Peppers take a good idea, having extra supplies and tools for an emergency, and take it to 11.

I’m not a prepper, but I did read my local government’s disaster preparedness list and have everything on it that applies to my family. I keep 3 days or so of extra, shelf stable food in the house; bought a home water cooler and keep an extra jug of water that I rotate when we use the one in the machine so that we have a few days of clean water at all times, which is way more practical and safe than a camping water jug that will sit and stagnate in the basement; I have a battery “generator” that I keep topped up with a solar panel because we have a sewage ejector pump and a sump pump to stop the basement from flooding in bad weather; and I have good first aid kits for the house and cars.

The only thing not on my local government list are the emergency car kits, which is really just a basic vehicle toolkit, jumpstart kit, flares, sweater and space blanket, all in a cheap bag that lives on top of the spare tire.

I don’t live in the most disaster prone area, but we do get tornados and nasty thunderstorms that knock out power for a day or 3. We don’t exactly have the lights on when that happens, but we do have food, water, a non flooded basement, and even some heat in the winter, and both cars have something to keep you warm while you either fix the car or wait for the tow truck.

I kind of understand peppers, because planning all of this out after we lost power a few years ago for 4 days in fall was interesting, and there was just so much shit the internet was saying I needed: weeks or months of dried beans and rice, a generator for the whole house, enough guns and ammo to ward off a small army, etc. my local government list was hard to find compared to all of the forums and YouTube videos, but I’m glad I found it, it’s sensible and if spread out over months, very affordable. I highly, highly recommend you poke around your local government website for their natural disaster page, they’ll have resources of who to contact if you need help, and what you should have on hand. If it’s not on your city’s page, try your county or state government. One of them should have a page about disasters and how to prepare for them.

The files are in the computer?

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.

AMD is a lot cooler than NVIDIA

I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.

You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.

That’s kind of like saying that ford can’t make a model t anymore.

I’m sure they could, there’s just no reason to.

I’m also sure the contractors that built the Saturn V, those that are still in business, could build equivalent parts today if the government asked.

The Saturn five was an absurdly large rocket designed specifically to get 3 people from earth to the moon. It was insanely expensive per launch, and the only reason it ever flew was because the government was writing nasa blank checks in order to beat the soviets.

Today the government wants a reasonable dollar figure for a launch, and the days of spending a billion dollars per launch are long past.

That’s an extremely bold assumption.

The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

There’s a bunch of hacked chalice dungeons you can join that essentially give you unlimited blood echoes.

The “front” or “forward” direction of a screw is clearly the face of the fastener itself, be it a hex head, Phillips, or Slotted screw. Picking a side of a face as the front doesn’t make any sense. The whole thing needs to rotate one direction or another, and it will either rotate to the right to tighten, or the left to loosen.

If I ask you what the front of a clock is, are you going to tell me it’s the top curve near the ceiling? No it’s the face of the clock, and the hands rotate around it to the right.

If you follow that arrow around to the next with your hand, which direction is your hand moving?

That is indicating clockwise rotation, or a rotation to the right. We’re talking about circles here

The whole thing is rotating to the right, that’s what clockwise means. Clocks rotate to the right. One arrow is not pointing left, it’s pointing in the direction of rotation, which is to the right.

What the fuck are you talking about.

You’re either rotating the fastener to the right or the left.

It doesn’t matter what side you’re talking about, because you’re not moving one side of the fastener, you’re rotating the whole thing one direction or the other.

Clockwise just means something is rotating to the right.

If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?

Oh we have generics all over the place.

The problem is that large drug companies abuse our patent systems to keep their drugs exclusive for longer than should be allowed.

Look at EPI pens. The drug is just Adrenaline, you can get a vial of that anywhere as long as you have a prescription. But the EPI pen mechanism itself is patented. So no other manufacturer can sell an easy to use, pre measured dose of Adrenaline without violating the patent. That’s why EPI pens cost hundreds of dollars instead of the 20 bucks they probably actually cost to produce. And you need that mechanism, because no one with a throat that’s closing is going to be able to calmly pull out and ampule or vial, measure the right dose into a syringe, and get it into their system before they pass out from anaphylaxis.

I finish my own cabinets, so maybe I’m just out of touch. But materials alone is only like a hundred bucks or so, and a company already owns the compressor and paint sprayer. I don’t think I’d pay more than 1k, it better be fucking Van Gogh painting my cabinets for anything over that.

2-3K for paint?

You’re getting reamed by your painter if he’s charging you 2-3k for a small room like that.

To orbit the moon, a space craft needs to move at about 1.5 km/s, or 3300 miles per hour.

So any landing starts with you going at 1.5 km/s and needs to end at the moons surface when you reach about 0 meters per second.

If anything goes wrong with your engines while you slow down, you smack into the moon at either near orbital speeds, or at fighter jet speeds. The window for having an engine failure and being slow enough to survive is so narrow that it might as well not exist.

That’s why Apollo used pressure fed, self igniting engines. As long as 2 valves opened, you had an engine. And Apollo landers had a totally separate ascent engine that worked exactly the same way, so if the landing engine failed, they could just drop the landing stage and return to orbit at practically any time during the descent. They even had a whole procedure of what to do if the ascent engine didn’t light when they were supposed to leave. Everything from jump starting the engine like a car with a dead battery, to physically getting access to the valves and manually opening them.

I hate the current plan for Artemis. I hate that in 55 years, we’ve only managed to make shit more complicated. The current plan is for a vehicle with no abort capability to ignite its 3 turbo pumped, liquid methane fueled engines at least 4 times to get from low earth orbit to the moons surface, with days between ignitions.

A capability that has never been shown to work or even exist in any capacity. Turbo pumps are finally machined pieces of engineering that need to behave exactly right, or they turn a rocket into either a bomb, or a giant tube that can’t move. And the current plan for Artemis calls for these finely crafted pieces of machinery to be subjected to the harsh environment of both space where they’ll sit for at least a week, and multiple ignitions, where they’re subjected to ridiculous temperatures and pressures.

Absolutely ridiculous. We never left an astronaut on the moon in the 60s and 70s, but by god are they trying to open the first graveyard on the moon these days.

If your primary means of housing came out of your ass, you’d probably embrace the assless slacks too

To be fair, you can exploit Skyrim by looking at it funny.

I accidentally discovered the “phase through a wall by holding a plate” thing all by myself just dicking around.

• we invented the modern car, y’all are driving on the wrong side of the road
• a switch is a switch, if you don’t like the direction it goes, just flip it over and put the cover back on, half the switches in my house go one way, and the other go the opposite way, some of them are even sideways.
• y’all sank the ship that had the US copy of the metric standard on it, and also invented the imperial system in the first place.
• if you look at the entomology, the US largely uses the original English pronunciation of things, it’s the British who have slowly changed their pronunciation over the centuries. We did have a guy who intentionally changed a bunch of the spelling, you are right about that.

Semi drivers require a commercial license, and special training. They’re monitored way more closely than your average American driver.

And side mirrors only let you see what’s behind the car to the sides and at a distance, not what’s immediately behind the car. I don’t want some idiot in his $80K battering ram to roll over me because I happened to walk behind his death trap and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear view camera to come up.

Not being able to see what’s immediately behind the vehicle is a safety hazard, especially in suburban areas or parking lots where most people are reversing out of a space with other people walking around.