As someone who worked from home for almost a decade before being pulled into the office, I regularly got flack from my peers for it as well as older boomer types. IME, people who are forced into the office frequently feel a sense of “fairness” where they want everyone else to come in as well.

“If I have to be miserable, you should too”

I love how most of them are kinda risqué with the clothes partially removed but hiding everything, but then every once in a while it’s FULL NUDE or HERES SOME NIPPLES

There are also rumors about… other stuff.

In the early 2010s there was a guy who would park in downtown San Diego with a van covered in accusations against the US government. He’d stand outside the van with signs and tell anyone who would listen crazy stories about military experiments. I talked to him a few times and he was always going on science ethics, mind control research, and shadow plots to radically change the viewpoint of the American people.

After we talked, I had a good chuckle and assumed he was just a crazy loon.

However, some local journalists thought he seemed a bit too coherent for the far fetched nature of his claims, and spent some time digging into his past. He held a doctorate in mathematics from an ivy-league institution. When they interviewed his grad school advisors, they gushed about how he was the most brilliant student they’d ever had. They were able to confirm that he left academia to take a research position at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), where he held a Top Secret security clearance.

When interviewed, he told journalists that his research at SPAWAR revolved around dolphin consciousness. The military allegedly had him experimenting with mind control on live dolphins in the hopes that it would improve their utility.

He says the guilt over the unethical cetacean experiments drove him to blow the whistle on the program. Nobody believed him, and it devolved into him standing on the street hoping someone with a bit of power would take him seriously enough to bring national attention to the experiments.

Is any of his claims true? No idea. He was probably crazy. However, he has just enough credibility to make you think…. maybe he was trying to blow the whistle on something real.

Sadly, getting more places with less money is absolutely possible, but the key to making it happen is abandoning planetary science. It’s a shift from a paradigm where engineering exists to support planetary science efforts to engineering for engineering’s sake

I went on a first date with a girl who ordered a slice of “big Mac” cheeseburger pizza with McDonald’s secret sauce and American cheese

She wanted me to try a bite. I did. It was terrible. She loved it

No accounting for taste, I guess

Have you never heard of tunes?

Any idiot can make substantial software changes to almost any modern car with easily available inexpensive hardware. Look up Cobb, ECUtek, openflashtablet, Hondata, etc

You literally just plug it into a port and flash the software

Oldest F-16 I have seen in the air is no more than 50 years old. Oldest biplane I have seen flying was over 100 years old

Ergo, wood and canvas is the superior construction method

Western media trends towards the myths and legends from western culture? No shit

I mean, what else would you expect? That’s human nature. Kinda a wild thing to be complaining about

Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, military helicopters don’t actually run on kerosene or avgas

They run on snow-shovels of cash flung into the intakes as fast as you can manage

If we are talking realistically, star trackers in space are just good for orientation data, not position. Modern ring-laser gyros have low very drift rates. ICBM flight times are short.

Assuming the military cares to retrofit a modern IMU, I doubt a star tracker is the least bit necessary for a good navigational fix.

Perhaps we just need to generate a little excitement.

Gladiators worked nicely for the Romans, maybe we could generate similar hype with a reality show to choose the governor of each new province. I think “Love Island, Argentinian Governor Edition” would be a real hit.

Hard to argue we don’t have the appetite after spending our first 150 years conquering territory roughly double the size of the Roman Empire at its peak

Can you imagine the Italians running everything? Sure there’d be plenty of good pasta and wine worldwide but I doubt we’d stay productive with three-hour wine lubricated lunch breaks every day

I say the USA needs to have a proper go at an empire. People could serve in the legion (navy) for citizenship and everything

They collect a tithe of 10% of members’ income from the entire congregation. Most people accumulate less than 10% of their income as net worth annually

So yes, quite possibly they do.

Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

Starship Troopers

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Did you know they don’t eat garlic bread in Italy?

Ergo, “Italian Food” in America is better than food in Italy. They have to take us out as a matter of self defense

It certainly has the potential to be. Remember most of the costs related to fission are safety measures, plant decommissioning, and waste disposal. If we merely had to operate the reactor without concern for those issues, fission would be incredibly cheap. The fuel costs and basic technical requirements to operate a reactor are trivial in comparison.

Fusion produced 4x more energy per mass of fuel compared to fission, isn’t at risk of meltdown, and has the potential to produce negligible radioactive byproducts. In addition, it outputs helium which is an important and finite strategic resource.

Even if the cost of fuel goes up dramatically compared to uranium reactors, it might still outperform nuclear in a big way. However, sourcing He-3 from the moon might be a lot cheaper than you think. My day job is related to space resource utilization. Transporting resources off the surface of the moon could be quite economical once we reach a sufficient level of development.

The usual joke is that fusion is always “30 years away”, not 10. The reason is that fusion projects have historically faced an issue where funding is chronically below predictions

However, this past decade is seeing a number of promising changes that make fusion seem much closer than it ever has. Lawrence Livermore managed to produce net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. Fusion startups are receiving historical levels of VC funding. ITER is expected to produce as much as ten times as much energy as used to start the reaction. The rise of private space infrastructure is making helium-3 mining on the moon more possible than ever before.