Don’t forget the part where you buy all of the extremely hazardous acid before the apocalypse.

And then remember to do the wiring of your shelter before you breath in all the acid and lead fumes.

Get the order wrong there and you’re just gonna burn all your tanks of acid.

The comic background radiation is just the mii theme played at really slow speed

Blazing saddles was written with the golden rule of offensive comedy: don’t punch down or up, punch in all directions.

I’ll yank your units

Is that you satan?

I use them to wrap my fish, works great to prevent freezer burn.

I still get half a tree worth of sale ads every week

Use it to extract more money from the indentured servants they conned into going.

You think Jeff bezos is gonna be putting up the solar panels?

You think the air in mars habitats is gonna be free?

The comic isn’t talking about love, it’s talking about marriage.

I’ll preface this with the fact that I’m a straight male atheist, and I’m married. My wife and I have had rough patches, as every relationship does, but I made a commitment to her. I swore an oath that I would support her through whatever happens in this life. I didn’t swear this to God or anybody but her and myself.

I’m a very principled person, one of those principles is that if you say you’re going to do something, you should try your level best to do it until it becomes clear it’s not possible. I don’t make promises I don’t expect to keep.

The thing that strikes me as off about this comic is the fact that they are married. If they’d just been partners, then that’s one thing, there’s less commitment there. But marriage is a commitment to a person. It’s not a promise to having sex or feeling romantic every single day, but just a promise that you’ll be there with them during the good times and the bad times. That you’ll support them in what they want to do. There’s no need for these people to divorce if one of their sexualities is changing, because marriage isn’t about the sex.

If my wife told me out of the blue that she thought she was interested in women, or might be trans, I would never offer divorce first. We’d have a conversation about what that means for our romantic relationship, but I still respect and care for her as a person, and would feel like I’m failing as a husband if I wanted to cut and run during a hard transition like that. I made a commitment to her, and if that’s what she wants to do, then I’ll ride it out and make sure she has as many resources as she can for a major change like that, and I know she’ll do the same thing for me. Hard times and changes don’t mean the end of a marriage, it means it’s time to buckle down, come together with your partner, and come up with a plan on how to face it together.

I also respect that nuance like that is impossible to fit into a single page comic like this, and there does seem to be that message of supporting your partner in their decisions. I just have issue with the flippant call for divorce. Relationships and people do change, and it’s good to talk about that and acknowledge that that we should support people when they change, but divorcing them is not supporting them. The comic would have been just as good if they left out the panel about divorce and just went to “my wife is single” because an open marriage is still a valid marriage, it just means you’re not devoting your genitals to one person.

I agree with you that our society puts a lot of importance on love, maybe too much. I’ll always love my wife, eventually. Believe me, marriage is hard, you’re not gonna feel the warm fuzzies every day, or maybe even every week, but the point is that you try. I promised myself to her because I love her. But my takeaway is that I loved her so much for years, that I promised I would always be there for her even if we’re both sick, or I’m mad at her for something, or if she’s changing as a person, and she promised the same thing. That commitment is more important than the love, because love is temperamental. You marry someone because you love them so much, you promise to be there even when you may not be feeling that love.

That’s why they made it a pin.

Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.

It’s a real shame that they never got to install the centrifuge module on the Iss. It was supposed to be big enough for a person to fit in, and would spin to simulate gravity. The best way to mitigate damage is to remove the thing that’s damaging you. We don’t test how to survive radiation exposure by having people stand next to some plutonium and see how many jumping jacks stop them from getting cancer. We have protocols about how long you can be around radiation, and how fast you need to leave the area. Microgravity would be treated the same way: how long until it starts affecting your health, and what’s the minimum amount of rotational artificial gravity needed to stave off the effects.

Before Apollo 11, nasa spent a lot of time getting astronauts to try to navigate to a simulated lander out in the desert. They used explosives to make a scale version of a lunar field, dropped astronauts off, and had them try to navigate to the lander.

If I remember right, only a couple people were able to even identify where they were on the map, let alone find the lander again. Lunar surfaces are just so unnatural that human instincts about size and scale tend to get you in more trouble than not.

No atmosphere to diffuse the light makes things look really strange.

If it really did, then nasa would not have committed to this hare brained scheme of musk’s.

The fact that the SpaceX proposal was accepted by an interim director who then went to work at SpaceX 6 months later, and no one has investigated this or challenged the acceptance of this contract tells me that safety is clearly not the priority. If safety was the priority, the new director would have looked at the current proposal and demanded a renegotiation or reconsideration.

If only that philosophy existed today.

NASA landed on the moon with 1960’s technology, not because it was easy in the 60’s, but because every single aspect of the mission was planned, tested, rehearsed, and made as simple as possible where it couldn’t have a redundancy. The only time something went really wrong was when a faulty tank exploded on Apollo 13, but due to having an entirely separate craft in the form of the lander attached, the astronauts were able to ride out the failure all the way around the moon and back to earth. Oh yeah, even the orbit they picked would let the whole spacecraft fly around the moon and come back to earth without having to do any engine burns.

Look at planned missions today. Launch the Human Landing system. Have it sit in space for an unknown amount of time while anywhere from 6 to 12 refueling rockets are launched to refuel the lander. Relight lander engines in earth orbit, go to moon, relight engines again to orbit the moon. Launch the Orion spacecraft with crew on board, this also must burns its engines once at the moon to enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous and dock with the HLS, transfer crew and supplies over. Undock Orion, relight HLS engines for a 4th time to deorbit and land HLS. Use an elevator to get from HLS to the lunar surface for the next week or so. Board the HLS, which needed at least 6 refueling tankers full of cryogenic fuel to get to the moon and has now been sitting on the 200 degree lunar surface for a week, and light the engines a 5th time to take off and enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous with Orion, and return home. NASA has demonstrated that Orion can do the mission. But HLS has not even shown the technical capability of doing this. Its engines have never been relit in space, it has never sat in space for a week to see what happens to the engines. The entire interior isn’t even built yet and NASA is just using a 9 meter steel circle to train astronauts on the airlock section because no one knows what it will look like.

This mission couldn’t be more complicated if you tried. Apollo needed a total of 1 engine relight on the transfer stage, and 2 engine relights on the command module: one to enter lunar orbit, and one to leave and return to earth. The lander used pressure fed engines that only needed to work once each. One engine got them from orbit to the surface, one got them from the surface to orbit. If the Ascent engine didn’t work, NASA had plans for everything from literally jump starting it with the descent module’s batteries like it’s a dead car, to having an astronaut use bolt cutters to cut the safety pins on the engine so the valves can be manually opened.

If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you might call off work and get it towed to a mechanic. What do you do when you’re trying to leave the moon, and your rocket engines won’t light because they’ve been sitting in space for almost 2 weeks? The nearest rocket engineer is 240,000 miles away back on earth, and so are all the spare parts. And what do you do if only some of those engines light, and the others either don’t or explode while you’re on a suborbital trajectory. Complexity kills on harsh environments. Space is one of the harshest environment we’ve ever been in, so things need to be as simple as possible and known to work.

The fact that this was your take away is concerning.

No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.

Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.

You want to know a better system?

What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?

We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.

As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.

DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.

To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.

That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.

No, that’s a card that’s been standard in Google searches for years. It basically copy pastes an excerpt from an article written by someone else.

The AI card is an entirely new feature that is being rolled out where an LLM attempts to fill the same roll without deliberately copying a third party source.