NaibofTabr

“Nobody had called me. Nobody had said, ‘You did something wrong, you’re in trouble, you’re on probation.’ I had gotten nothing. Then I get a text message early the next morning saying, ‘Can you talk at noon?’ And I was fired immediately. There was no warning. And I asked, ‘Well, what, you know, what’s the [issue]?’ Nothing. They were just like, ‘Oh, we just want to make some changes.’ They never said why.

Hmm, terminated without cause? isn’t this grounds for a lawsuit?

One of the biggest problems they would have is just pointing their communications equipment in the right direction. The Voyager probes have a complicated guidance system (AACS) which takes input from a three-axis gyroscope and several other reference instruments to keep the 3.7m antenna pointed at Earth. If the antenna goes out of alignment then the radio beam will not hit Earth and will not be received.

The only reason this works is that the Deep Space Network on Earth is actively listening for the signal from the probes, and the people operating it know exactly what direction to point the receiving antennae to get the signal from the probes. If you don’t have very precise targeting you probably won’t get the signal.

Next year Voyager 1 will reach a distance of one light-day from Earth and it’s already a very difficult problem that is only solvable because it was planned for extensively prior to launch, so never mind trying to accomplish this at a distance of hundreds of light-years with no planning.

This ^. You can think about a radio source just like a visible light source. It fades out over distance because the energy emission is spreading out. If there are other light sources that are of similar or greater strength between you and that light, it will be basically impossible to distinguish the one light that you care about from everything else.

Native Americans: “Washington DC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration”

Apparently there’s some bullshit narrative being pushed by Fox that Tim Walz is somehow responsible.

Um, the core feature is privacy invasion. It does what it says on the tin.

It’s fine if some people want that functionality, as long as it’s not enabled by default.

So there’s this radio editorial from 1973 called “America: The Good Neighbor”, written by George Sinclair. I think a lot of what Sinclair described has been lost, unfortunately, but this line always pops into my head:

You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at.

I feel like this part is still true. For better or worse, as a nation even when we feel shame due to the behavior of our politicians we don’t try to hide it, pretend like it doesn’t exist. Our politics is theater and we all know it. It’s on display for everyone to see.

You can read the whole thing here: https://thinkingagain.com/html/american_tribute.php

It is an artifact of history, and just… keep in mind that it needs to be read and understood in the context of the time it was written. The Apollo program had just ended the year before, and US troops had just withdrawn from Vietnam. The Watergate scandal was current news and is specifically what Sinclair was referring to in the quoted line above. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered only 5 years prior, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a recent memory. It had been only a decade since John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

And there was video and live discussion of all of it just on display for everyone to see on the still quite new platform of broadcast television.

Things haven’t changed much.

Food is a reasonable target for biodegradable packaging because you don’t really expect the food to sit around for more than a year (for long-term food packaging you just wouldn’t use a biodegradable material).

Packaging products that might have a long shelf life is more problematic. If the material breaks down in saltwater then it will start breaking down if someone picks it up with sweaty or recently washed hands.

Well right, and coating them with plastic means that they leave plastic residue behind if they break down in an uncontrolled environment, and increases the cost and complexity of recycling:

If the paper has a plastic or aluminum coating, it can be recycled, but it is much more expensive and complicated.

Some plastic coatings can be separated from paper during the recycling process. Still, it is often cheaper and easier to use virgin materials to create new products than recycling paper coated with plastic.

Paper coated with plastic isn’t suitable for composting, and most times, such products are incinerated for heat or landfilled rather than recycled.

https://www.almostzerowaste.com/non-recyclable-paper/

Yes they already exist. They are not really better than pure plastic, they’re kind of a form of greenwashing because they appear to be environmentally friendly.

Aida said the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

If this means that it does not break down when exposed to just water, that’s a pretty big deal. Water solubility has been the major issue making biodegradable plastics useless for food packaging (typically you want to either keep the food wet and water in, or dry and water out - either way water permeability is a problem).

Of course most foods also contain salt, so… I guess that’s why the article talks about coatings. If the material has to be coated to keep it from breaking down too fast, what is the point? either the coating will prevent it from breaking down, or it just moves the problem to the coating not breaking down.

It is Winter

Yeah their whole shtick has been mimicking American corporatism et al since before the 80s. Aint working out for them.

There absolutely was an effort in Japanese businesses to imitate American businesses in the 1980s, but it was also very much a two-way street and it’s important to keep this in mind. Some of the toxic work culture elements that exist in the US corporate world today were imported. Also keep in mind that learning about other businesses was more difficult at the time because the Internet wasn’t a thing yet. Computers were barely getting local proprietary networks in very few, leading-edge businesses. If you wanted to learn about business operarions in another country you’d have to buy physical media (newspapers, industry journals, commentary books) or visit in person. It was slow and expensive.

Ultimately a lot of what you’re referring to tracks back to Theory Z which was also called “Japanese Management”.

In fact there has been a lot of cultural crosstalk between Japan and the US, going back a long time. For instance, baseball

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1859 and is Japan’s most popular participatory and spectator sport. […]

The Japanese government appointed American oyatoi in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, who made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.

When the digital electronics revolution came in the 1970s, Japan was both a competitor and a partner for the US. In the 1980s Japan’s economy rivaled the US. Frankly, a lot of it did in fact “work out” for them, though it’s difficult to separate the economic success from the electronics industry boom (how much of the rapid development of electronics was dependent on the corporate culture that had developed during the previous decade? how much of the business success was a result of the demand for the electronics products? how much of the demand was created internally by the businesses themselves? how would you even go about drawing lines between them?). The exploding popularity of video games (a side effect of the electronics revolution) resulted in a massive cultural export from Japan to the rest of the world, including the US.

And really the rabit hole goes way deeper. I highly recommend this video: Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. by Moon Channel

So what you said is true, technically, but it is really a half-truth which projects the idea that the relationship was somehow one-sided, when in reality it was very much not.

One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone’s automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state.

…

Pain is a great teacher.

If you had the hardware to build a robot that could “feel” the world around it, and you wanted it to self-teach how to move around on its own (so that you don’t have to pre-define movement paths), you would probably program in a system that could interpret potentially damaging sensations as danger/bad and avoid them automatically (too hot/too cold/too sharp/too hard/etc). That system would essentially be a pain response.

There’s nothing functionally communist about the government of China.

Taco will be the next word banned from federal information systems.

no shit son

Trump exploded the value of the US dollar by destroying the trustworthiness of the US as a trading partner, and the market is responding.

Graphene is the most amazing material, it can do anything you can imagine - except leave the lab.