TeknOShEeP
2d ago
ThisIsSin covered it pretty well, the only thing I would add is GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.
Karl, on the other hand, at least by going off social media posts, rather vocally and militantly left wing, and not in a family friendly way either. (Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).
TeknOShEeP
4d ago
Jimmy John's has superior cold sandos to Jersey Mikes, but no one can top the Big Kahuna cheesesteak from Mikey.
TeknOShEeP
4d ago
I do, but boomer-fuddville is convenient to me, so if i need to zero a scope or try a new build I can be in an out in under an hour instead of making it a half-day excursion. I make a point of loudly calling out all of these violations to the RSO, and they are pretty good about clamping down on it, but they shouldnt have to intervene in the first place.
TeknOShEeP
4d ago
I think that was definitely true for the first Trump admin, one of the many personnel problems it had. But my reading of the tea leaves is that Vance is absolutely being groomed as Trump's successor- he is being sent out to do the sort of foundational policy making that you wouldn't fob off on the average do-nothing VP. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference is one of biggest moments in international relations of the decade, fundamentally changing the relationship between the US and EU, and full of lines that I would imagine Trump himself would have loved to drop, and yet JD is the one doing it.
Also, Vance is low key probably the smartest (in terms of IQ) major figure in American politics today, which is always a plus for his future prospects.
TeknOShEeP
4d ago
children were born without marraige
Er, you mean "within marraige"?
TeknOShEeP
5d ago
Yeah, I know exactly what type of gun owner the plaintiff would be, and its not good. One of those times when you wish this would be kept quite and the family could step in with a quiet word.
TeknOShEeP
5d ago
On the one hand, this is a horshit denial of 2nd ammendment rights based on bullshit case law that actively makes everyone involved less safe (its the same debate being had right now in the pilot community- when you punish people for seeking mental health care, no one is going to seek mental health care). The courts should be fucking ashamed, and the justices involved run out of town on a rail.
On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.
A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.
TeknOShEeP
22d ago
Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage"
I would agree- arbitrage has a very specific technical definition that is not remotely equivalent to "free money". It gets abused often and is frequently used in get rich quick training course scams and the like.
You can execute an arbitrage strategy in gambling, but its much more likely to pop up in things like sports betting where you could buy the opposite sides of a result at different books under the right odds, ensuring a profit regardless of outcomes. Bookies are generally competent enough to avoid this situation though.
TeknOShEeP
25d ago
Okay, but let me turn the argument around- prove that the launches are not making a profit. You say they are just setting money on fire. I say that is a ridiculously high number of launches to just burn piles of money on, it's an order of magnitude more than their nearest commercial competitor, and if they were not making money there is no way that even Musk could bankroll it. A handful of launches to prove concepts? Sure, its an investment. But you need paying customers within about your first 5 or 10 rockets, and you need to be making money not too long after that.
We have examples of what vanity space companies funded by billionaires look like- Virgin Galactic is one, Blue Origin another. SpaceX does not look very much like these companies. It does look a lot more like actually profitable commercial space launch entities like ULA and ATK, except with what appears to be far superior design and operations.
I professionally walk in aerospace circles, and while I dont work for SpaceX, I've worked with them on some stuff, and they by and large come off as an incredibly serious, cost-focused entity. Far more so than even "legacy space" they are beating the pants off of at the moment.
TeknOShEeP
27d ago
The US space program started out as a massive government push, and during the heyday of the Apollo program NASA's budget went as high as 4.4% of the entire federal budget. It definitely got results, and its the reason any space program exists at all. Lots of bad behavior has definitely snuck in since those days, but without the whole Space Race thing there is zero chance we have anything like the industry we have today.
Looking at the rest of the globe there is a strong correlation between "has an actual space industry" and current or prior national level "Space Race"-tier efforts. I.e. Russia and China have actual launch capabilities, their direct geopolitical adversaries in Japan and India have developed fledgling capabilities in response (as has Israel due to similar threats), and then you get giant blocks of highly educated, wealthy, sophisticated nations that have somehow managed to produce what is recognized in official policy documents as more of a jobs handout than actual space program, mostly due to a complete lack of any initial kick in the butt.
TeknOShEeP
27d ago
Just please, won't someone show the actual profit the company is making.
You are asking for non-public numbers that being a non-public company SpaceX is under no obligation to provide. The current best guess is that Starlink (and its defense version Starshield) account for roughly 2/3rds of the company's revenue, and since most of that is for actual services rather than hardware it probably has a decent profit margin, but everyone has their own assumptions.
I know Musk is one of the richest people on Earth, but even he doesn't have unlimited cash to throw at a failing endevour. Jeff Bezos is also one of the richest people on Earth, and his rocket company Blue Origin is actually older, but has done far, far less in that same timeframe. If I get to invest my own cash, I'd put it 100% with SpaceX.
TeknOShEeP
27d ago
The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.
Lol, lmao even. The competition is quite literally being left on the ground while SpaceX is by far the most advanced launch company on (and leaving) Earth. This (pdf warning) is a handy little summary of 2024 launch activities. There were 263 total orbital launch attempts last year, of which 134 were SpaceX Falcon 9s (132 standards, 2 heavies). 133 of those attempts were successful, for a demonstrated reliability rate over 99%. So more than half of all launches last year were SpaceX, and they are more reliable than anyone else. But even this number vastly understates the actual capabilities gap. While numerically having 50% of the launches, the Falcon family put more than 90% of the total mass into orbit because they can carry substantially larger payloads than any of their competitors (the Falcon heavy in particular can roughly double anything else's mass to LEO). Putting the very large cherry on top is the fact that no one else is remotely close to cost-competitive with Falcon 9 below $3k per kg and Heavy below $2k per kg, while everyone else including the Chinese who use ICBM boosters and drop their rockets into populated villages all north of $5k per kg.
