to navigate three sub-menus while driving 75 mph on a dark highway to adjust the defroster is the single worst safety downgrade in modern automotive history.
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Unironically this is the result of changing their logo
I am sure will be insightful as Alan's work always is, but it gives me pause about ordering anything from OUP ever again. buymeacoffee.com/ayjay/the-l…
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One of the more disturbing elements of the world of Fahrenheit 451 is that the classics still exist, they’ve just been wholly rewritten to remove anything that makes them interesting or challenging. Our addiction to a fully frictionless existence is going to kill us.
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For the record, this is why I am close to giving up on the public library. The fixation on modern books coupled with publishing’s fixation on representation of everything *except* my family leaves my children baffled by books that they have no frame of reference to understand.
My kindergartener went to the school library for the first time at school yesterday and the book he checked out is about the importance of the first day wearing your hijab. He said he thought it was a book about an adventure on the ocean.
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We really need this to work, and others to join.
I see a lot of naysayers and hate when any newcomer tries to break into defense industrial areas that have big moats around legacy companies. Sure, skepticism on execution is warranted, but we as a country really REALLY need this to work. We are in a very dangerous shipbuilding deficit and any help is good and so are new perspectives on how to fix the problem. Lots of money tied up in all this and competition where there has been basically little for a long time is a great thing. Anduril has a lot to lose if they fuck it up, so let’s hope they succeed along with our other established yards.
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Since your profile indicates you are a former NASA, I thought I would flag a few points:
1. I personally pay for all costs associated with the fleet of F-5 aircraft, be that airshows, NFL flyovers, or NASA workforce incentive flights. The rest of the NASA fleet, including F-15s, F/A-18s, and T-38s, requires currency flights to maintain pilot proficiency. Would you prefer they do that over the desert where no one can see them?
2. Obviously, the first A in NASA is Aeronautics, and throughout our history we have taken NASA X-planes to airshows. In fact, a lot of my strategy at NASA draws upon our proud history. We took the X-31 all the way to the Paris Air Show in 1995, the SR-71 was featured at the Edwards Air Show and Oshkosh in 1997, and the X-29 flew at the Dayton and Oshkosh airshows in 1990. It is part of our history, and do you know why? Because inspiring the next generation of engineers, scientists, researchers, pilots, and astronauts is part of what we do. It always has been.
3. It is also our nation’s 250th birthday and the year we returned NASA astronauts to the lunar environment. We are returning to the Moon, building a Moon base, and this is a great time to get out, engage with the public, and tell the NASA story.
x.com/NASAAdmin/status/21072…
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My days of not trusting AI answers are certainly coming to a middle. Gemini just flat-out hallucinated descriptions and links to multiple requests for, amusingly, comic strips on age of sail naval history.
People insisting hallucinations are a thing of the past are nuts.
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I do totally get wanting to go in blind, but we really need a way to distinguish actual major spoilers with just getting some basic information about the gist of something.
Found out that there’s a supposed “twist” that is revealed in the first 20 min that changes the entire premise of the film that is not shown in the trailer. I didn’t mind getting this “spoiled” even though I’m extremely uptight about spoilers. A twist in the first 20 min of a movie that’s over 2 hours long is just not a spoiler, I’m sorry. And it’s ridiculous that they didn’t include it in their advertising. They have no one else to blame but themselves if word-of-mouth doesn’t overcome this absurdly self-imposed hurdle.
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"The Swiss voted for bigger pensions.
For it to pass, they must now explicitly vote again the higher taxes to fund it."
I'm not a big fan of referendum but I must admit forcing citizens to vote on a tradeoff is a vast improvement over most political debates
The Swiss voted for bigger pensions
For it to pass, they must now explicitly vote again the higher taxes to fund it
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