Did NASA accept o ring leakage?
My understanding was that the o ring performance (failure) surprised engineers, and was determined to be a result of the exceptional (cold) launch conditions.... Or?

To be clear, the fact the o rings even existed was a result of congressional pork barrelling in the first place. The booster construction was originally designed to be one piece but by contracting it to some favored inland congressional district, it needed to be in 2 parts to fit rail transport.

Has this happened?
No?
Are you imagining something just for the sake of arguing against it?
Yes.
That is a strawman.

The WHO showed its value (or lack thereof) kowtowing HARD to Xi and China during the COVID outbreak, cheerfully parroting whatever narrative China wanted to promulgate.

This is even more ironic in the light that the US pays a grossly disproportional share of WHOs budget both in assessed and "voluntary" contributions - MULTIPLES of what China pays.

Sure, I think there should be a world health organization, but why should the US pay the lion's share?
It's funny how at the end of the day, all these organizations ... the US seems to paying the bulk of the tab.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Historical note: it made PERFECT sense that the US was the overwhelmingly dominant funder of all these sorts of organizations in 1946. Even in 1960, the rest of the world was still rebuilding while we enjoyed the massive economic advantage left us after WW2.
If you noticed: it's NOT "just after WW2" any more.
The US borrows 20-25% of every year's budget against the future, meaning every dollar we pay WHO, every dollar we use to fund the UN, 20-25% is being paid by a loan against future economic performance. That's asinine and needs to change, full stop.

I don't LIKE how Trump has done the things he's done but at the core, in many ways he's not wrong.

Personally, I think the fact that BILL GATES pays 50% more than EUROPE should be humiliating for that particular putative "world power". (To be clear, Germany - separately I believe - pays almost as much as "Europe", lol).

"Anyone describing me in a way that is entirely accurate but makes me sad" I will declare it an epithet and them stupid-heads for making me uncomfortable.

Is that about right, Corky Sherwood? Going to go home and bite your pillow in rage?

Bullshit x 1000.
If I see a painting in a book or a museum, and think, "cool, I could do my own take on that" the artist doesn't get one red cent.

"But" you say, "The museum or the book paid the author for that art".
They likely did.

But whether one argues that
a) the creator was already fully paid already and they get nothing more for later views, or
b) that their payment is backward-rationalized across all the potential viewers in the future (meaning what they're paid per-view asymptotically approaches zero ANYWAY), or
c) that - by posting their creation online where a LLM can get to it - they're VOLUNTARILY conceding free access to their work by human or electronic eyeballs, the distinction in this case being irrelevant ...at the end of the day, no, the author is NOT getting (in a real sense) anything (more) from me taking a look. Which ends up just like an LLM parsing it.

Oh no!
Some AC doesn't like meh posts!

Please someone get me some smelling salts, I think I'm getting the VAPORS.

What's wrong with using a perfectly descriptive and - aside from the people pretending they suddenly don't know what it means - widely understood label that accurately describes the worldview of ones' opponents, to describe those opponents?

If I say "Starfleet Academy is loaded with woke bullshit" that literally, accurately, and precisely describes all the hilariously bad directorial, narrative, casting/character design, and dialogue choices that make it hilariously awful.

If you were to use 'libertarian white male' as an epithet, to you that may be an epithet, to me I'm fine with that description even if it's factually inaccurate to some degree.

It's an adjective/adverb. Feels like it's the accuracy you're complaining about, not the epithet. That or your marshmallow emotional sensitivity.

Ultimately, all this will do is delay things a (now pretty tiny) bit until AI is indistinguishable from human art.

That's not far off. I agree it sucks but technological inflection points are like that. I think AI being shoehorned into every fucking thing is absurd, and am happy that businesses are maybe starting to recognize it at this stage for the snake-oil it is.

But the reality is that art - and apparently music - are now the low hanging fruit.

Let's be clear, I don't believe in some sort of intangible divine human aura that infuses person-created art. It's not magic.

AI builds and adapts its algorithm in the same way humans do - by absorbing others and copying, making permutations either in concept or execution that makes it "new" art and not just a copy. Humans (supposedly) do it with intent, AI by random iteration: in the end-product, the route to get there DOESN'T really matter.
And in both visual arts and music, the last 50y have seen artists widely adopt digital tools to simplify their creative work. Well, it turns out that these tools ALSO almost entirely enable AI - would we have any real threat from AI graphics if things still had to be drawn/painted with physical media? Would we have spotify AI playlists if current artists hadn't badly-blurred the line on the "creative" nature of sampling? Or if the music industry hadn't so reduced 'pop music' to (imo) a banal, repetitive, predictable near-algorithm in the first place, that AI couldn't easily co-opt that same algorithm to ape human artists?

