So all those "ANTIFACIST ACTION" flags don't exist? The matching gear, obviously bought and provided by rich donors?

They were a thing before 2016, they go back to good Weimar-era Germany.

That you would deny knowledge tells me you're getting your news from the pig trough.

There's no leader. It's a bunch of loosely-affiliated marxist asshats. Rich white kids LARPing that they're oppressed, because that's what their media and their professors constantly tell them.

Is so that when you catch somebody using pi of 3.14159265359 you can toss them into a work camp and use them as slave labor if they are a dissident.

Fascism requires an in group which the law protects but does not bind and an out group that the law binds but does not protect.

That's what you're looking at these days. Good old-fashioned fascism.

And the actual problem is that overworked parents who don't get to spend a lot of time raising their kids combined with underfunded schools that can't pick up the slack from those overworked parents is the problem.

I'm not surprised it's worse. We have been cutting funding to schools for ages in order to move that money into very expensive private schools and subsidies for the rich assholes that send their kids to them. AKA School vouchers.

So a lot of the programs that were around when I was a kid that would pick up some of the slack are long gone. Those were the first to go because you could argue that it wasn't core curriculum.

But it's a lot easier to blame the kids and those dastardly screens than it is to actually do anything. Feels better too.

Except for WB. They'll turn HBO, HBOMax, Max. HBOGo, no, now it's just HBO, oh wait, ... into H+BO! They're always slow on the trends, but they'll rename the service six more times in the coming year so who cares?

I suppose I should have clarified I was speaking specifically of launch vehicles.

I don't think so. NASA's output has been fine. Remember they tend to do basic science. SpaceX for example hasn't really done much more than tweak NASA designs. Their reusable rockets were the last major hoorah before the cuts really started to bite into NASA. So you don't get a lot of major products coming out directly because all we really let them do anymore is basic science. So you don't get the big exciting stuff from them like reusable rockets.

On the other hand that's critical for people like SpaceX because basic science takes decades and decades to pay off. So nobody wants to do it. Traditionally that's how we progress. The government does the difficult and expensive work and then hands it to a private company to make millions or billions off of.

But these cuts are part of the project 2025 cuts to take over every aspect of the government and replace it with cronies. It's literally right in their playbook. You can look it all up yourself they are not hiding it.

So I don't think SpaceX is going to want to pick up all these guys because they aren't going to want to spend the money on the basic research that these guys were doing. I'm sure they'll pick and choose a few of them but most of them will be on their own. And we're going to lose out on a whole lot of important long-term science discovery. The kind of stuff that is really boring and which the majority doesn't actually ever pay off.

One of the major problems with science. A lot of it just never pays off and then you get some of it that just well transforms our lives for the better. But absolutely nobody knows which is which. And worse stuff that was discovered decades ago might be relevant to our great grandkids but we are long dead

And planting a tree whose shade you will never lie in is way out of fashion

It's meant to be a pork barrel project to create jobs because the private sector can no longer maintain economy by itself and hasn't been able to since, well since we've more or less ran out of cheap readily available land.

I mean they literally talked about it in the fifties. Keeping the economy going with government spending. Socialism basically but disguised because we were fighting a cold war with the commies.

Meanwhile we have been automating everything we can get our hands on since the late'70s. So we need every single job we can get.

There's plenty of food and housing and medicine and everything else and has been for decades the problem is distribution. Our entire system is built around jobs. If you don't work you don't eat. We turned jobs into a resource necessary to live and we have been making them more scarce every year.

The center cannot hold.

We can't keep automating everything while firing government workers and expect things not to go completely pear shape

25% unemployment got us world war II. We have been using government jobs and gig economy work driving for Uber to hide from that unemployment. We can't hide for much longer.

As much fun as people have repeating this little factoid, the problem is that NASA stopped innovating and started becoming nothing more than a pork funnel to certain districts. Had NASA continued to innovate, or at least continued to remain relevant, the door wouldn't have been open for SpaceX to step through. True reusability, rather than the Shuttle's "months of rebuilding" routine, and not throwing away boosters and launch stages are innovation simply because NASA, through government mandated handcuffs, were unable to work towards those goals in a realistic fashion. In fact, when SpaceX started, the mentality that it couldn't be done was so entrenched that there were a lot of folks publicly saying they would fail outright in reusability on the scale they proposed. And here we are today with the Falcons making the reusability of the Shuttle program seem like a joke.

Please note: I'm not in any way a fan of Musk the man, but SpaceX has provided innovation in an industry that desperately needed it. If NASA were capable of doing what SpaceX has done, they were prevented from doing so by congressional mandate.

EVERYONE who creates progress does so by standing on the shoulders of those who came before. This self-evident statement seems redundantly silly to have to repeat every time some dares commit the offense of being impressed with the progress SpaceX has actually managed to create.

I have doubts on the planned schedule too, but SpaceX has continued to move forward at a pace that far exceeds reasonable expectations. Note: Musk's publicly stated goals are never reasonable. He's a dreamer/idealist fueled by ketamine and other drugs. But his stated goals for SpaceX have continue do to come to pass, just not on his timelines. I think the only real impediment to Starship continuing to move forward would be if Musk inserts himself more fully into the process instead of babbling like an idiot in public while letting the actual engineering team do the engineering.

I would expect to see the timeline slip, but I would still expect to see a fairly steady trend of progress.

Does it? When people get wrapped up in the pursuit of money above all else, sooner or later they're gonna start eye-fucking the military. That's one avenue of enrichment that seems to always have a near endless supply of financing, and very little scrutiny over how that financing is spread around.

If that argument ever applied to vehicles, that would be the end of buying cars. Granted, that may be the direction we're headed anyway, with the way the prices on them continue to climb. But if you don't actually own the automobile you purchase, one of the largest expenses outside of a house any individual will ever contemplate, then there's no point in throwing that money at it. We'll all be leasing, or buying "points" for some form of ride-share for self-driving vehicles, or something similar. I suppose that's the way things are headed. After all, "You will own nothing, and you'll love it."

I don't really think we'll ever have decent consumer protection in the United States again. At least, not in the lifetime of anyone here today. People seem hell-bent on electing business-first politicians, regardless of how much evidence we've seen that this does, in fact, make the country worse for anyone not part of the C-Suite and up. For some strange reason, the worse things get, the more easily people seem to be swayed that only by protecting the business class can we make things better. It's baffling to anyone with a sense of logic, let alone a sense of compassion and decency.

In the Dow Jones case, did they have any business dealings in Australia? Or was the threat to use international law to make them pay the judgement against them?

Because it seems that the only way Ofcom can make 4chan pay is by trying to get their judgement enforced in the US, which seems extremely unlikely given both US law and the current administration.

A bit OT but it's often worth getting a lower resolution camera. The lower end 4k ones are either fake 4k (upscaled) or real 4k but the smaller pixels on the sensor mean poor low light performance, or exceed the ability of the optics.

A solid 2k or even 1080p camera, with decent optics, is usually a better choice. Or get a surplus high end 4k one. Due to paranoia over Hikvision and others, there are some of those available at reasonable prices used now.

I'd like to know how much blame each of these companies deserves. It seems that the hack was actually Salesforce customers being socially engineered to give the hackers access to their accounts. Obviously some training needed there, but was it a flaw in the Salesforce software's design? There was a bank hack many years ago where the social engineering relied on how the software would ask for certain information at certain times to get the target to give out the needed credentials, i.e. it was a flaw in the process that made it possible to confuse users.