dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

I don’t know if Japan of all places is ready for it. We’d better hope the zombies are vulnerable to airsoft BBs.

It turns out Yogi Berra was right all those years ago. “I never said all those things I said.”

The point is that even bringing the parts together until a critical state was reached, the material did not explode. If the Demon Core were left in its critical state like that but otherwise undisturbed, it surely would have melted but would not have gone off like an atom bomb.

It’s not just reliably sticking the two subcritical halves of fissile material together, but keeping them there via inertia long enough for enough of the mass to go critical before the much more minor reactions blow them apart via melting/vaporizing the nearest surfaces.

If you had to halves of an atomic bomb core and just clacked them together mechanically you’d wind up with a lot of heat and a big old pulse of radiation, and if you were the one holding this device you probably would indeed die. But there would be no nuclear explosion in the sense we think of it as compared to actual functional nuclear weapons. At best you’d wind up with an energy release equivalent to a few pounds of TNT, which would be much easier to replicate with… a few pounds of TNT.

This has been explored to death, e.g. via the Demon Core experiments, where a critical mass of fissile material was brought together via manual means and the end result was the release of enough radiation to kill at least two people (albeit certainly not killing them instantly) but no explosion.

Whatever. Mine’s cooler.

Oh, please please please please drop your gun and go fisticuffs with me thinking you’re some kind of tough guy. I fucking dare you.

Important note: This doesn’t suddenly mean that Chick-Fil-A and the people who own it are suddenly good guys now.

It’s even worse and more insidious than that. It’s performative and obviously politicized bullshit designed to attempt to delegitimize the international courts by encouraging people to equate this with Putin’s potential prosecution. “See? It’s totally the same! If ours isn’t real than theirs isn’t either!”

The vast majority of homeless people are not visible, and they are not the stereotype of the drunken incoherent bum sleeping under a newspaper on a park bench like the guy in Back to the Future.

It’s startlingly easy to become homeless simply by having a minor upset in your income, which can get you evicted quickly if you’re renting and especially so if you live in an area which has weak or nonexistent tenant protections. Lots of homeless people were doing just fine or at least close to okay before something happened. They got injured and thus lost their job. A spouse divorced them and took most of the income with them. Their house burned down but they didn’t have enough insurance to cover it. They had to escape from an abusive domestic partner. Etc.

These are just ordinary people who had their home pulled out from under them for some reason. Now they’re temporarily living on a friend’s couch, or in their car, or in a motel room, or whatever. But the barrier for entry for obtaining housing is so damn high in many places that it’s impossible for them to work up the capital to make it over that hump and either make rent plus a security deposit, or magically cough up the down payment on a mortgage.

Many of these people probably already owned a car before whatever it was happened to them and thus they still do. Even if they’re still paying off the loan on that car, that monthly payment is almost guaranteed to be less than rent or a mortgage.

Yes, but everything you listed is the kind of crap we should be teaching in high school, and aren’t. That’s because America has a fascination with transforming our middle and high schools into tiny little prisons and disciplinary systems rather than places where education happens.

In a theoretical correctly functioning modern society, college absolutely should not be necessary to earn a living except if you wish to enter a specialized field where a significant degree of additional training and accreditation is required in order to, among other things, ensure public safety. If you want to be a doctor or dentist, lawyer, architect, critical infrastructure engineer, etc., then yes. Absolutely, there should be a degree for that.

No one should be attempting to demand with any kind of straight face that it should be “required” to have a nonspecific bullshit degree to get a job in sales, marketing, retail or even retail management, graphic design, programming, etc. In fact, the vast majority of both white collar and blue collar jobs in reality have absolutely nothing to do with getting a degree other than showing employers that you’re Willing To Play The Game.

A beater car is still probably cheaper than an apartment. Also, you can’t drive your slummy apartment away if you don’t like the scene wherever it is, nor can it transport you to work. It’s also some modicum of space wherein you can lock up what stuff you do own.

If I were placed under the terms of some very specific curse where I had to choose explicitly between a car and a house, I’m sorry to say I would be forced to choose my car. Actually, if I had my druthers I would probably pick my truck over my car, because despite its impracticality for daily transportation it’s big enough to live in semi-comfortably as kind of a mini RV and would also allow me to store and transport some tools and stuff. (It’d also be much easier to use my truck to make money than a car, in some manner of hypothetical sudden destitution scenario.)

Authoritarian fuckwits making sweeping ultimatums to change typefaces for spurious, racist, and political reasons?

Believe it or not, this has happened before. Perhaps most famously… yes, guess who!

“All” of them most certainly do not. You can still go buy a brand new XR650L right now that not only does not have any electronic rider aids whatsoever, it has no electronics other than its spark ignition system. Never mind a TFT dash. It still has a mechanical speedometer, driven by a rotary cable.

Electronic features on bikes are becoming more available, for sure, but if you really want to they’re dead easy to avoid.

Anyway, I was thinking of the safety aspect. If Republicans say the want cheap and less safe vehicles, motorcycles already fit the bill.

Buy motorcycles. Problem solved.

“Lots of people are selfish shitheads unless they think there may be immediate consequences for them acting like shitheads” is a well-worn observation on human nature, and is not especially new. Just watch how people drive for the next few miles after they spot a cop on the interstate as an example.

The fact that apparently these people can’t quite separate the fictional concept of Batman with reality, i.e. the threat of real-world consequences, is somewhat novel. Not especially encouraging, but novel.

Nobody is ever actually shot while “cleaning” their gun. Unloading it is step 1 in this procedure for basically every firearm ever made, and that assessment stretches back several hundred years by now.

This is just a culturally ingrained lame excuse people pathologically fall back on thinking they’re going to save face over capping their own damn selves with an easily avoidable negligent discharge. And everyone who tries it inevitably thinks they’re the first person to think of it, because they’re stupid.

Hey! I will have you know, mine also involves copious amounts of knives, duct tape, and drywall joint compound.

Well, two things about that.

One, the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun is further out than the orbit of the moon. Even without doing any math, just a cursory observation of how shadows work will illustrate that, given that the moon itself can just barely cover the disc of the sun from where it is, any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon in order to completely block the sun’s light. Or some appreciable and nontrivial fraction of the diameter of the moon if you only want to block part of the sun’s light. Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge. (“Quite the challenge,” by the way, is rocket scientist talk for, “This is complete science fiction, and whoever suggested it is insane.”)

Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.

Emphasis on “tiny” adjustments, per the article. I don’t think Elmo comprehends just how much surface area is going to be required to make any measurable let alone meaningful impact, nor the cost of hefting all of that mass up there and keeping it there.

This whole crackhead idea is completely infeasible. But he probably hopes it’ll help him scam the government out of a bunch of money trying (and failing), while wasting vast amounts of rocket fuel.