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Comment Re:15k satellites + starlink (Score 1) 29

What are the environmental costs of vaporizing satellites and other components in the atmosphere? The main plan seems to be to let them deorbit or encourage that somehow. Or blast them with lasers. What's that do to the ozone layer? Where's the toxic pollutants go?

What are the environmental costs of 48.5 tons of meteoritic material entering the atmosphere every day? What does that do to the ozone layer? Where do the toxic pollutants go?

Comment Re:the problem is being numb to disasters (Score 1) 199

This reminds me of the movie Independence Day where Will Smith wakes up when the ground shakes and tells his wife there's an earthquake only for her to reply "It's not even a four pointer, go back to sleep".

I was bemused, if the earth moved even slightly where I live I'd be freaking the fuck out!

I had that happen to me several times when I lived in Southern California. It is a real thing to just go back to bed and plan on reading about it in the news in the morning.

When I lived in Missouri, I took tornado warnings much more seriously.

Comment Re:What's next for dark matter theorists? (Score 1) 64

This is just some normal (non-dark) matter that we expected to be out there but was previously unobserved. It has nothing to do with dark matter or dark matter theories. We infer vast amounts of (otherwise unobservable) dark matter from its effect on gravity, and that has not changed from this.

Comment Re:Journalism died decades ago (Score 1) 169

Meanwhile most people dont have the wherewithal to engage in such scrutiny. For all its imperfections mainstream media rarely results in such extreme and crazy shit like Qanon or the anti vax movement.

Iraqi WMDs, Hunter Biden's laptop, and the Steele Dossier were not as extreme?

I would include covering for Fauci's lies and the WHO covering up China's involvement.

What about "saving" the 2020 election? The mainstream media was proud of their lies.

Comment Re: same same. (Score 1) 221

I've had many Windows upgrades fail. Some of them resulted in an unusable system, others reverted themselves and only wasted hours of my time. And for that matter, just running Windows Update without an upgrade to a new Windows version very frequently breaks Windows Update so that it will not work, and on a few occasions has resulted in an unbootable Windows system. In fact even my work machine has rendered itself unbootable with a Windows Update, and I work remotely.

For the past couple years Windows 10 update has rendered my system unbootable almost every time. I had to move the boot partition off of my hardware RAID, and now have to disconnect all USB drives until the update works and boots. Then usually I have to reinstall the RAID driver.

Then I have to reboot about every 2 weeks because file explorer start crashing.

Comment Re:this isn't a new idea. (Score 1) 46

Ethanol might burn cleaner, but it produces more emissions than gasoline. Also, it can eat away at various parts of an engine if the engine isn't designed for ethanol use.

It is a difficult problem. Taking maximum advantage of ethanol requires higher compression, which increases emissions, so the extra energy is not available lowering gas mileage so more ethanol has to be burnt also increasing emissions.

At least that is how it works with my 2002 E85 pickup where ethanol costs more per mile.

Comment Re:I use BlueSky for news (Score 1) 169

Because I can follow lots of news accounts, I dont have to depend on one source for news and paywalled news sites get blocked so I dont have to see their posts ever again (washington post & new York times are blocked)

I arrived at the same conclusion and partial solution; WP, NYT, MSNBC, CNN, etc. are blocked from my search results.

Comment Re:Journalism died decades ago (Score 1) 169

We're basically trading traditional media which at least has some sort of oversite (however imperfect) for social media which has even less. This isn't good.

That oversight was organizing the distortion. It was always there, but revealed through social media. The only way to correct the oversight was to drop traditional media, or scrutinize it just as heavily as social media.

Comment Re:What a great news source (Score 1) 169

Candidate A: hardworking successful and respected prosecutor, Senator, and Vice President. Exemplary record of promoting health care, voting rights, and reducing gun violence and crime. Full understanding and adherence to the rule of law. Well educated. Articulate as a court officer should be.

Or Candidate A: enforced a policy of routinely withholding exculpatory evidence in criminal trials while attorney general.

And that was enough for me, although an "exemplary record of reducing gun violence" is code for "record of denying 2nd Amendment rights" would have served.

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