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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Add in the congress critters from both houses need to run their own campaigns at some point, in many cases they can’t afford to just kiss the ring. This is especially true in the house where seats are up for grabs “soon” and the voter base is relatively small. If you’re a Representative and won your seat on a small margin, you clearly don’t have a mandate and need to act more moderate. Some senate seats are in the same boat (McCormick in PA, assuming the recount still favors him, is in this boat; he’s run three times now and barely beat out Casey this time, it’s a fair bet he doesn’t have solid footing for his first term and can only toe the party line so far). The only thing we should all bet on is at the end of the day everyone in politics is going to lookout for themselves first. It’s going to be a shitshow for at least the next two years, probably the full four and maybe beyond.



  • But as you pointed out above, children were (and are) being pushed into colleges whether it’s right for them or not. Hugh schools are measured by college admissions rates of their students, and so are pushing kids into this debt without any real voice on the other side telling the students they have other options.

    Colleges are pushing new students towards financial aid without spelling out the true costs of those loans. All of this to people who often have almost no financial literacy or experience to understand the impacts. They are exactly like the soldiers you just mentioned. So by all means student debt is predatory.

    Its clear you are not open to considering some debts as beneficial to discharge, so I won’t waste the time explaining the vast net benefits of infusing our younger and middle aged generation with cash flow that they would by every measure largely reinvest in their communities, making everyone better off. But can we at least agree that student debt is at least as predatory as shitty car loans to young enlisted recruits near bases?



  • Our cat will put us to bed. When we turn the light off she will lay on my hip for 5-15 minutes then once she’s convinced I’m asleep (I’m not) she will hop off the bed and go do cat things (she tells us it’s catslified and we can’t know she does these cat things). She sometimes will lay on my wife for 30 seconds, maybe a minute but always lays on me. She’ll pace around too until I lay on my side so she can put me to bed.

    In the winter she’ll come back and snuggle up with one of us because she likes the warmth and we keep it cooler at night. In the summer she’ll lays a bit further away near one of us (usually pinning the blanket down so I can’t get up). She is truly a creature of habit.



  • The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.



  • In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

    The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

    I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.




  • The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).



  • These are small cell antennas, generally used for mmWave 5G due to the poor penetration the high frequency signals have or to increase capacity of a network where a lot of devices are used in a small space (places like stadiums, airports, city centers, etc) in which case they may have LTE antennas as well. They usually cover about a city blocks worth of area so you’ll see them spaced much like you describe.

    The box on the ground is the actual radio and power supplies with the antennas behind the shroud on the pole. You’ll sometimes also see the radio cabinet mounted about 1.5m up the pole so it’s off the ground.

    Source: a company I used to work for installed these (Crown Castle).


  • As an introvert that likes the idea of hanging out with friends but gets exhausted from the thought of social interaction, I can’t stress enough how much I value friends that include me like this. I even usually have fun and will sometimes even join in after a while.

    PSA, always invite your introvert friends, and don’t take it personally if they decline.