I’m in the space industry and I can tell you that anyone pretending to be an authority on orbital mechanics on the internet is full of shit. I’ve taken entire classes called “advanced orbital mechanics.” That shit is wildly hard, vaguely inaccurate, and so slow that you can only do it effectively on a computer. Even then you have to decide which variables to throw out because you if you use them all you won’t be able to calculate predictions on every satellite in time for them to be useful. Then you have to take the predictions, predict how wrong they are, and predict again based on those predictions if two satellites will run into each other.

The truth is that nobody knows if Kessler Syndrome is even real. I personally fall on the side of thinking it’s nonsense, there are too many variables that would have to go wrong all at once. It’s like being worried about winning the lottery. There have been multiple catastrophic on orbit conjunctions that have created thousands of pieces of debris. Still no Kessler Syndrome. Even in a nightmare scenario I can only see it affecting one orbital regime. The odds of Starlink effecting the orbit that GPS is in is effectively not possible. But this is not a solved field and I am not remotely an expert, I’m just tired of people who don’t know a thing about the field thinking they’re experts because they have a JWST desktop wallpaper and have 300 hours in KSP. The real experts are ancient old men and women who have been doing orbital predictions for 40 years and I’ve seen them get into yelling matches about this sort of thing.

This post got away from me but the point is this shit is so involved it effectively can’t be fact checked because you could come to whatever conclusion you want.

The tow was (rip) the bar. That’s wild, you can literally see the change happening in real time. If you guys do work on the radar regularly we’ve probably met haha, small world.

I left not too long ago, it’s gotten significantly warmer. Rained every week of summer. I think it hit 60 one day. The tow is closed because the permafrost underneath shifted and the building is cracking in half.

Thule?

Depends on the cost of living and state taxes in an area. Usually it’s $3.50-$5.00 a gallon/~4 liters. At the gas stations in Germany on American military bases it’s about $4.50 a gallon right now.

Nobody goes to Starbucks for good coffee, they go because it’s the same everywhere. Sometimes I want to go get a great coffee somewhere they know how to pull a decent shot, and sometimes I want brownish sugarmilk.

Have they been difficult to get? I’ve always been vaguely interested but never actually looked into getting one.

The end of WW2 was a complex political issue, and the atomic bombs were not the ‘press here, end war’ that most of us believe.

The Japanese we’re holding out hope (stupidly) that the Soviet Union would negotiate a conditional surrender with the united States as the end of the imperial system was unacceptable to them. The US had floated that if there was an unconditional surrender, that the imperial system would stay intact, but wanted it to seem like a US condition, not a Japanese one, because that would be a conditional surrender.

The Soviets always intended to invade, but were held by a nonaggression pact they made with the Japanese. The US pressured the Soviets very hard to violate this and invade Manchuria.

There was literally a Japanese war cabinet convened already when news of Nagasaki reached them. We have actual primary source for their reactions. They did not care.

Only once the second bomb dropped and Manchuria was invaded did some of the cabinet manage to convince the emporer to intervene which was extremely rare.

At least JJ had the decency to put it in an alt dimension where its canonicity can be properly disregarded.

I know I’ll catch flak for this but they’re what got me into Star Trek. I was completely unfamiliar with it and the movies were fun so I got into the shows. Obviously they share very little besides a vague aesthetic but the movies were a good bridge for me as a teenager

Ironically the BMWs here in Germany tend to use their signals in my experience

Putting aside that that whole show is pretty rough and I’ve mentally decanonized it, the guy who said it is technically a mega space nazi from the space nazi dimension so I choose to believe he just thought that Musk being an aspiring space nazi was as cool in our universe as it was in his.

Honestly I’m pretty proud of how well turned the ship around on gay rights. Like in the span of a decade there was like a 40% opinion swing on that. We’re still not where we need to be and it seems like it’s getting worse though tbh. I think Europe overtook us on that front because I feel much safer here in Germany being gay in public.

How (generally) genuinely nice and outgoing everyone is in the states. (Outside of the south where it tends to be a very fake in my experience.) In the states I’m mildly introverted, in Germany I’m usually one of the most outgoing in the room.

Our multicultural foods and stuff. You’re never more than a stones throw from really good Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc. food anywhere in the US.

Turning right on a red light, the European mind cannot comprehend it.

Air Conditioning.

Handicap accessibility.

Our national parks are unparalleled.

Probably a few other American gems I could think of if forced to.

All that being said I’m immigrating to Germany right now and the grass is very much greener over here. I have no desire to live in the US again. I’m definitely not proud of America anymore, but I am proud of a few things about America.

Yeah really risking life and limb 🙄

You’re either a troll or you’ve had your brain freshly Zambonied, either way you’re not worth the effort to debate.

Highly doubtful much of anything majorly sensitive got leaked. Firstly even unclassified DoD emails are encrypted by default. Secondly anything classified isn’t even on a network that can talk to normal email, it’s either 100% point to point encrypted or on an airgapped network. If I hopped on SIPR (DoD Secret-level internet) and emailed a normal email address it simply wouldn’t work.

We’ve only sent $71B by DOD accounting. We’re giving them our old stuff that we would have disposed of and buying new stockpiles. In most cases we would have done this anyway.

Even if it were the case that we’ve spent $71B we otherwise would not have, that’s a damn good deal. We’re defeating our greatest geopolitical adversary for 5% of our military budget while hardly lifting a finger. Now that’s cost cutting!

Cluster munitions are normally controversial but in this case I don’t think they are. Cluster munitions are controversial because they leave tons of unexploded ordinance sitting around like landmines waiting for someone to die later, but that doesn’t matter in this war in my opinion for two reasons. Number 1 it’s Ukraine’s land and if they think saturating it with little explosives they’ll need to clean up later is a good thing to do that’s their business. Number 2 Ukraine is covered in all sorts of UXO right now, including the somehow non-controversial literal land mines.

4k Blu Rays exist. Aside from the pain of having to get a special cracked drive to rip them they are my primary backup for my movie server.