Yup, I was not allowed to ask female candidates anything about family or children. I could get fired if I did.

There were a number of women I interviewed who were aware of this issue, and at some point, they would say something like "I know you aren't allowed to ask, or even react, but I am not having any more children, and will not have my family interfere with my work."

And for a lot of positions, like Team Lead, it is really important to have some idea about family matters, like are we going to have multiple team leads so that the woman can have children and take leave?

Point is, not being allowed to ask questions like that, while on the surface is protecting some sort of privacy, it also makes for a decision process that might favor male candidates in more critical positions.

I've never been in a position where I could take large swaths of time off. Some positions are like that. Even for accidents. Day after I got out of the Hospital for a broken ankle I got calls to come in. I told them I could come in the next day, but they had to understand I was quite drugged up, that I had on a bloody cast that I had to keep elevated.

Hell, the wife intercepted a call from them trying to get me to come in the day of my ankle operation. She's a professional too, but wouldn't tell me until a couple weeks later. She wasn't at all happy. note, that ended up being quite a kerfuffle. Wife was so pissed she was swearing at me, people at work were pissed, mostly at who asked me to come into work - but a little at me as well. One of our photographers grabbed a picture of me in shorts and T-shirt with my cast propped up. I think it might have been for evidence.

But even in more normal times, I'd get phone calls for some emergency while I was at the beach, or across the country. Just part of the territory.

Shit needs to get done, and team leads are often a pinch point.

Final note: I'm sure people in here will chime in calling me a psychopath, maybe a people pleaser. I know right?

And I got a 50 percent raise after 1 year in my present position, and on occasion, 100 percent more on the new rate. (I'm paid per project)

This whole looking at your social media to somehow find out how little money you will accept is just weird.

Employers do check on social media to see if you are disparaging them, like the woman who was fired from GameStop for posting a video ridiculing GameStop, their customers, and their products, finally showing the location of the store safe.

Or the Chili's employee who made a video about how stupid the customers were, for expecting good food and a clean rest room.

Or the Psychologist who made a twerking video while complaining about patients.

Or the nurse who took a dick pic of a well hung patient, then shared it with other nurses, and it made it onto the web (I think it was 4 nurses fired)

Or the woman who was posting her "Office Siren" journey on TikTok - an Office Siren is a woman who wears provocative party dress Club like clothing to work, and to get reactions from men, whether validation or getting men fired. She recorded her interactions with HR after men complained about her trying to provoke and probably get the men fired. Turned out HR and the company didn't like the clothing choice, the recordings with HR, or the unsafe workplace environment.

It isn't just women - I've seen men posting about getting fired for social posting, but it is never as outlandish or memorable.

All you do is show your level of ignorance. I've posted nought but facts, and you act like the special child screaming "Neener neener, neener I can't hear youuuuuu!" While holding his hands over his ears. If you cannot understand a launch envelope, and why Spacex even has expendable missions, well there ya go!

If it was only improving, not regressing.

Here's my recent W11 story.

For my Digital radio classes, I picked up a Lenovo Laptop. A decent one. I wanted to have something similar to the class member's computers. So after a couple weeks of dealing with the update problems of class members, I had my first. Despite my disabling OneDrive The update re-activated it, but I didn't know until the next class, when I found out that they moved all of the non-program files with program settings and multiple instance settings and other program related folders to OneDrive. And the programs stopped working. And somehow nuked my local account, which made for an unholy mess. I also needed to create a new way to run multiple instances of a program for people, and had to publish one for W10, and another for W11.

I had to uninstall OneDrive. My first classes were during Windows 7 times. Only took 2 sessions to get everyone running. The last W-11 class ended up taking the entire course devoted to figuring out why the student's computers worked last week, but not this week.I ended up switching to my Mac because the instructor should have a working system.

The whole point is that W11 is degenerating and falling apart. Updates are more malware than malware is. At least the bad guys let your computer function, while Microsoft can leave your computer non functional.

I call it security through bricking.

The next class that recently started is me teaching Linux first, then we'll move on to the digital radio matters. This is what was requested by my students.

I've never bought into poster's security through obscurity claims. There are plenty enough Linux machiners out there, as well as all the Apache servers - and let's not forget all those Raspberry Pis - to make a decent "attack force" for whatever the bad guys want to do.

As for the update process, here is a reason Windows forces their updates, and Linux and MacOS allow you to install them at your leisure. People don't avoid Linux and MacOS updates because the computer works afterwards. Windows? Well this article is all about yet another Windows update trainwreck

It's hard to do much with a single panel and only a few hundred pixels, but political cartoons? That's a pretty low bar... Usually you can at least draw silly caricatures of politicians, but this is just a mouse with some lame punditry. That's not even very impressive ANSI art.

Reminds me of this old fossil: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...

There are many aspects of a flight profile. Some are based on where you put the payload when it is in orbit. Others are the weight of the payload. As an example, 9's Payload for a GTO orbit is 5.5t when recovered on barge, and 8.3t for an expended mission. LEO orbit, 17.5 t if recovered, 22.8t expendable.

Just because some flight profiles can land at a pad or on a barge, does not mean that this happens in all cases.

