__egb__

Maybe the lack of nuance is due to learning, through decades of experience, that the assumption “it won’t be done right” can be baked in.

It really depends what your goals/targets are. You can still do a lot with narrowband filters that make light pollution a minimal concern.

One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.

I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.

At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.

Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.

Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.

Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.

All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”

> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.

Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].

In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?

Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...

[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...

IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.

The Navy already does forecasting for the DoD. They have their own computing facility (called Fleet Numerical) in California and run their own models.

> They still ask for a tip.

Finally, something to do with all the old sticks of RAM I have.

Time to start keeping track of how many times attorneys from ‘DEI schools’ win on the other side of the courtroom.

Oh, come on now, this one’s easy. They can just activate Textualist-mode and say that that if the founders wanted this clause to apply to tariffs then they should have explicitly used the word ‘tariffs’.

So many of the further-left’s answers follow the progression of the “step 3: ???” meme. I guess these days we might call it “concepts of a plan”. Even when the goals sound great, the paths to reach them are vague or non-existent (or even worse IMO, depend on questionable or simply outright illegal means).

You mention healthcare…I lived in Colorado in 2016 and we had a ballot measure for a constitutional amendment to establish universal healthcare. Great!

However, in the months leading up to that vote there were so many questions about details that the organizers of the ballot measure just met with some form of, “We’ll let you know after the amendment passes.”

I was a federal employee at the time, with an FEHB plan, and I was concerned that I would wind up paying for both the FEHB plan and the state tax that would come with the state plan. I sent multiple emails and asked at an information session but no one involved in organizing the ballot measure would even entertain the question.

Is it any wonder the measure failed 80-20?

Read it again. 40% of the 10% flagged by Cruz. So just 4% of all NSF grants were related to DEI…in some way that isn’t even apparent without actually reading the proposals.

It’s all fun and games until the seat in your car—or spaceship—says, “Moisturize me!”

There have been plenty of government commissions in the past. None of them functioned anything like DOGE, not even the ones instituted by the current President during his first term.

I think this is a surprise to many…even Trump’s more ardent supporters. After all, they thought they were voting for President Trump, not Assistant (to the) President Trump.

What should Tim Cook call himself if, say, a little DOGE-ie gets into the Passport or IRS or SEC systems and actually changes all Tim Cook references to Tim Apple?

I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

Trump has said he won’t make the same mistake of having people like Kelly or Milley or Wray around.

Commander in Chief is an official duty of the President. With the Supreme Court ruling, is there such a thing as an illegal military order from the President anymore?

There are less guardrails in place now than were in 2016. It is dishonest to act like everything is the same.

We had a similar situation in our family and we tried teaching mindful screen habits. We still lost because we couldn’t do anything about the school screen (chromebook). If we took that away at home it just provided an excuse for not doing schoolwork.

We contacted teachers about our child downloading and watching anime and playing games all day in school. They wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything. We requested that the school take the computer away and give hardcopy assignments. They refused because that would invite notice from other students which could lead to bullying. That’s what they told us. I found the acceptable computer use policy on the school website and tried playing that card. Turns out our child hadn’t actually even signed it the last year…but that didn’t actually matter, and the school didn’t enforce the policy anyway.

The schools here won’t actually discipline kids anymore. We would get emails from the principal begging parents to tell their kids that they’re not supposed to leave school grounds at lunch, but every day at least a hundred kids would just run out. (Our kid didn’t do this…I guess watching anime in the corner of the cafeteria prevents truancy…yay?)

The last two-and-a-half years of high school were so exhausting trying to find anything that would work. Nothing did. Two parents and a therapist trying to counter one teenager, bad family influences, the school system, and multibillion-dollar internet corporations that intentionally work to addict people is a very uneven situation.

> Also worth pointing out that NIST doesn't set policy…

Which has a side effect of NIST not even following its own guidance!

Are you under the mistaken impression that hurricanes are spread evenly across the season? I don’t understand how you can speak in the past tense when the season isn’t over for another three months. The historical peak is September 10th and the active part of the season is considered to start around August 20th.

> but shareholders (who should put pressure on executives and the board to act with prudence to avoid these kinds of disasters) are adequately punished.

So if I own some Vanguard mutual fund as part of a retirement account, it’s now on me to put pressure on 500+ corporations?

Perhaps it’s on Vanguard to do so…but Vanguard isn’t going to just eat the cost of increased due diligence requirements. My fees will increase.

How does that increased due diligence even work? It’s not like I or Vanguard can see internal processes to verify that a company has adequate testing or backups or training to prevent cases like today’s failure.

When, on average, X number of those 500 companies in my mutual fund face this share seizure penalty per year…am I just supposed to eat the loss when those shares disappear? Does Vanguard start insuring against such losses? Who pays for that insurance in the end?

