• No trigger discipline
• No hands on the wheel
• Open container of alcoholic beverage
• Speeding egregiously
• Driving a Nissan

All checks out.

Pyrite disease! The pyrite oxidizes in humid air, converting to a mineral that takes up much more volume. If the pyrite is incorporated into the fossil matrix, that expansion causes the fossil to crumble.

It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!

I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

My church squared that circle by only caring about others in the "eternal souls damned to hell" sense. If your physical needs weren't being met, that was a personal failing as far as they were concerned. What's that? Jesus did a lot of caring for the physical needs of others? Nah, see, that was as only as a metaphor for their spiritual needs. Get your hands off my stuff, dammit.

Rotovap on a flytrap.

What in the generative AI nonsense is that header image? A mysterious man is lasering the moon, while his crotch ray attacks a low-flying jet and another beam shoots from his briefcase towards parts unknown, and a confusing late-night aerobatic demonstration takes place in the background?

They're flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you're right up next to them -- and once they're past the front lines Russia doesn't have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine's reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine's air force is to support efforts on the ground.

I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.

I did a little digging and it seems like there's a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn't need frequent all-day service, even if it's a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they've got doing "editing" at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into "world-first electric wonder train amazes!"

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to "disrupt" it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

Says the 'man' who just tried to buy an election in Wisconsin.

Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that

Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all

Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn't unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I've heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.

Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines... Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there's no evidence this was even attempted.

Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.

Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn't just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.

I just can't think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.

And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility... Like, what the fuck? That seems like it's designed to create this sort of a disaster.

They've got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.

1. Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
2. Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
3. Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren't really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you're building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
4. Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept, and I've even drawn up plans for one I'd like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned... But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else's project. I don't trust the other people who build them to do it right.

He's suddenly full of righteous indignation now that he's had a taste of his own medicine. Hypocritical fucknugget.

This is called the "Johnson Treatment," ironically.

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don't understand why the former is objectionable. It's not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art... nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers' part

We are rapidly approaching the point where it is an open question as to whether the Supreme Court can make its rulings stick in jurisdictions that don't fall along the current majority's ideological bent, and that's not a place anybody in their right mind wants to go. The question is, are Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett still possessed of enough self-awareness to recognize that and rule accordingly at least some of the time? If not, do Roberts and Gorsuch make a consistent enough voting bloc to swing dicey decisions away from the foaming-at-the-mouth radical right wing of the bench when they might seriously endanger the ongoing credibility of the court as an institution? I'm not super optimistic, but time will tell...

In the mirror universe, in 1952, a young Fred Willard was walking through a chemical plant when he fell into a vat of preservation fluids. Instead of drowning him, the fluids embalmed him alive, making him ageless, immortal... and evil. 72 years later, having mastered the art of crossing between realities, he now stalks our world, neither dead nor alive, seeking carnal pleasures and absolute power. He is... THE ALPHA MALE.

Coming to theatres this fall!

Oof... At work we deal with clients whose projects are covered by NDAs and confidentiality agreements, among other things. This is bad enough if the information scanned is siloed per organization, as it could create a situation where somebody not under NDA could access confidential client info leaked by an LLM that ingested every PDF in Adobe's cloud service without regard to distribution. Even worse if they're feeding everything back into a single global LLM -- corporate espionage becomes as simple as a bit of prompt engineering!

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I'm so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request