DDE

In general, don't be ashamed. So long as you highlighted to your immediate superior that you're short of work at the moment, you're entirely moral in watching cat videos on company time. It's your boss's problem to keep you occupied.

So the Rebel Moon 2 trailer has dropped and word is, it looks as bad as the first film. You know, some years ago I thought the industry fatcats are going to try and cook up another Star Wars now that the real ones are hollowed out and dying. I just didn't expect them to dip into literal Sequel Trilogy reject pile and fetch someone whose previous (IIRC) big-budget project required bringing Joss Whedon out of the doghouse. Oh, well, the backstage drama and economics are better than the movies they write these days.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/28/energy-hungry-tiktok-data-centre-ukraine-ammunition-production-nammo-norway

Thomas Stafford (commander, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project) dead at 93. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/science/space/thomas-p-stafford-dead.html

But also unproven, as algorithmic manipulation nearly always is. It feels like USG can't face the reality that TikTok's target age groups hates them that much without any help from the Chinese, and their own attempts at psyops either fail or are actually amplifying the message.

Given that Bezos is on the march against SpaceX starting about mid-February and word of ULA acquisition, I don't expect him to be stopped here either.

I really think it's just data wars. I had to look into Amazon and Alibaba these couple of days and it struck me how much Amazon just looks like a desperate attempt to substitute Alibaba and thus prevent ReD cHiNeSe InVaDeRs from getting detailed data on the transactions of American businesses. Alibaba famously used this data in lieu of normal financial reporting to produce credit ratings and push SME microloans.

Sounds like he dodged a bullet there. That's, pardon me, gaslighting. (Although I may be spoiled by a largely toxicity-free workplace where I pretty much adore everyone... from a distance) What if I told you about all the tax avoidance and money laundering going on in restaurants where I... Wait, did I tell you the COVID-era blanket moratorium on health, safety and fire inspections is still in place Russia-wide because of the war? Yeah.

Expanding from beyond the Russian spaceflight thread... Anton Frolov, The Downfall of the Neuronet "And who knows what the warrior is? What technology will come along next?" Comments be like: "Butlerian Jihad?" "BUTLERIAN JIHAD!" "Omnissiah be praised..."

I believe this was initially "sold" as an anti-COVID sanitary measure. But, as always, it's just cost-cutting with a smile. Is it? Forcing you to have more first dates or having to shell out to impress sounds like a sleezy customer engineering strategy. Plus, you're not producing content for social media and free marketing for the venue if your smartphone is in your pocket. Post at least four photos of every course to Instagram, or else.

Shuttle (and Apollo?)* astronauts were all trained to drive their emergency escape M113, to their absolute delight * I believe the Shuttle crew just left no space for a driver, but this wouldn't be an issue for Apollo

I think you're conflating two big groups. The first are trolls. Now, back in the day, trolling was a difficult task. One had to switch apparent political alignments like a T-1000 to get under the target's skin. This day, however, the battle lines are very clearly drawn, so one can blanket-posture as, in most cases, a far-righter sharing the various degrees of conspiracy theories, although the "breadtubers" also produce some madm... people from among their audience (and back in the Runet, we've got our own Reds vs royalists culture war that's kind of orthogonal to the Anglophone one). Point is, they don't necessarily believe the stuff they spout, it's entertainment and roleplaying, although oh gee can it be a political rabbit hole. The other group are actual nutters. Now, here's the problem: they don't gain validation directly from your enragement, as trolls do, they gain validation through elitism. The conspiracy nutters and their equally delusional counterpart, the uncritical mainstream enforcer, are in the game because they believe themselves the lone heroes holding off the hordes of ignorant rabble and the sneaky and nefarious powers-that-be to get the message out. Therefore, all their internet posting is actually really important... but at the same time they don't really care about interaction with anyone.

"Pardon my newest friend. He's dead tired."

So it's more or less understood that tooth fillings have potential as accidental (oh my gosh, that's terrible) AM radio receivers. Can perceptible sound be induced or by a solar storm (catastrophic magnitudes included), or am I a failure at physics?

Il-20 is no pretty thing but its name hides an ancient secret that is far more visually offensive

"Gagara" is a loon. Yuri Loony

90th birthday

PowerPoint slides. Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

None shall pass

If you don't give her a bouquet of roses, you don't love her. If you do, you're profligating the family budget. This year the roses go at $3+ each. Flower sellers across the post-Soviet space be like:

Which wasn't an unreasonable requirement. At the time everyone was exploring how to increase effectiveness of short bursts, and the Soviets ended up with AN-94 precisely by the same logic. It's just that by then they'd largely stopped chasing new cartridges (for assault rifles, specifically - the contemporary attempts at replacing the 7.62x54R were wild, like the 10x54R discarding sabot flechettes, but they never involved a new gun).

Fact 1: bullet casings are a thing because they act as an expendable way to seal the breech. Thus all caseless rifles keep having serious obturation issues - the gas keeps leaking through the breech. Fact 2: the prototype German G11 caseless rifle with its exotic action was quite mechanically complex, and so its plastic hull was made virtually airtight to avoid dirt ingress; it had a pressure relief valve due to the issue above Fact 3: the immediate reaction products of gun propellants are rich in CO and, when concentrated, are quite explosive; and facts 1 and 2 have ensured that this concentration inside a recently fired G11 rifle was rather high Fun fact: the G11 was, among all the many other issues, liable to explode in your hands P.S. the G11 bombed so bad the British were able to easily buy Heckler und Koch afterwards

Apparently you just get more crime and a spike of attractiveness for Commercial Leisure buildings.

...am I on a mission to actively sabotage the entire workspace?

I never quite got a feel for how the day/night cycle worked. Especially because the "inertia" of the city seemed to be too great, and the changes wouldn't get noticeable before morning came.