Obi-Wan said “That’s no moon… because it’s a flat disc!” but they edited it out because they didn’t want people to know the truth!

In real life, Qaddafi got rid of landlords in Libya. It resulted in a lot of housing problems.

Some people don’t have wealthy parents that can buy them a place to live outright. There is a need to have housing available that doesn’t require someone to have wealthy parents or get out a large loan. The ability to rent a place is important.

The real problem is the high cost to own a place to live which results in people having to rent when they’d rather own a home.

Yeah it’s a weird thing about parasocial relationships. You like someone based on things you’ve seen about them on TV and then you start feeling like you know them. But really, nope you don’t.

I think it’s fine to like famous people, but just understand that you don’t really know them. If you later find out they’re a horrible person well then don’t like them anymore and it’s no big deal. You only like the things you know about the person, but if you avoid going down the road of feeling like you really know them, it’s fine.

Did your PhD recognize that most people don’t post their opinions on the internet, especially if they find something to be mediocre?

To me it’s the internet that ruins everything. Many times when I see something and I feel like “meh it wasn’t great but it was ok” I end up seeing an endless stream of negativity towards it on the internet. But who am I to say the the ending to Game of Thrones was ok but needed a few more episodes so it didn’t feel rushed, or Rise of Skywalker was really interesting but the editing was a bit janky or whatever? Say things like that and you get an endless stream of people telling you that you’re an idiot for liking something and not conforming to the hate train. But talk to people in real life about these things and it’s a different conversation.

I think the main problem is that the people making things in these franchises listen to the internet too much. This has resulted in a general lack of confidence by writers because they’re too worried about how the internet will criticize them. But that’s gonna happen no matter what they do. And the studio execs looking at the internet data and basing a lot of decisions on that.

I don’t own a Tesla? I don’t even own a car at all.

But I do have some experience with software engineering and know there’s pros and cons to everything. Standards are great but there are times when there’s a reason you need to make something for a specific purpose. I don’t know the specifics (and I’m guess you don’t either) of how a space suit interfaces with a space craft, but I can see how the requirement to have a spacesuit interface with multiple types spacecraft could result in an increased complexity. 99% of the time every spacecraft will have the same number of spacesuits as astronauts, and it’s only on a rescue mission like this that the number will differ. But on a rescue mission there will also need to be the same number of empty seats as the number of astronauts being rescued meaning there will always be enough room to carry the number of necessary spacesuits.

The time to have a standard spacesuit standard would’ve been before either the Dragon or the Starliner launched. As it is creating a standard would mean components in both the spacesuits and spacecraft components in one or both of the programs will need to be redesigned. Which opens up the potential for a problem similar to pissing on a Tesla dashboard (weird analogy). You should mitigate that by not imposing an unnecessary re-design of space suit and space craft components.

Sure they may want to have a standard, but it’s best they wait for a future re-design of the space craft is happening for other reasons to require it. Let the engineers make that engineering decision, not impose it because of some extremely minor inconvenience caused by a single failed mission.

Is it really a big deal for a spaceflight that was meant to carry four people in spacesuits to instead carry two people in spacesuits plus two empty spacesuits?

Sure there probably should be some kind of standard, but it feels like there’s much bigger problems to worry about.

No.

They provide nothing of value.

Yeah I feel like Radiohead cancelling a tour date in Tel Aviv isn’t going to result in Netanyahu making compromises at the bargaining table. It’s just guys like Roger Waters (a tankie Putin simp) thinking they’re more important than they really are. It’s sort of like that time Dennis Rodman went to north Korea or Sean Penn went to Iraq to try to negotiate deals with various authoritarians. Just celebrities with big egos thinking they matter in an area where they’re way out of their element. Play music for your fans in Israel or don’t play music there, either way it doesn’t change anything.

Honestly I think the whole “the world needs to turn against all of Israel” idea is doing more harm than good. Expressing hatred towards an entire country doesn’t facilitate negotiation.

It’s a hit piece on musicians for playing in a country the writer hates. Also it’s not even clear that they’ve played in Israel in the past two years… quotes from Nick Cave were from 2022 and the quote from Radiohead is from 2017.

It’s really ugly when people are researching anyone that has ever been to Israel so they can target them for a hit piece. Like what’s going on here?

Thom Yorke’s quote seems reasonable:

Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government. We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America.

I mean yeah, was it morally wrong to visit the US when Trump was President? Was it wrong to go to the US while the Iraq war was happening and people were being tortured in GitMo? Is it wrong to go to the US now?