References from paper :

A Survey of Launch Vehicle Recovery Techniques

Shraddha C.

Pankaj Priyadarshia

and Devendra Prakash Ghate

Institutes:

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, 695022, Kerala, India

Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, 695547, Kerala, India

A pretty good read if you have the academic credentials to access it. Clear, at a reasonably high level so not too deep in the weeds, with all manner of different flight profiles for many rockets - including StarShip. And a lot more. Otherwise, I think it is a little premature to claim the success of Starship. The Falcon's are good reliable Rockets. Starship might end up a tad problematic.

https://www.teslarati.com/spac... Forgive the link, it is a real rah-rah piece.

CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX has successfully expanded the envelope of orbital-class rocket recovery with its 50th booster landing, meaning that all Falcon boosters will have a better chance of safely returning to Earth from now on.

https://space-offshore.com/boo... "Falcon 9 missions may need to land on a droneship instead of RTLS due to the weight of the payload or the overall mission profile." I think you have academic access. Here is a good technical report on a lot of rockets that land after use. https://www.sciencedirect.com/.... You'll need academic credentials to download it. But it has a lot more info - and as part of the launch envelopes, there is constraint based on payload as well as direction. If you are going to land, there is a significant reduction in payload.

All of this is why I find it a little amusing that many among us find the most important aspect of launching these candles is the recovery.

tl,dr - where the rocket is going, what it is carrying has a big effect on recoverability. You can force things, reducing payload, or only sending the profiles to places where the first stage can make it back to the launch site, otherwise small extensions to allow it to make it back to a barge.

Because Orbital mechanics is pretty difficult for most to grok. She does have bona fides, Doctorate in Environmental Science and Masters in Physics.

So I'm pretty certain that she well knows that Orion is still in orbit around the earth.

But just think about it. We have people in here who think that not re-using a rocket is some sort of crime, not thinking how that first stage can only return if it is close enough to the launch site. That if you want to go to the moon or a planet, you just point your Rocket at it and it's balls to the wall time. Among other misguided notions.

All said, She is an administrator, and I believe her excitement when she said that, so I'm not quite so willing to call her a political appointee. I'd call it an audio typo.

If it was me, I might say it was the first time humans have left Low Earth Orbit since 1972. And since it is a matter of providing soundbites, I would save the Perigee and Apogee part for later. Perigee and apogee are the more interesting parts from my perspective.

This gets brought up fairly often. And yes, we did it before. Why do it all again?

The learning curve is why. I can't imagine there is anyone from the Apollo project left at NASA. So a whole new group of people have to learn how to make things work. All those people sitting at their consoles are learning, re-learning after a fashion, what the Engineers learned in the 1960's.

It's all good!

A lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding that returning a first stage to the launch site puts a huge constraint on where in orbit you can place that rocket's payload.

You can add a bit of flexibility if you return a rocket to a barge in the ocean - but not much. And when you use a barge, you are eating hard into whatever savings there are in capture and refurb.

The first stage has to have enough fuel to make it back to the landing pad or barge. If the launch envelope takes it out of that range, it's just another disposable rocket. As an indicator, people will notice I only mentioned the first stage. Because there's no good way to recover the second. The rocket is way too far downrange, the earth is rotating. There aren't many landing sites at that point.

Your assignment: Find out why reusable rockets are only useable for very specific launch envelopes. If you use them out of that launch envelope, there are just as disposable as the rockets you think are some sort of complete waste. You are a really smart guy seems like you could teach us all about this stuff.

I understand completely. Many who are orgasming about a Woman and a "Black man because it checks off a box do not like White males, and want less of them doing things. Racism is in no way restricted to the dreaded white male. The people who would call themselves inclusive aer every bit as racist and sexist.

After all, when people say we need more women and people of color in a profession, they are exactly saying they want less White men.

P.S. Race is exactly the biggest social construct ever invented. I'll believe that human races exist when speciation happens, when a human from one group cannot mate and produce offspring.

Now just between you me, and the fencepost, If we're talking about all that, we could skip a lot of the hassle, and use a hybrid approach. Break Martian ice into Hydrogen and Oxygen components, then utilize Alumina to produce solid Rocket Boosters, using the perchlorates that constitute around 1 percent of the surface area of Martian "soil". Some experiments have been performed using the 60/40 mix of Calcium and Magnesium Perchlorate. looks pretty promising. https://engineering.purdue.edu... Even makes these cool red, white, and blue flames.

Solid boosters and H-O main engines.

All of this is of course hypothetical. There needs to be a reason to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, where people are born, reproduce and die there.

I support sending people to Mars to do research, but that's a whole different setup than the almost inconceivable amount of work needed for the Muskovian pipe dream. In this more practical vision, the return trip materials would be transported separately and in place before the astronauts ever landed. Assembled onsite then come home. It is still an incredible effort, but perhaps a thousandth of the Brave New World plans that still require that reason for all the effort and expense.

What is the reason for a permanent human presence on Mars? Almost certainly living in a cave, and the major industry will be making the fuel and infrastructure to leave Mars. After that, creating the pressurized environment, the air to breathe the water to drink, and the food to sustain life. Oh, the irony.