Thrashy

I'm bleeding, making me the victor!

Rotovap on a flytrap.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything -- very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially -- and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn't blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That's arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren't afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing's case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

With regard to this specific issue, you don't even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because "think how you could hurt his future prospects" -- examples are so plentiful that you can't help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It's really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball's ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.

Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary -- the least likeable candidate that's made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis -- still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I've seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don't have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.

Yes, but the Obama "Hope" poster is probably the most famous piece of campaign graphic design in at least 50 years.

My high-school friend group adopted "it goes" from our French class ("Comment ça va?" "Ça va!", roughly meaning "How goes it?" "It goes!" being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

This is what's actually meant by the "invisible hand." They pushed prices past what the market was willing to bear, and lost sales as people made do without. Now they're adjusting prices back down, because it makes more sense to accept a smaller margin and make it up in volume. It's a textbook example of the demand curve in action.

When market-based systems work, they work fairly elegantly. It's the cases where they break down that I get concerned with.

The Wikipedia article for these little monsters describes the males aggressively fighting over females mid-mating, to the point of killing some as they attempt to tear them away from one another, and then squeezing the eggs out of their dead bodies to fertilize them... Gonna guess it's the same one.

If I recall, it's between 3x and 10x as expensive to build buried lines versus overhead, tending more towards the high end of that number in existing built-out neighborhoods where there's a lot of existing stuff in the right-of-way that needs to be removed or worked around somehow.

The real problem that folks have been bringing up is for-profit electric utilities ignoring line maintenance and instead just pocketing as profit the funds that should have paid for that work. Lots of folks in my area have noted that the utility used to regularly trim trees near the lines, but that work basically stopped after it merged into a larger regional power company. Even when people would call to report branches basically draped over the lines, the utility would ignore the issue.

For what it's worth, I live in a relatively small pocket where power is provided by a county public utility, and the outages in our area were much less severe and power was restored to all but one or two people within a day. The utility board is far from perfect, but in this case they performed significantly better than their for-profit peer around us.

I've got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I've seen from "status symbol" card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I've ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that "low" rate you'd have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

Fun fact! In America, bartenders are more likely to die due to a violent incident at work than police are. Overall many trades are deadlier than policing, including fishing, forestry, and roofing.

So when we as a society decide it's acceptable for roofers to only fix the shingles they can reach from the ground and lumberjacks to only fell trees less than 15' tall, I'll give cops a pass for half-assing their jobs and treating their own personal safety as more important than that of the public they claim to serve and protect. Until then I would tell them to suck it up, put on their big boy pants, and actually try and do what we collectively pay through the nose for them to do, and deal with the kind of oversight and accountability that they have so far fought tooth and nail to avoid.