Yeah Star Trek Legacy is the show I want. Picard S3 was fun and all, and it restored the ending of TNG to be the way it should be, but I want to see new stories while checking in on some of the aftermath of DS9.

A prequel is an automatic retcon. There will always be questions like “why didn’t they have that thing in the stories that take place afterwards?”

Besides, backstories are meant to be imagined by the audience. As soon as you decide to make a prequel you’re choosing to create cognitive dissonance for the fans. When people have to choose the backstory they imagined vs. the backstory somoene else came up with and put on the screen, people are going to choose the backstory they imagined.

Prequels are always bad for the fans, but the studios like them because it’s a lower barrier to entry for the non-fans.

I do use it occasionally, but I gotta google for the command every time. So not exactly learning it.

It’s one of those things wher eI’m sure it’s fine if you learn it. But it’s not DOS CMD, but also not bash.

So instead of improving CMD to have more features or just going all the way and offering an official bash implementation, they want me to learn a third thing. Just don’t have time for it.

Yeah, who cares what’s canon anymore? Next week they’ll make another prequel that’ll retcon the previous retcon to something else.

It’s nothing but prequels anyway.

Yup. And you can kill processes in Windows to in the task manager. Or probably with a Powershell command too, but nobody’s gonna learn Powershell LOL.

There’s nearly always equivalent functions in both Linux and Windows, just in Windows you gotta click around in more bullshit forms and shit to find stuff. Or learn Powershell, but again, LOL. They are both OSes after all, they do similar things. Just one might do them better than the other.

Every day I feel more and more like this LOTR shot:

No thanks.

Israel and the EU are prop rep and they went hard right.

Prop rep only looks good on a spreadsheet, it’s terrible when you consider power dynamics.

First of all the parties have all of the power in a prop rep system. There really isn’t any point in even having seats other than to make it appear like a legislature instead of what it really is. A coalition formed in a backroom in when the parties in that coalition hold all of the power and the parties outside of it may as well not be there.

The seats belong to the party, not individuals representing communities. Which means the MP can’t cross the floor if their party is going to screw over their community. They can resign but then the Party appoints someone else to sit in the seat and that person votes the way the party tells them to.

The biggest problem with First Past the Post is the name. If you call it a Community Representation system (which is what it is) it sounds a lot nicer doesn’t it? You vote for a person to represent your community you put pressure on them to put pressure on their party and on Parliament to make the necessary compromises and concessions in the best interests of the community.

Minority interests can more easily be ignored in a Prop Rep system than in a Community representation system. In a community representation system, a thousand votes in a riding can swing it and that means any party can lose seats if they ignore minority interests. In a Prop Rep system even an million votes from minorities are meaningless if the party they vote for isn’t part of the ruling coalition.

Would you really want Canada being run by a coalition between the CPC and PPC where all power rests in the ruling coalition? Where the CPC has to give the PPC what they ask for to maintain power? This is the situation in Israel right now, and it may soon be how it is in the EU.

If you want electoral reform maybe push for ranked choice voting instead of a Prop Rep system that’s currently failing in some very high profile ways in other parts of the world.

In addition to color being too expensive for textbooks, it was also too expensive for newspapers. And colour film was more expensive than black and white film. Since photos taken by photo journalists at the time were meant to be printed in newspapers in B&W, most photographers shot with B&W film even while the technology for colour photography existed.

the sentiment of black-and-white photography being the “true” way of documentation

Well… B&W does have better resolution, both back then and now. Notice how many photos from NASA probes are in B&W? It’s because to get color you either have to take three photos with filters on them and combine them together, which is what NASA does. Or have clusters of three different sensors in an array to pick up the different wavelengths, which is what most consumer cameras do. But that effectively cuts the resolution into a third of what it could be if you had sensors that simply detected light without caring about the wavelength.

Of course the way most cameras are constructed you don’t get any benefit from B&W in terms of resolution since the way the sensors are arrayed is optimized for colour. But NASA’s cameras allow for higher resolution B&W images (when they already know the colour of the thing they’re looking at and they want to see detail) and the filters are there when they need to figure out what colour something is.

Yup. and some meetings you people ask you a question so you legit need some time to think about what information you should look up before the meeting. Even if 95% of the time nobody asks you anything, you gotta take some time to think about the topic the meeting is on and whether there might be a question for you so you have the answer for that 5% of the time. But 100% of the time you have to stop and consider what the meeting is about beforehand for the 5% of the time there’s an actual question.

Also when I know I have a meeting coming up, I don’t want to get in too deep on something that takes a lot of focus.

Yeah if it were about security they’d check the version of HTTPS, SSL, TLS and all that stuff.