For most people, yes.

For my best friend, no. The reason is that he and his wife really wanted a kid, and they got everything together and had one. He is the happiest new father I’ve ever seen.

My wife and I don’t want kids, and have taken permanent action to make sure we don’t. In part, this is because we understand the responsibility that would be carried for years. We have other things we want to do with our lives. So for someone else to have full knowledge of that responsibility and embrace it gets respect from me.

I hate that you’re right.

Russia has some odd game theory incentives because their nukes probably haven’t been well maintained. Now, the rest of the world has to assume they work. The consequences of being wrong about that are too great. However, if Russia actually launched a nuke and it fizzles, that’s a pretty good indication that their nukes don’t work in general. It’s therefore in Russia’s best interest to keep pretending that it will launch a nuke, but never do it because that would remove all doubt.

And then they’re fucked. With the nuclear taboo broken–fizzle or not–nobody will complain when NATO gets directly involved in conventional ways.

Married into a Scandinavian family. Scandinavian baked goods are amazing.

Here’s some solid numbers:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Launch-Cost-Per-Kilogram-to-Low-Earth-Orbit-LEO-US-Thousands_fig1_361415873

The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.

Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.

That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.

One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.

What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.

It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.

There are intelligence briefs that we get from Israel, and the money we give them tends to boomerang right back into the US military-industrial complex.

OTOH, Israel collapses in a week without US support. Maybe politicians should realize this and use it to tell Israel to knock it the fuck off.

When do politicians realize that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than the US needs Israel?

Notch funds a real life Mooshroim when?

I don’t think there’s a way to commit identity theft in this hypothetical that would work. Being immortal would mean it had to work in the long run, or at least a few decades until you can do it again. Someone will notice eventually. You can call it “people being stupid about it”, but a mistake will happen if you wait long enough.

See, that’s the kind of “America is a shithole” argument I can support.

Calling the US a “shit hole” because it’s hard to commit identity theft is odd.

FWIW, scientists who study supercentarians think Jeanne Calment was legit. She answered some extremely detailed historical questions about her village. She was either a walking Wikipedia about the area she grew up, or her claims were real.

That said, most supercentarian claims probably are bogus. They often come from areas that had bad recordkeeping a century ago, had their records offices bombed out during a war, or are generally well known for pension fraud. They’re often very poor areas that tend to have a low life expectancy, and it’s very strange that a real supercentarian would pop up there.

Remember when everyone was praising Bolton for going against Trump? This is why you don’t simp too hard for people who have already shown who they are but happen to do one good thing.

Next: Liz Cheney.

If it’s enough negative thoughts pile up, they’ll eventually breach a threshold where people avoid the company. I was looking forward to Metroid Prime 4, but I’m thinking of skipping it now.

I believe so, yes. Every 802.11 frame is effectively ACK’d. Makes a mockery of OSI layering, but so does everything else.

Right, I think that achievement only happens in the sequals.

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PHP extension might be telling. Consider that phpBB had an extention system that didn’t have any kind of hooks. All extensions were installed by modifying the code in place. They did not use any of the diff formats already out there; in a gross case of Not Invented Here, they made their own. Took them a while to make their own patch tool to automatically apply their custom diff, and it was buggy as hell.

So that shop might have just been following the lead of one of the most successful PHP apps.

Someone will be along to say “PHP is good now, actually”, but I don’t care. The community was shit back then, and I don’t see why anyone should care beyond legacy software at this point.

I think there’s a way to reconcile it, but it requires people to behave themselves. It can still be under a CC license, but also behind a pay link for the author. Yes, we could get it from somewhere for free, but that takes more effort and we’re not supporting the original creator.

This is basically mutual aid applied to non-physical goods. We know you still need to make a living in capitalism, and we’ll agree to exchange useful things for money under that system until we have a better one.

There’s also an argument similar to the one for streaming services (the one the services themselves have forgotten in the last few years). Yes, we can pirate it, but that takes effort, the sites involved have all sorts of shady advertisements and try to infect your computer with Windows XP viruses, and we can get all we want and more for ten bucks a month.

Languages don’t die. They have long tails.