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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • That’s great for the workers, but… is Boeing as a company just too far gone anyways? Even a gesture like this doesn’t seem like it could reverse the spiral they’ve fallen into…

    Brazenly assassinating whistleblowers, a notorious focus on moneymaking over public safety, rushing production in order to meet deadlines, self-certifications that are being found not to be up to industry standards, quality rejection by NASA, more whistleblowers citing safety violations on the new 777 that are so severe that it might be more cost-effective to just scrap all the planes than to totally disassemble them to fix the issues, and a complete exodus of talented workers who can pass on essential technical knowledge because driving them away was necessary in order to make all the Speed Over Safety stuff feasible…

    I certainly don’t envy anyone who’s been tasked with saving the rotten zombie husk of Boeing that’s shambling along only by the momentum it accrued while it was alive.


  • Oh, wow. I can’t imagine having knife skills that precise. I’ve looked into this; what you actually need to do to prepare the fish isn’t actually difficult- there are only two organs that need to be removed without puncturing them.

    But you still need a steady hand and incredible precision to remove those parts 100% consistently, frankly slicing the fish into ‘paper thin’ sheets would be 10x more difficult- just, if you fuck up a paper thin cut then it’s still fine and edible. Managing to pull off that sort of presentation technique is a really good indicator that this girl is the real deal- if she can make those paper thin slices, she can remove the poisons in her sleep.

    I would love to try real sushi one day, but alas. I live in the UK. Best I can do is homemade with stuff from the supermarket.


  • Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

    Armchair general opinion here, but basically: It pretty much doesn’t matter how much armour you pile onto something- it adds weight, fuel costs, and reduces speed, and all the armour in the world will still only last a limited amount of time against powerful explosives specifically designed to destroy armour. The most basic thing about armoured vehicles is doing something in the time that that armour buys you. And to do stuff, you need speed, firepower, and a good optics system.

    The Bradley has those three things in spades. Even if it’s not the most heavily armoured vehicle ever seen, it’s really fucking cost effective, WAY easier to maintain with Ukraine’s more limited resources than the US army, and versatile as hell. It uses the time that it has before the armour inevitably fails exceedingly well.


  • Even if Blizzard games haven’t had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.

    Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.

    Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan “free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times”, which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.

    It wouldn’t be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard’s actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren’t just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government’s oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard’s morals and principles, or lack thereof.












  • Oh I like this topic! Fun fact, Ball Bearings are actually a SUPER important little thing and a major hallmark component of the industrial revolution. You need to be able to make really good ball bearings in order to make a rotating joint that’s just decent, and churning out perfect little spheres by the tens of thousands was one of the first tests of the modern world’s capacity to make things in industrial quantity.

    Basically, a standard rotating joint (simplified) has an inner metal band, eight ball bearings equally spaced around the inner metal band, and an outer metal band that traps all the ball bearings between it and the inner metal band. This means that the two bands can be rotated with incredibly low friction and relatively low wear. This is used in basically every machine with moving parts, and trains absolutely fit that criteria.

    But it’s definitely not operated with zero wear, especially in machines that are constantly operated and weigh a lot, like trains. Ball Bearings can and will wear down during operation and need to be replaced semi-frequently.

    As for buying them from China… I would assume that’s totally possible, but China might not have enough stock, or they could be trying to leverage their position to sell the ball bearings at a high markup since Russia doesn’t have the ability to buy elsewhere.