Launch services isn’t a contract to launch anything, it’s just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.

Google’s delusional fantasy has always been you want to buy a guitar, you go on Google, their ad algorithm shows you a perfectly targeted ad for the guitar you want, and you love and trust Google so you click the ad and buy it. They think LLMs will make that actually work, they want to give you a Grima Wormtongue that can simper and manipulate until you do love and trust it, and once you’re a rotting husk it whispers the ad algorithm into your ear so you think it was your idea.

School class picture, the priest that let Stalin and his mom stay with him to get away from Stalin’s abusive dad faked a story about who Stalin’s dad was so he could get in to a free school for children of church officials.

You can treat Costa Gavras movies like a series: Z, State of Siege, Missing

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that’s happening.

People jumping out of windows in 1929 was a hoax made up by Winston Churchill trying to convince poor people that rich people were hurting too. One drunk tourist fell off a balcony before the crash, and Churchill manipulated it for propaganda. The first actual suicide on Wall Street in the weeks after the crash was a clerk in her 20s worked to death by her bosses getting rich off the volatility using her as a human high frequency trading computer.

They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/02/10/boston-man-found-not-guilty-of-being-a-chinese-agent/ that’s the first “Chinese spy” in that Hill article

During COVID China let people do government paperwork in an app instead of the embassy, and let local businesses sign up to help old or poor people with the app. The FBI decided to call that “police stations” and went after guys who owned a restaurant and set up an iPad for people to use and scared the shit out of them. They hadn’t done anything yet, but if the FBI scared them enough to lie or delete the app, now there’s a process crime and they’re fucked. There was nothing actually happening, like all the teenage autistic terrorists the FBI makes up and pretends to catch. Same with the other countries the panic spread to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nv0p6047go

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/chinese-police-stations-montreal-groups-demand-answers-apology-after-police-investigation/

People are saying puritans or religion, but the US was even more religious and puritain 150 years ago, when nudity in public bathhouses was common. What changed was the US got rich enough to buy millions of tiny single person bathtubs and make installing more of them than you need an investment asset that you sell to pay for retirement.

Japan has onsens and it also has people sleeping in a bush on the street. Both of those disgust Americans because you look poor. Even if you’re a sleepy business man in a suit it’s offensive that you’re not embarrassed that somebody might think you’re poor for a second. American onsens were for the poor, then for the very poor, then they were effectively illegal because we hate the idea that somebody too poor to buy a personal bathtub is allowed to live.

Those who affirm the sovereignty of the Israeli state and also believe Palestinians have a right to sovereignty for the same reason, and who take the Palestinian question as fundamental, must admit that the Israeli establishment’s policy is literally crazy and deliberately aims at avoiding all possible solutions to this problem. It is therefore politi- cally accurate to say that a state of war exists between Israel and the Palestinians. In this war the Palestinians’ only weapon is terrorism. It is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no other, and the French who approved FLN terrorism against the French must approve in turn the Palestinians’ terrorist action. This abandoned, betrayed, exiled people can show its courage and the force of its hate only by organizing deadly attacks.

~~Jean-Paul Sartre, 1972, after the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich

The thing they changed was cutting holes in the area where the fire was last time to “ventilate” it. I think it’s the same fire just blowing out the holes and melting something different.

I don’t know if you’re falling for it or this is just how you feel, but Newsom was talking to Charlie Kirk who popularized the “groomers” line, calls June “groomer month” all the time and constantly talks about executing “groomers”. Newsom softballed it to make it seem like Kirk just cares about sports, and repeatedly dog whistled a lot about how much he agrees with Kirk keeping it ambiguous about what exactly he agrees with.

Maybe you believe Newsom is deep down a good guy and he’s just doing this to shill for right wing votes, and once you give him power he’ll be normal. But right now all he’s doing is telling his audience of out of touch liberals that the “I don’t want to see a black pilot on my plane” guy is the kind of sensible conservative Democrats should be bipartisan with.

IMO based on how he talks and the trans bills he’s vetoed as governor, Newsom is the type of liberal that likes the idea of being the big guy protecting “these poor people” from dirty rednecks, but is also extremely suspicious that all this gender shit is some kind of Tiktok trend that might get out of hand if he lets trans people have it too easy.

He doesn’t, almost all of SpaceX’s profit is Starlink. On NASA contracts they bid low and lose money to block competition. Elon bid 2.9 billion for a lunar lander so Jeff Bezos’s company wouldn’t get it, and it’s going to cost Elon 4x that much at minimum if he actually has to finish it, which is why he’s trying to kill the moon program.

Early on NASA contracts were funding SpaceX, now he has to pull up that ladder to protect his monopoly, and it’s cheaper to just kill NASA entirely.

He can still get government money but once all the technical people inside the government are gone it would work like Boring Company. Draw some CGI of a space monorail and sell it to congress with no process or oversight and grift off hype and fomo.

They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

The story also goes on to say about how the deaths caused by the soviet-era disaster cause is disputed. How is that a pertinent thing to add?

It’s not disputed those are just different parts of the same IAEA report. 2 people died in the explosion, 28 of radiation poisoning, 1 from a heart attack, so 31 known, then 19 with high radiation exposure died years later for ambiguous reasons, so 50 potential direct accident deaths. And then they estimated about 4,000 as the total eventual cancer deaths.

Their definition of “anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) content” is dialed way up into treating “China will fall in 7 days” like good content and anything less than that is Chinese propaganda. If they search for Tienanmen Square and get “pictures of the square without mention of the massacre” they classify that as “pro-CCP”. If they get “unbiased historical content” or news coverage about bad shit China does they call that “neutral”.

They also don’t do anything to compensate for Tiktok’s overall censorship, they went looking for massacre and genocide on the platform where people say corn and unalive, they don’t compare how Tiktok deals with China vs any other subject.

They did a survey of how pro-China people are and how much they use Tiktok, but don’t do anything to adjust for Tiktok being publicly associated with China. They could’ve put a question in the survey about whether people were boycotting Tiktok for anti-CCP reasons but didn’t, which looks like they were fishing for a result.

I remember NCRI from back when they did the study comparing Antifa to ISIS, and they’re still doing weird shit like that, if you like Luigi you’re “Killing with Applause”, colleges being too woke and anti-genocide is the “Corruption of the American Mind”, if you do DEI it’s your fault white people are racist.

A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

What makes Marxism communist is structurally you are more brutally exploited than a serf. A lord who kills his serfs stops being a lord, a boss who kills his employees is hiring. That nature of the exploitation left open an opportunity for a minority bourgeoisie to form and replace the lords last time, but this time capitalism doesn’t allow room for that. It flattens everything into one homogenized capitalist class and one homogenized working class, so the only possible revolution is those two switching places. If Marx believed you were freer or more powerful than a serf he wouldn’t be communist, he would be looking for which faction of workers was going to break out into a middle revolutionary class and replace capitalism with their own system of exploitation.

It’s both. Many, many issues have 15 people who can explain what they don’t like and try to do something about it, and then 15 million people who don’t like the same thing but can’t explain it, won’t try, only vote when they feel like it, and will never see any scolding you try to do.

Yes, Democrats don’t know how politics works, they ask Republicans to decide which issues are important, and then argue a slightly more moderate response to those issues is best. Sometimes they accidentally win doing that, if the economy is good and people are happy with moderation, but that’s probably not going to be true any time soon.

Wealth tax to collect more money to give to Israel and the most lethal military and killing immigrants is what she ran on, she ran as a right wing populist and lost because Trump is a better right wing populist

Small minded voters are told what to think, Harris refused to tell them to want free healthcare because that shit pisses off donors