It seems that OSC has decided that the Russian-built, formerly NK-33 rocket engines refurbished and rebranded as the AJ26, are to be removed from the fleet and replaced with a new engine, with a first launch in 2016. It was always the plan that the AJ26’s would be replaced, but I guess having one of them go kerblooie speeded the decision along.
A pity I didn’t have a better camera than the cell phone with me. Oh, well…
So today I had a doctors appointment to yet again try and figure out just what’s wrong with my lungs such that I am susceptible to those damned bronchitis attacks. The festivities began with a series of chest X-rays, and climaxed with the doctor coming in the examination room and announcing:
“We want to schedule you for a CAT scan. There’s a spot on your lung I want a better look at.”
Gah.
Yesterday I saw this sign outside the polling place. I’ve seen this sign before… it or some version of it has been there every year since I started voting in Utah a decade ago. I’ve never paid it much mind. Because why should I? Nothing here is even remotely an imposition for lawful residents/voters. So why are “voter ID laws” so controversial elsewhere?
If simply proving you are a legal voter is so troubling to some people, just imagine how tweaked they’d get if my plan for instituting fractional votes based on the voters multiple-choice test results, testing for basic math skills and understanding of civics (history, what the Constitution says, what your rights are and what they *aren’t,* etc.) was instituted as it really should be.
Some years back I posted THIS “meh”-quality line drawing cutaway diagram of the Boeing YC-14. Here is a vastly better version in full color.
The hard truth:
It’s a good joke, but it’s also a dark vision of the future to come. As I mentioned a couple years back, barring a technological or economic collapse, it is pretty much inevitable that robots capable of doing most human jobs will, within a generation or two, be almost universally cheaper than minimum wage employees. This will make a whole lot of people not only permanently unemployed, but permanently unemployable. Without those bottom-end crap jobs, a lot of people won’t be able to gain the skills needed for better jobs.
This issue is being discussed again:
The idea there is that we must accept that most people will soon be redundant. And the best way to prevent an uprising of the useless (and not, as the headlines suggests, of the robots), is a “Universal Basic Income.” A UBI is some level of cash paid out to people, weekly, monthly or annually that provides enough for all their needs, probably somewhere above what you’d get as a full-time min-wager. The idea is that this would free the useless to live lives of dignity while never actually having to work.
On the one hand, I really don’t have a better option.
On the other hand, if you give vast numbers of people all their needs and then some without requiring anything of them in return, what sort of people will you end up with?
Suggestions:
1) Institute a UBI. But it mandates sterility treatments for those who accept it.
2) Institute a UBI. But if you accept, you lose the voting franchise.
3) Institute a UBI. But the checks can only be cashed in the Off World Colonies.
For me, if a poverty-level UBI was instituted and came my way, it’d be a big boon. Suddenly having that extra cash come in would be fantastic. But it wouldn’t stop me doing what I’m doing now… I’d still keep cranking out APR and USBP and whatnot. At least until some robot started doing it better. But let’s face it… a lot of people , if suddenly gifted with gobs of unearned cash, are going to blow it in a hurry. And then they’re get pissy that they don’t have *more.*
I’ve just uploaded the Documents and Diagrams catalogs to the APR Patreon site for the $10-level patrons to peruse and vote on. Only one new large format diagram, but a number of new documents to choose from.
If you would like to access these items and support the cause of acquiring and sharing these pieces of aerospace history, please visit my Patreon page and consider contributing.
It boils down to this:
“If medical science can’t answer the meritless qualms they have about vaccines, when can I use it at all?”
The former Sci Fi Channel, inanely rebranded as Syfy, continues to try to claw its way up from the World Wrestling Morass and Ghosthunting idiocy that has characterized it in recent years… now by greenlighting a miniseries based on Arthur C. Clarkes. “3001: The Final Odyssey.”
Note that “Scott Free” here is Ridley Scott’s production company. So production values should be pretty good.
Given that Syfy will also the adapting Clarke’s “Childhoods End” and “The Expanse,” and will be airing the vaguely promising-looking “Ascension,” perhaps Syfy might actually become a decent science fiction network again.
Now, if someone over there could get on with adapting “Footfall” and “Lucifers Hammer” and “1632” and “Ringworld” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and “Warworld” and *good* versions of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “From the Earth to the Moon” and “War of the Worlds…”
