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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • I suspect SpaceX benefited from the closer scrutiny they received from NASA and regulatory agencies, especially after Musk smoked pot on Joe Rogan‘s podcast. I’m sure he would’ve liked to “innovate” more by cutting corners but wasn’t able to because of the scrutiny, so they had to do a better job of dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. In contrast Boeing has spent several decades trying to convince the government they don’t need close scrutiny because they know what they’re doing. As the builder of some of the 20th century’s best-regarded aircraft and spacecraft, they’d largely been given that lax oversight by the 2010s. We now see the legacy of this, as lax oversight allowed them to cut the corners everyone assumed SpaceX wanted to cut, with hundreds of people dead as a result.

    When the Commercial Crew Program was first announced everyone assumed Boeing would easily ace the project and SpaceX would struggle, maybe even fail. Now I’m just hoping we don’t see two more dead courtesy Boeing before the year’s end.




  • We’ve been trying to find something to get more electrolytes into my daughter who has POTS/dysautonomia. She didn’t like the Gatorade/Powerade classics when we first started learning about/suspecting the condition (too sweet). We’ve tried others like Liquid IV and Drip Drop but she didn’t like those because of the sugar alternatives they use (weird aftertaste). We were going to try LMNT as another recommended option but saw they use stevia and that’s also a no-go. I did notice their website lists a DIY recipe, and I suspect that might be the least expensive way to go. Annoyingly, the recipe is listed using both mass and volume measurements, but I suppose that can be dealt with/converted. If we don’t find a better option for her soon I’m starting to think we’ll just try to make our own from this recipe.






  • I’m not optimistic about this. The finance “geniuses” have seen how much money software and electronics companies are making from subscription models and trying to put them into even combustion powered cars. I think it’s BMW that’s already started trying to put heated seats on a subscription model. The equipment’s already in the car but it’s disabled unless you pay them a monthly fee.










  • I think a perfect example of this is email. We used to pay for email; it came with our Internet service. Then they started offering free email services that would show banner ads in a webpage. Kind of annoying but good for people who didn’t have regular access to email in the dialup days, or eventually we realized it was convenient so we didn’t have to change our email everywhere each time we changed our ISP. Then Google started actually scanning our emails to give more relevant ads. They were less obtrusive, but we were giving up more, but we also got a lot more email storage in return and it seemed okay. Now most people use a free email for their primary. Our ISP (probably) still offers an email address with a small storage option, but who still uses that? People gradually gave it up without realizing what they gave up. Now it seems like you have to pay even more on top of your Internet access to actually get email privacy.



  • It’s not nearly as much sugar added as I expected. Jif, which seems to be the most popular brand, has 2 grams of added sugar in a 33 gram serving, for a total of 3 grams of sugar (peanuts seem to naturally produce some sugar). Comparing that to Costco’s Kirkland Select natural peanut butter, which only has peanuts and salt for ingredients, a 32 gram serving has 1 gram of total sugar. So the total sugar Jif adds is twice as much as would naturally be present, but still makes up only 6% of the serving. It’s sweeter, but not dramatically sweeter. It’s not like it’s been turned into Nutella, which has 19 grams of added sugar in a 37 gram serving, or 51% of the serving.