Affirmative Action No More

 awesomeness, history, news, politics  No Responses »
Jun 292023
 

Supreme Court strikes down college affirmative action programs

The court ruled that both programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and are therefore unlawful. The vote was 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case, in which liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused.

Affirmative action, i.e. systemic racism, is a bad idea on several levels. Firstly, it’s simply racist; it foment distrust and discord. Second, it’s not only unfair to those who are excluded, it’s unfair to many of those it purports to help. For example:

Harvard is an elite institution in part because it’s *difficult.* Just because you get in doesn’t mean you get through. It’s my understanding that the curriculum and grading policies there are such that you have *got* to be the best of the best. but if you got in while being the best of the mid, your chances of making it through a Harvard degree are in serious doubt. How much debt did you put your family in to go to a school you’re very likely going to fail out of? After you’ve been made to feel inadequate *and* impoverished, are you going to go to the mid-level school you should’ve in the first place, or are you going to simply bail on the whole thing?

When I was getting ready for college, I had dreams of going to MIT or Stanford or the like. My advisors, fortunately, were both smart and honest and, indeed, *good* enough to tell me that that was an insane notion. I was *not* at that level. It would have been ruinous to try, even if I had someone squeaked in. Fortunately, I didn’t have some institutionally racist program in place to bend the rules to jam my piddly ass into a program I was ill-suited for.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it’s unfair to society: by driving away the best and brightest in favor of the mediocre, society is denied the opportunity to be served by the best and brightest in their best capabilities.

Let’s see if cities burn.

 Posted by at 3:43 pm

“XB-2002 Stealthawk”

 aircraft, art, history, Hmm..., models, politics  No Responses »
Jun 282023
 

This popped up on ebay a few years ago. It purported to be a Boeing design for an advanced subsonic stealth bomber… but the design is, clearly, rather silly. Supposedly it dates from 1984 and was produced at, by and for Boeing, intended to be a decoy for the B-2 Advanced Technology (Stealth) Bomber competitors. I’m not sure Lockheed or Northrop would have looked at this and seen a serious design, however.

*Some* aspects of it seem like they might have been taken from an actual stealthy bomber design… the inlets and exhaust, indeed much of the middle part of the wing/body, look about right. But the stubby wing and especially the straight-vertical fins in substantial numbers are goofy aerodynamics and spectacular corner reflectors.

At least two of these were made and wandered out into the wild over the years.

 Posted by at 12:31 pm

That’s a lot of clothes

 blather, Hmm..., photography, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 262023
 

Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.

Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2;  but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?

If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.

High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)

A recent satellite photo shows the pile:

It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.

An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers

Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Giant+Pile+of+Unsold+Clothing/@-20.2353681,-70.0930992,836m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x91523e70293c5633:0x671ff739632f5660!2sAlto+Hospicio,+Tarapac%C3%A1,+Chile!3b1!8m2!3d-20.2686722!4d-70.1049169!16zL20vMGd4cjc3!3m5!1s0x915215426eb9ae75:0xbb5867ab02cd19a1!8m2!3d-20.2350799!4d-70.0911125!16s%2Fg%2F11styh04ds?entry=ttu

Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.

 Posted by at 8:36 pm

Russian Civil War: Well that was fast

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, politics, russian empire, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 252023
 

I believe I am unanimous when I say…

An army – a *small* army – of poorly trained, ill-equipped chuckleheads managed to get within range of Moscow without getting kerploded by the Russian Army and Air Force. There is no getting past the fact that this makes the Russian military and leadership – especially Putin – look even more like incompetent ineffectual corrupt and cowardly boobs. Hell, at this point it might be best for everybody if we just have Finland send a few hundred drunken bums into Russia to conquer the place.

This was not something I expected to see anytime soon, but here we are. What’s next? The President of the USA hosting a bunch of half naked perverted weirdos on the White House lawn?

 Posted by at 1:49 am

Russian Civil War in the offing?

 Crazy, Hmm..., news, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 232023
 

Russia accuses Wagner chief of urging “armed rebellion”

Ummm…

 

https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1672358654794661890

 

 Posted by at 8:26 pm

Red Rocks

 AARRRGH, Crazy, news, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 222023
 

The Red Rocks Amphitheater in the foothills west of Denver is a neat place. While I never went there for a concert when I lived in the are in the late 90’s, I went there often enough to hike around and test liquid biprop rocket engines in the parking lot when security wasn’t looking (what, was I going to test them in town? Don’t be silly). Along with concerts, something else I never experienced there was a hailstorm. Having seen the videos from last night, I’m just as glad that I missed out on that.

