DDE

Tonight's solar storm has painted the sky all the way to Southern Russia.

Does he? The admin has a vested interest in embracing such claims. Don't know what's worse: teachers who "can't do anything to stop the bullying" or overactive admin... you likely get both anyway.

It's not the popularity per se, it's the format. Everybody lamented that Twitter's post lengthimit made it a network exclusively for sniping and hot takes, and the imagery-based networks are worse. Perhaps I wouldn't fare too bad with my three feline meme generators, but I just don't understand communicating that way. I need my ranting space!

We're moving within the office, so I decided to clear out my locker a bit. Dug up the department roster from early 2020 at most. Before COVID. Before the war. Somehow, everybody got sand into their eyes.

I think this is a canard. Whether cost-plus is wasteful or not depends on what the "plus" is and what you're allowed to charge as "costs". A mildly off-topic discussion but one I've been privy to is the cost-plus pricing of the Russian defense industry... which usually drives manufacturers to sell at below costs. The legally mandated maximum "plus" of 20% (and in practice it's usually around 5%) is very quickly eaten away: for example, you're only allowed to include the region's average salary in your costs, and, well, good luck hiring good engineers, craftsmen and managers at average wage. As far as I hear, it's very similar for US DoD subcontractors lower on the food chain.

Within a large enough corporation, budgets start working the same way. It's less about the private-public dichotomy (after all, the private sector worships the ground NASA project management experts walk on, or at least used to at some point) and more about recalcitrance or lack thereof. NASA don't have in its classical, overt fashion of "I outsourced building the launchpads to companies I own, whoops" but they certainly have to obey a ver6tain established notion for distribution of pork among constituencies (i.e. companies), et cetera et cetera, sometimes hidden under the veneer of "using off-the-shelf tech" and sometimes utterly blatant. We see similar results in the failed cost-cutting in ESA and Roscosmos. New Space gets to establish this distribution, or, as in case of SpaceX, vertically integrate. Nevertheless, as to thread topic, I am very, very doubtful. It's a limited and unstable source of funding. Also, it will be completely shut down by the planetary protection people.

When RAF Bomber Command formed the dedicated dambuster squadron (the 716th) for Operation CHASTISE, the other squadrons were scoured for their best pilots, and their ground crews. Nobody specified best ground crews So the other squadrons showed their appreciation for the top-secret outfit by sending them absolute sloths, drunkards, pregnant auxiliaries and the like.

...aaand we're back to +10°C and above. So long, winter.

Death wave? At some point your initial generation of workers become seniors. Almost all at once! You have to pace your expansion so that they don't.

...but you can still bulldoze their homes arbitrarily.

Sorry for posting a VK screenshot of a Twitter screenshot of a Reddit post, but... ahem... as well as multiple clothing layers.

Are older rocket engines with development costs already amortized still more expensive than new engines? Assuming we stick to the same propellant pair, perhaps. (Arising from an off-site discussion how everyone except SpaceX is too obsessed with saving costs and time by using legacy tech... which doesn't seem to work)

OK, the purge has damaged Korolev's jaw claimed yesterday's launch from Plesetsk. The main payload has turned up in the catalogues as Cosmos 2570. Still presumed to be a Lotos-S. Also, this is the Yenisei superheavy launch vehicle, in the flesh, so to speak. ROS's chief designer boasted yesterday that they've produced over a thousand chapters of digital documentation... https://t.me/roscosmos_press/1600

Apparently the Russian KSP slang for kerbals is "cucumbers". Learnt in Roscosmos chat where everyone whined about Astronomy being dropped as a school subject, and I advocated compulsory KSP in schools instead.

"MY profits, OUR losses" Free market capitalism my a... Why does everything that has to do with subsidized housing (and state guarantees are a stealth subsidy) always turns into such a quagmire?

Eh, don't forget the Asian-Russian financial crisis and the Dotcom bubble. Basically, I get the feeling the politico-financial planning window has been shrinking relative even to what it was at the time of Vietnam.

Yep, first snow, and it's stayed thus far.

To be honest I believe there was one case where S-400 was reported by Russian sources in the tactical role... but yeah, Bild gonna Bild. Just an example, they bit the bait on a Zinoviev letter: https://www.titanic-magazin.de/news/miomiogate-juri-kuehnert-bild-und-titanic-9482/ First two videos near Svatovo dated late February 2023. *shrug* Every report indicated it was a CAESAR 155 mm shell... granted, they were also utterly obsessed with the state of Rogozin's rectum.

They have emulators in Tula, up to and including a certain AEK-906 (i.e. Konstantinov was involved) Nosorog (Rhino). The ever-so-memeable 12.7x55 mm revolver also uses it. ...in all two known specimens, of course.

Aleksandr Konstantinov, one of the weapons designers who tried to unseat the Kalashnikov rifle during the 5,45 mm rifle trials, had apparently heard that lowering the recoil axis reduces mizzle climb... so he went all. Sources like Popenker claim this was actually built and submitted:

Getting society to agree to a mass euthanasia program for broad swathes of "unproductives" and "undesirables" is cheaper than shipping excess people off-world. But I concur There's a theory that there will be a rebound afterwards, and that it may already be happening in France thanks to underappreciated natal policies, but it's mostly just a theory... And even Africa is gradually peaking.

Ostensible recordings dated January 2023. Senator Rogozin was in no longer place to further such plans. It seems like a way to get a massive blast without escalating to another option that was somewhat widely discussed ahead of the spring-slash-summer-slash-we-no-longer-disclose-the-date Ukrainian counteroffensive - tacnukes. Even then, a Soyuz offers few advantages over an extant ICBM. Frankly, I think he just saw one of those robotic MT-LB kamikazes and thought "cool".

My instigating quip was in fact a result of that video. Think I've heard the myth before, but only in passing.

Ah, DLC fodder. As expected.

Not.