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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is why I (a Georgian) am doing early in-person voting and not mail-in voting. Between the tactic you mentioned, the possibility of disqualification due to a bullshit “signature mismatch,” and sabotage from DeJoy (who is still the fucking Postmaster General because Biden apparently hates the USPS as much as he does and failed to make board appointees who would remove him), mail-in voting is unacceptably risky unless you have no other choice. And that’s sad, terrifying, and – most importantly – fucking infuriating.



  • I was under the impression that a “rocket” does not include the payload.

    Sure, I think you’re totally correct… if the part with the engine is separable from the part with the payload. But with the Space Shuttle, that isn’t the case unless you’re limiting yourself to talking about the SRBs. The orbiter is a spaceplane and that makes it weird, but its main engines are rocket engines (as opposed to a hybrid ramjet or something) and it launches vertically, so I think it’s still fair to also call it a rocket.

    Or as another example, consider the problem scaled aaaaaaaall the way down to something like this:

    Is the whole thing a “rocket,” or does that only describe the bottom half and it’s called something else from the payload bay up?


  • Remember, unless we’re talking about Enterprise, “space shuttle rockets” includes the orbiter itself. The orbiter’s main engines were where all that fuel from the external tank was going, after all! From that perspective, I would argue that the main “space shuttle rocket” was definitely much more complex than the Super Heavy booster, because the crew stuff, cargo stuff, spaceplane stuff, etc. was integrated into it.

    I feel like your criticism of the shuttle system being less reusable than advertised might have been more applicable if we were talking about the Soviet Buran (which indeed used expendable Energia rockets to reach orbit), not NASA’s shuttles.











  • That’s a nice thought, but it won’t happen because the ratcheting effect of primarying out moderates only works in one direction, rightward. This is because corporate donors are just as happy to fund fascists as they are moderates.

    In contrast, progressive candidates often don’t stand a chance because corporate donors fucking hate them and will spend effectively unlimited amounts of money to destroy their chances, especially if they make regulation and oversight of corporations a big part of their platform. Ditto for the police “union[sic]” and police reform, or AIPAC and opposing genocide, for that matter.