 

 

 Posted by at 8:52 pm

I imagine there’s a market for this sort of thing

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, Hmm..., models, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 222023
 

A “hovertank” is, of course, a terrible idea. A hovering vehicle pretty much by definition has no traction with the ground, thus cannot well handle a lot of recoil… which is the sort of thing a cannon provides in spades. And anything that hovers has to be built light enough to get lurched off the ground, which reduces the capability to be armored. And… on and on.

Nevertheless, the “hovertank” has it’s place in science fiction.

And now modern consumer electronics and drone technology has reached the point where a hovertank can in fact be yours. In subscale plastic model form at any rate.

I’m honestly surprised and impressed that that bitty quadcopter could lift that, and do so effectively. Now imagine that the kit was designed for that from the get-go, using vac-formed parts… or even carbon fiber laid-up components. Far lighter, and better integrated with the lift system.

 

 Posted by at 12:58 pm

Well there’s yer problem

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, wisdom, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 212023
 

As is well known by now, Disney has been making a mess of many of the properties they’re in charge of. The Marvel movies/shows have plummeted downhill; Pixar movies stink; the endless CGI “live action” remakes are soulless cash grabs at best, and to all reports that forthcoming Indiana Jones movie is gonna be *terrible.* And then there’s the smoking ruin of Star Wars. Why is this happening? To an outsider, it looks a lot like sabotage… a vast organization that wants to tear down not only its own legacy, but poison the culture as a whole. That’s crazy conspiracy theory talk, of course. But then… there’s this:

Disney’s Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton Exits

The fact that Disney – or any corporation – has not just a “diversity officer,” but a *Chief* “diversity officer” is of course a stinging indictment about their wisdom and sanity. But there’s one line in the article that jumped right out at me:

Disney HR chief Sonia Coleman’s note to staff announcing Newton’s departure … She has been dedicated to ensuring every person sees themselves and their life experiences represented in a meaningful and authentic way.

Ah. No. That’s just… NO. Bad storytelling company. Bad. BAD.

I don’t want to see myself and my life experience in *any* sort of way in any sort of movie that Disney might make. I want to see stuff that would inspire me to emulate. I don’t want to see what I am; I want to see what I can become. Once again, there are two world views:

1: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want to be like Captain Kirk.”

2: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want Captain Kirk to be like me.”

Worldview #2 is the one known as “representation.” It is cancer. It should be mocked, spat upon, driven from polite society out into the wasteland to die shriveled and alone, huddled against some broken forgotten ruin of a statue of a long unremembered tyrant. “Representation” does not inspire people to greatness; at best, it inspires smug complacency. It does not bring people together; it only divides. Because if Person A finds themselves represented by Character A who shares all the “important” weird little identity politics quirks of Person A…  then Character A does *not* represent Person B who doesn’t share those quirks. Character A will only appeal to a thin slice of the audience… and then will not inspire those people to much of anything, because Character A tells them how awesome they Already Are. You don’t need to change, because you’re perfect just the way you are. (Unless, of course, you need to go on a risky series of hormone treatments and lop off your dangly bits.) And if Character A *doesn’t* share your identities, and in fact is quite different or even opposed, then you will feel outraged that someone isn’t catering to you.

So, yay for Disney getting rid of this one little symptom of the larger problem. Now get rid of the entire department, and let not the precepts of DEI ever be spoken of again.

 Posted by at 6:07 am

Keep your head on a swivel

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 192023
 

This video hit earlier today. It *appears* to depict (because it might be staged) a family at a gas station; as the video begins, the father, pumping the gas, is apparently acting strangely. It transpires that the father has seen something concerning, so he’s getting the hell out of there ASAP. Some commenters have suggested that he’s “fragile” or over reacting.

 

Over reacting? Well, maybe. Having seen the following video that came out later on the same day… the importance of situational awareness is driven home pretty clearly:

 

When it’s just you, being alert is important enough. When you have family depending on you…

 

 Posted by at 11:27 pm
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