clearing the launch tower during a test launch with an experimental rocket that has no payload and no humans aboard is success

managing to get into the right orbit without aborting using a rocket that’s launched since the 60s and is lit with giant matchsticks is success

You, an idiot: “these are comparable”

They sort of do, or they do in a way that makes them almost useless once they hit their final low level. Are you suggesting that instead of asymptotically going to zero, they just hit zero at some point?

I don’t think articles like this help that situation. “Plastic isn’t actually recyclable” is a pretty dangerous mind virus that’s basically already running rampant.

Pyrolysis isn’t perfect. But it is absolutely better than throwing plastic in a landfill, and can handle otherwise impossible-to-recycle mixed feedstocks.

The process I worked on recycled PET while leaving the other materials in the mix untouched, ready to go through a different specialized process. That was kind of the whole point of it. Those sorts of technologies are harder in the sense that the tech is more sophisticated, but realistically doesn’t cost more to run once you have it going. The future isn’t all doom and gloom. That’s why I hate these “don’t bother recycling” articles.

There are alternatives to pyrolysis that are slowly coming online. They have their drawbacks – it’s certainly easier to chuck a bunch of mixed plastic into a reactor and heat it up until something happens – but they’re real.

I worked on one of them for a few years. It’s pretty cool! They’re currently building a pilot plant to demonstrate the technology at scale.

Yes. Muzzle loaders. Shoot once, then spend a few minutes loading a powder charge and a bullet down the barrel. They weren’t flintlock muskets like it was the 1700s, they were modern rifles. Just loaded through the muzzles. It gives the deer a fighting chance. You have to hit on the first shot. Did you know that people also hunt with a bow and arrow? Those have been around since the Neolithic. Sometimes not using the most advanced tech is the point.

It’s funny that you typed all that stuff trying to explain firearms to someone who you assume knows nothing about them. I’ve shot everything from pellet guns to the aforementioned muzzle loader to a .30-06 to, yes, an AR-15. I can pick up most guns and check to see if the chamber’s clear. I can disassemble and clean and put them back together.

I want these things to go away. Not just AR-15’s. Anything semiautomatic with a magazine that can hold more than, let’s say, six rounds. Anything beyond a revolver is over the top for personal protection, and if you think that’s not true you’re a lunatic or just want to cosplay army guy. Duh, AR-15’s are the most commonly used firearm in shootings because there’s a lot of them. How about we make there be less of them and other guns that can kill so many people so quickly?

Enforcement at fewer points (manufacturers, distributors) is much easier than at each individual person with a gun being evaluated.

Okay, then. I guess I’ll ignore the muzzle loaders my dad and all his friends used to hunt with until the AR-15 became such a symbol of the “cold dead hands” crowd that they all went ahead and got one. And then a few more.

I think the AR-15 should be banned because I think any semiautomatic rifle and pistol with a magazine capacity of more than a few rounds should be banned. That’s enough for the “guns are easier than getting medicated for anxiety” crowd to feel like they can engage in deadly personal defense without making it easy for someone to walk into a school or church or business and just unload.

I mean depending on who the wellness check is for, the answer may be “they are not well, because they were shot by a cop for no reason, and whoops that was their neighbor, and also the cop shot the neighbor’s dog too”

same as any other rifle

I’m sure the use of AR-15s in shootings has nothing to do with its magazine capacity, firing rate, and deadliness at relatively short out to intermediate range. Not a lot of kids in elementary schools getting killed by people wielding muzzle loaders.

supports the second amendment

I think we should have a well-regulated militia. But I don’t think that every school child should be able to wield an AR-15. I guess that makes me anti-2nd?

Inoreader worked okay for me, syncs with the client apps I use, and was fairly Feedly-like. But I eventually went to a self-hosted FreshRSS install due to the ads that got inserted into feeds.

If you’re concerned about things like FOSS, you should consider finding a way to self-host, either on hardware you own or using a cloud VPS. Any service that can sync and keep client compatibility updated is going to incur costs, and they’ll extract that value from you somehow - ads, data slurping, whatever. Better to pay for it yourself so you at least have a clear idea what the relationship is.

It sounds like you’re breaking down cops into several categories:

1. Cops that do bad things on purpose
2. Cops that do bad things on accident
3. Cops that work alongside groups 1 and 2

Sure, group 3 cops may use that discretion for good. Maybe they don’t pull someone over for going one over the speed limit, or decide to look the other way when a homeless guy tries to sell cigarettes. I agree with you, this is the kind of discretion that’s supposed to happen.

But when people say ACAB, they’re saying that when cops that don’t do terrible things work alongside cops that do, they are complicit. One cop slowly, agonizingly kills a guy. Three cops watch and do nothing to stop him. That’s an extreme example. But there’s a million small versions of that, in every big city and small town, where a cop uses either their legal authority or “I’m a person with a gun” authority to do something bad, and their coworkers let it happen.

Cops that don’t stop their coworkers from doing bad things are just as bad as those doing the bad things. So, ACAB.

Discretion is just selective enforcement. Lots of people do a thing. But cops only think it’s damaging to society when the wrong kind of people do it. That thing might just be existing.

Maybe that punishment involves jail time, but more likely it means being harassed, or put in cuffs for a while but let off, or just be intimidated by a guy who can legally whisper “I fear for my life” into a body cam and then kill you.

ACAB means cops either participate in that system, do nothing to stop it, or try to stop it and get forced out.

“both sides are the same”

account created less than two weeks ago

Lmao get fucked

The small beings are being brought to the slender building of magic!

It was a scan during upload to their cloud photos system. Everyone else does it on their servers, Apple was going to run the scan before so they didn’t have to ever have them. To not have images scanned before upload, a user would just not have to use their cloud photos service.

The messaging was really badly handled. They almost certainly just scan all the same photos on their servers instead now.

Just too busy giving science denial sound bites to show up to practice

I went to college in Muncie, Indiana, which is the inspiration for Pawnee in Parks and Recreation.

Muncie is kinda like Pawnee, I guess. But without the whimsy.

Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.

Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)

So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.

But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.

I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)

A better question would be why Microsoft went with a nonstandard layout when they designed the Xbox controller. Nintendo had been using the A-to-the-right layout since 1990.