• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • The problem is Biden’s team has been saying the economy is great, look at all the metrics… but people don’t feel that it’s great for them. It would be helpful for Biden to validate people’s concerns and feelings instead of dismissing them.

    The economy is doing well, let’s admit that. But the first question of the debate demonstrated that things are not great. Denying that reality and pretending otherwise is extremely damaging. I don’t want a grandpa who will lie to me to make me feel better, I want a grandpa who will sell it to me straight but help me through what I’m going through.

    If Biden could accept and be upfront that people are struggling day-to-day, he may not alienate as many people over to Trump on economic success.


  • bluemellophone@lemmy.world
    cake
    topolitics @lemmy.worldCNN's debate was no fair fight
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    Agreed.

    Biden could have started saying, “you know, I’ve never been a good debater – especially with a bit of a campaign cold – but what I have been good at is running this country. I’ve clearly been around for a while and, since I’ve dedicated my career and life to being a servant to this great country, I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s economy. Yes, we’ve taken a few punches recovering from the pandemic, but compared to our international neighbors we are doing ok. Not great, but not bad. There is still a lot of work left to do cleaning up from the mistakes of my predecesor, but we are making good progress and will continue to do so. <insert list of capping medication prescription costs, FED interest rates have stopped and not rising, historically low unemployment with 11 million new jobs, taxes on corporations>”


  • This.

    You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.

    Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.



  • The S-IVB-506.

    This was the third stage of the launch vehicle for Apollo 11. After entering Earth orbit, the S-IVB rocket was responsible for the translunar injection burn. Once the burn was complete, the command module, LEM, astronauts and the spent rocket were then coasting to the moon. The astronauts would detach the CSM, pitch up, translate in, extract the LEM, then thrust with RCS to get clear of the S-IVB. At this point, the rocket is still on a coarse to the moon.

    Many of them orbit between the Earth and moon to this day. One is speculated to orbit between the Earth and Sun. Many impacted the lunar surface, including the one from Apollo 13.

    The S-IVB-506 rocket was the one that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s a piece of human history, floating silently in a heliocentric orbit above us.














  • bluemellophone@lemmy.world
    cake
    toAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are many men growing beards again ?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Long story short: WW2

    The military required men to be clean shaven, which was partly tactical (proper gas mask seals), partly to whitewash the service (e.g., black men can have severe skin reactions to shaving every day), and had other benefits to unit cohesion and general order (routine personal fitness and hygiene).

    Well, that stuck, and an entire (massive) generation of men and their male children were taught that to be good they simply had to be clean shaven. Those two generations make up the vast majority of business and political power in the US, so the idea of “success” and “power” was idolized by a clean shaven male. This was further accentuated by the counter culture reaction of this cohort’s kids in the 60s and 70s, where longer and unkempt “bad” hair was cast against this “good” clean shaven look.

    Fast forward to today, those traditions and appearances have been baked into most of modern life. As the boomer population starts to fade away, so will the tyranny of the razor.


  • $350k includes the salary but also all of the health insurance benefits, taxes, stock options, office space and perks, compute hardware, software services… the works. An employer will have an averaged overhead factor for their skilled workforce, which can be anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 typically. A worker with an annual pre-tax salary of $140k could cost Google $350k in overall expenses per year. Labor is expensive.

    Also, these people weren’t just making simple Python scripts. Most of them were contributing core functionality into Python itself and managing the internal Python version and the ecosystem of Google software stacks that depend on it.