So the current state of play is that the SpaceX workhorse, the Falcon 9, is at a minimum twice as capable in cost and capacity metrics compared to all of the competition, while being substantially more technically advanced. Its the only rocket currently active that incorporates re-use in any meaningful fashion, its the only rocket currently flying with engine-out capability, and its the only rocket currently flying that can do school-bus style launches where customers can buy a small chunk of the total launch mass and get their payloads inserted into independent orbits.
Everyone else is just playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 at this point, and having a hard time with it. Its fair to say SpaceX is at least a generstion ahead on the general launch vehicle front. But the hell of it is the Falcon 9 is going to be made obsolete by Starship, which will be even cheaper and have vastly more payload capacity. Are there problems currently? Yes, absolutely, the block 2 second stage seems to have some very big problems. But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling. No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform. The second stage needs some work clearly, but you get optimized platforms by experimenting, and thats what they're doing.
I guess this all seems like fanboying, but it is wild to me that one of the most technically complex and expensive markets ever developed by humanity is so wildly skewed towards one participant based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
TeknOShEeP
28d ago
Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
the problem for actual conservatives is what is there actually to do here?
Really, the problem for "actual conservatives" is more along the lines of "how can we claw anything of any relevance back?" The "real conservative" party is dead, Trump killed it, and publically so. Being a William F. Buckley fanboy is the surest path to a dead political career, and frankly good riddance.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.
The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.
But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.
The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
"building bridges"
One of the Pope's formal titles is Pontifex Maximus, which literally translates as "supreme bridge builder," and along with the Keys of St. Peter bridges feature heavily as motifs in papal proclamations, bulls, teachings, etc. So generally very on-theme for a new Pope.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Is it fair to say that while Pizzaballa looks like perhaps the most logical candidate from an idealogical (mild conservative) and experience perspective (ie a diplomat with experience in the middle east) the fact that he's only 60 may be disqualifying for too many cardinals for him to have an actual chance at being elected?
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Formal recognition of Crimea is probably a non-starter for Ukraine
Why? Crimea is, and has been for the past two centuries, culturally, linguistically, and economically Russian. It was only part of Ukraine because Krushchev did a Kruschev in the 1950s and it didnt matter as they were all part of glorious Soviet Union. It became awkward after the fall of the wall, but they hashed out a compromise where Crimea operated as an autonomous region of Ukraine instead of a integrated one, the state that persisted for 30 years until Russia formally annexed it.
I don't condone the whole "starting a war" thing, but Crimea has never been Ukrainian in any but the most nit-picky sense, and blowing a peace deal over it would be catastrophically stupid.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Calorie counting has historically and scientifically been shown to have just about zero impact on dieting and positive health decisions. It works for a tiny minority of people. I called it the diet for people that love accounting.
I frankly do not believe you here. Citations are needed, and I having a very difficult time conceiving of how a plan deliberately discarding information critical to its success would somehow be more successful than one that actually acquires said information.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Okay, you are off on some tangent responding to a staw man I cannot even conceive of. I have not, and am not saying anything about experienced levels of hunger, or the theory of mind of an obese person. All I am saying is that the basis of a successful diet must be the recognition of the fundamental equation that determines whether body mass increases, decreases, or remains the same. Use whatever strategies you want to manage both sides, but to claim that CICO is somehow disproven, as OP does, is grossly incorrect.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Oh no, I have not forgotten the maintenance nightmare aspect, but thats not exclusive to swing wings (ie the C-5 galaxy makes both the B-1 and F-14 look easy).
No, the original argument against variable geometry (aside from systems complexity) was that changing the sweep, chord length, and span mid-flight would result in an extremely taxing and dangerous variance of flight characteristics that would drive the pilot mad, and then into an undesirable air-ground interface. The claim was that this is designing the optimum plane on paper instead of paying attention to how they are actually flown, and to be fair this was entirely valid logic if you based it on a) the F-111s development and early flight testing and b) publically available info about variable geometry aircraft.
But of course the DoD and the MIC had actually learned a few things, and the Tomcat and Bone both turned out to be excellent performers with long service histories. If you look at the whole batch of variable geomtery aircraft all born around the same time, with the F-111, MiG-27, Tu-22M, and the Tornado the idea as a whole seems to actually have produced highly successful aircraft, despite their inherent complexity.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
I am not advocating for dismissing anyones self-control issues, in fact I think they are fundamental for any successful diet plan. All I am advocating for is recognition of fundamental truths that, for reasons I do not understand, are vociferously denied by a portion of those interested in loosing weight.
If you do not have the self control to stop eating in abundance, plan around that- maybe substitute foods that can be eaten in large amounts with few calories. Maybe have that donut, but as a treat for a good exercise session. Many wiser people have many better thoughts. But throwing up your hands and saying "CICO is wrong" is not going to help.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
be indentical yet have TDEEs that vary by over a thousand calories despite being nearly equally active
Either we have very different definitions of the word "identical", or i am going to need a source on that claim. It seems to be farcically untrue at face value.
There's a FB video of it somewhere, amongst all of the other Satanist content (not derrogatory, he is apparently a practicing Satanist). Lacking a FB account, i cant actually log in to find the specific one. But he posted it himself.
Now i personally dont give a fuck what he does, but for branding purposes he's sort of pigeonholed himself into a very specific niche that a) most gun owners and gun curious people probably dont align with, and b) would definitely affect the squeaky clean image Gun Jesus cultivates.
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