Realistically, to alter culture, it is required that the structure of an institution must be modified as well, the personalities and priorities of those who end up leading are selected for by the incentives and structure of an organization. The people who “play the game right” so to speak, end up in leadership and leadership reinforces and defends the structure that got them where they are. But just swapping out leaderships without altering structure and incentives will lead to little change in the long run.
Ultimately nasa does have to play politics to receive funding from congress, that’s always been the case and always will be, there is no space exploration without public funding. That means doing stuff that is exciting to the public and convinces them to pressure congress to support it. I’d argue the flawed issue that has lead to some problems is them playing “job creation” politics which forces them to commit to wasteful facilities and companies that have outlived their usefulness to space exploration.
There have been several elections recently that they’ve lost, and there isn’t really anything the federal executive can do to alter those outcomes. The federal executive (trump and his people) can sue to challenge results on grounds of violating some federal law, but they have to actually win the case for that to effect anything. There is no pathway for them to unilaterally block or overturn election results.
The SAVE act was attempting to change that by moving a lot of oversight and management up to the federal level and under the executive branch, but that failed to pass.
In all likelihood there will be a flurry of legal challenges from trump’s people after the midterms, but those won’t stop people taking office while they’re being fought in court, and realistically they will lose the cases since they’re not based on anything.
A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).
There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.
The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.
Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.
With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.
The reality is that the ballroom is just public cover for the underground bit. Details are shaky on exactly what they’re putting in that underground bit, but it’s clear that it’s some sort of infrastructure for military/security/surveillance stuff.
Going out in a limb and guessing, I think he and his loyalists are desperate to get it functional before the mid terms because he thinks having a centralized hub for directing disinformation/propaganda campaigns and dispatching goon squads will help him manipulate the mid terms.
I also don’t think such a thing would actually make much of a difference in the outcome of the elections, even if it were set up on time. Because he’s an incompetent grifter who’s surrounded him self with sycophantic incompetents. Like, they’re convinced that they have some miracle skills of public manipulation by winning in 2024, rather than getting lucky by riding a wave of public discontent while their opponents did a massive own goal by completely misreading the political climate.
Stocks will go down in price. Which is good. Ownership of companies should be more accessible to the average person, and the value of owning a stock should be in the dividends it pays, not in the potential of the share to appreciate in value.
This is gonna sound gross and I hate thinking about stuff like this but…
The truth of it, or even plausibility of it, is irrelevant. Whether the people claiming it believe it, is irrelevant. What’s important is that it’s compelling and dominates the discourse. It prevents the discussions from being “Murder is bad VS had it coming”. Instead of getting to use the event to justify crackdowns on opposition or painting them selves as victims, they have to waste time denying allegations that they staged it.
Even if it’s not true, even if it’s absurd and conspiratorial, it’s still the right thing to say because it doesn’t let trump’s camp steer the conversation to benefit themselves. I hate it, it’s gross, but, the public conversation shifting in his favor is worse than me feeling a bit uncomfortable about a bad faith argument. I want conversations and discourse to be honest, reflective, and in good faith, but… both sides of a debate need to do that for such a discussion to exist.
Rare earths are not actually that rare, they’re just… messy to extract. They require a ton of processing, infrastructure and create a lot of byproducts that cannot just be dumped, the byproducts need to be neutralized and disposed of properly. Very expensive, not very large margins.
Rare earths are important to making certain things, but, oil’s products are key for running things. You can go a few years without replacing a phone, you don’t get oil for a week and your transportation infrastructure ceases running.
In the us, there was a dark and dismal corner of poltical science called Kremlinology, where far to much attention was payed to the positions various people were during speeches and parades, trying to determine who was and was not influential with in party at any given time, and then try to determine Soviet policy and action based on this.
Having access to the archives, we now know that they were almost entirely wrong, and the times when they were right were basically just random chance.
Like, it was ancient divination more than it was real analysis. People called them out on it at the time, but, they were influential because the CIA was gullible and congress was desperate for any sort of insight.
It is very private, by nature of it recording so little and leaving so little trace. Which is what was being asked about, not strictly speaking security.
Basically any distro not built and maintained by a company will be a thousand times more private than Mac or windows. Arch and Debian are both good in that regard, most distros are derived from those. There is also Fedora which is a community project, but it’s very heavily involved with Red Hat inc who is owned by IBM. I’ve never heard about any privacy issues there, but, it’s worth keeping in mind.
If you want something super secure and locked down in regards to privacy, there is Tails which has a lot of neat tricks and tor built in. Not sure I’d recommend it as a daily driver but it’s got it’s use cases.
Which is to say “less than” roughly 60 meters per second. Somewhere else on the site I couldn’t find again they mentioned it being a touch down speed of 20 miles per hour, which is a fair bit slower at about 9 meters a second, but that’s still a car crash if you’re hitting a solid surface.
The point remains. Getting a large object like that down to a soft, non injurious, speed is not practical with just a parachute. Other techniques must be employed.
So, the issue does come down to the chutes. A chute capable of reducing decent speed to 10m/s is significantly larger than one capable of getting the speed to 60 m/s. Impractically large on a weight constrained thing like a space capsule.
The Soyuz uses a small set of retro rockets to reduce speed in the last few seconds before touch down, and even then it’s like being in a car crash.
On the Vostok capsules the astronauts didn’t even land with the capsules, they just bailed out and parachuted down.
Landing in the ocean is significantly more comfortable and less complicated.
Realistically, to alter culture, it is required that the structure of an institution must be modified as well, the personalities and priorities of those who end up leading are selected for by the incentives and structure of an organization. The people who “play the game right” so to speak, end up in leadership and leadership reinforces and defends the structure that got them where they are. But just swapping out leaderships without altering structure and incentives will lead to little change in the long run.
Ultimately nasa does have to play politics to receive funding from congress, that’s always been the case and always will be, there is no space exploration without public funding. That means doing stuff that is exciting to the public and convinces them to pressure congress to support it. I’d argue the flawed issue that has lead to some problems is them playing “job creation” politics which forces them to commit to wasteful facilities and companies that have outlived their usefulness to space exploration.