This doesn’t even really hurt the shareholders who are best placed to possibly pressure a company. This doesn’t hurt “billionaire executive who owns 40% of the outstanding shares”. I mean, sure, it will hurt that little part of their brain that keeps track of their monetary worth and just wants to see “huge number get huger”…but it doesn’t actually hurt them. It just hurts regular folks, as usual.

The killer app for me is unchaining myself from a desk. I just can’t work effectively on a laptop screen, so while I’d love to go work while sitting at the beach or in a park or whatever, I just can’t do that right now.

This is why I have such high hopes for AR for work. I can keep my job but still return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of my distant ancestors…only I would be hunting bugs and gathering requirements.

To expand on this, Webb uses the Deep Space Network (DSN) to communicate with us. It can’t stream data back 24/7. There are generally three contacts per day each lasting a few hours, but I believe this is dependent on the scheduling of contacts with other missions that also use the DSN.

Also, the science data that is sent back is a stream of packets from all the data that was taken since the last contact. The packets are arranged for efficient transmission. One of the first steps of the science data processing is to sort the packets into exposures. Often packets for an exposure are split among multiple SSR (which stands for solid-state recorder) files. Sometimes there are duplicate packets between SSRs (data sent at the end of a contact is repeated at the beginning of the next contact). Only when the processing code determines that all expected packets are present—by using clues from other subsystems—can the next step (creating the uncalibrated FITS) begin.

If anyone is interested more details, the packet stuff is based on standards from the Consultative Committee for Space Data Standards (https://public.ccsds.org/Publications/BlueBooks.aspx).

I don’t understand either. I have an iPhone. My wife has a Samsung. According to certain pockets of the internet it’s a miracle we made it past our first date and now it’s only a matter of time before we’re divorced.

Our group chat with her family is evenly split between iOS and Android. No one’s ever said one word about it.

We absolutely have run into the issue where I can’t send my wife multiple photos at the same time over text (a single photo works fine)…so I just use one of several other methods to send photos in bulk.

To me, this topic is the ultimate “touch grass” example.

> Don’t the many zero setback cities invalidate your setback argument? They’re not drowning in stormwater - clearly it can be managed in a number of ways.

This means nothing without knowing the specifics of the local geography and ecosystem.

> Why not admit to yourself that you just like exclusionary land use regulations, and are comfortable with the impacts on the cost of living, increased commutes, etc.?

I’m not denying that our current zoning is exclusionary. It absolutely is. It’s excluding developers who want to sweep through and enshittify the place for a quick profit without regard to long-term viability.

> It’s not your neighborhood under threat, it’s your status quo.

In our case, the status quo many of our rules are meant to protect is, “the peninsula still exists and remains accessible by land,” so it’s both.

> …hundreds to thousands of such rules and the vast majority of them are _not_ that important.

And you base that on…?

> How does not wanting houses to flood relate to setbacks, minimum square footage, lot size, etc. requirements?

Here, minimum lot sizes are based on public/private water/sewer. We’re on well water so we need room for the well. We’re on public sewer, however, so we don’t need room for a septic tank.

As mentioned in other comments, minimum lot size also relates to infrastructure requirements. Here, it’s not as simple as just widening the current road or building another road through the narrow parts of our peninsula.

Setbacks are also related to stormwater management. Tree protection requirements, again, stormwater management and erosion control.

> Literally no one is saying "get rid of every single development regulation".

But you think that there are only an “_extremely_ small” number of valid regulations. You and the other comment I replied to seemed dismissive of specific rules that are vital to the survival—not just value, but physical survival—of my neighborhood.

Many of the zoning rules you list, and far many more that you don’t, exist for valid reasons. Those reasons may not be as obvious as the chemical plant/preschool rule, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as valid.

I live near a cove that comes off of the Chesapeake Bay. We have many of those zoning rules here for environmental reasons. Water movement and erosion are huge concerns here. Rules that affect density, frontages, trees within 100’ of the water…they are all necessary for the common good of the entire area.

We actually have a case on the other side of the neighborhood. A guy bought some land near his property for cheap. It’s not zoned for development because much of it is wetlands. He thought he could pressure the local zoning board to rezone it so he could make a handsome profit reselling it to a developer. As part of that effort, he diverted a creek and filled in the wetlands…and now several houses in the adjoining neighborhood flood (and there are legal repercussions for our entire neighborhood).

That is not true. It’s on a state-by-state basis and only a few states have laws that say ownership is automatically seen as intent to commit a crime.

It’s legal in most states to own lock picks and use them on locks you own.

I also believe most of the same states allow you to use them on any locks with the permission of the owner, but there may be a few that require a locksmith for that, even if you aren’t selling the service.

How about, “Winception”

And the first 30 seconds was just unscrewing the base.