Sure, "ban" AI art the same way digital photography contests "ban" edited pieces. You'll have as much success.

It's not an AI wearable pin.
AI can't wear anything.

It is a WEARABLE AI pin.

https://dictionary.cambridge.o...

As long as we're mobilizing resources to fix concentrated problem causers, shall we also dispense with the performative virtue-signal nonsense re banning plastic straws and drink-stirrers in the relatively well-behaved EU and North America to instead focus our efforts on the actual sources?

Per google-summary
"It's not just the often memed 8 rivers, but a relatively small number of rivers, primarily in Asia, are responsible for a huge percentage (around 80-95%) of river-borne plastic pollution entering the oceans"

"Than necessary" is really carrying a lot of weight here.

What the generation who'd just lived through WORLD WAR II (and potentially, I) considered 'acceptable risk' and what today's "don't get on your bike without a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, eye protection, and SPF100 sunscreen baby!" generation does probably were a fair ways apart.

I will wager a great deal that China's stance on risk is much, much closer to Apollo's than to Artemis'.

As the SAS puts it "Who dares, wins"

Progressives like to play semantic games, like words are magic. If they can just cast the right word-spell on you, you will be "convinced" to change your ways from an evil, corrupt not-enough-leftist to the side of Good Right and Never Having the Slightest Sense of Self Doubt.

Generally, a semantic argument with a leftist will start with their tabula rasa'ing their own common knowledge of vernacular, idiom, sarcasm, certainly humor, and a host of other commonly-used language features, basically anything aside from a ELI5 level of utter literalism.

cf the word "woke". It's 2025. Everyone with a passing familiarity with English (and a good number who barely even speak it) knows PRECISELY what the word 'woke' means.

In this specific case, in case there's a question, it was born on the left as a laudatory label for those sensitive to persistent racial injustices. Sort of like the way "social justice warrior" was originally a praiseworthy term.
Then, in a classic American Yankee Doodle fashion, the political opponents of those using the term as praise, started using it likewise as a label to mock and ridicule those who obsess over perceived racial injustice. At which point suddenly the first group didn't like the label so much.

Now, as with @justanotheroldguy anyone DARING to use the term must be a "moron or worse" (oh my heavens!) which is their offhand description of anyone who politically disagrees with them, later followed by racist, fascist, MAGA, or Nazi (it's really whatever insult is the worst they can imagine that day).

See how simple that is?

I've gotta be honest; whatever the Davos or Club for Growth (or whatever the fuck the cabal of global financiers is called today) insists we do, my instinct is to do the opposite.

The amount of time the media whinges about 1%ers and financial concentration and inequality, then CHEERFULLY reports what these the 0.00001%ers say "we should do" is fucking crazy.

The only people actually "getting something" out of what this band of sociopaths recommends are the highest-priced EU prostitutes working Davos during the summit.

Am I the only one seeing the hypocrisy here?

We have far too large and apparently-profitable marketplace living off the (non-productive) whiplash trading of financial instruments.

I'm generally a free-marketeer but we need to SLOW DOWN the system, not speed it up.

IIRC he advocated some sort of 100% penalty tax on any stock sold within a year of purchase.
COMPELLING the pump'n'dumpers to contemplate their trades against LONG TERM futures would greatly inhibit this lucrative, actually-valueless shadow economy.

"Interference with my phone is like giving me some brain damage," Clark told Wired. He expressed concern about the dumbphone movement, calling it "generally a retrograde step" and warning that as smartphone enmeshment becomes the societal norm, those who opt out risk becoming "effectively disabled within that society." Clark described this as "the creation of a disempowered class."

Well, if I wondered what the stupidest thing I'd read on the internet today was going to be, I'm pretty sure now.

Some nobody "philosopher" pulls some gestalt-mind-theory out of his ass about smartphones making us part of a meta-consciousness (mainly because he apparently has connection-anxiety) is ridiculous.

Haidt, et al, are doing really important, interesting, compelling work showing that for all the utility smartphones provide, devices like this are doing literal cognitive and emotional damage to young people. A vast array of negative social markers from loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide all SURGING coincidental with widespread access to smart phones.

Certainly young people are more vulnerable, but to suggest older people aren't being harmed in similar (but likely less deformative) ways would be unlikely.

Smart phones are FANTASTICALLY USEFUL. No question. But I can speak for myself that a good chunk the broad breadth of knowledge I used to have in my mind I now have to look up (that could be senility, too). Who even knows their kids phone numbers anymore?

To insist that people who want to get off the smartphone ecosystem are somehow impaired or dysfunctional itself flies in the face of a growing body of research the other way 'round.