A political test for customers

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons  No Responses »
Feb 142021
 

I’ve previously said that I am opposed to turning away customers based on their politics. This is a common practice in several industries, such as comic books, Star Wars novelizations and some others… where authors say things like “if you don’t like my politics don’t buy my book.” This to me seems incredibly dumb. Me, I will happily sell my stuff to anyone. Go ahead, give it a shot… go to my website and select a few hundred dollars worth of items, pay for them and see if I don’t just go right ahead and fill your order.

I Dare You.

But then there’s also this argument:

Michigan Ammo Maker: No Bullets For Biden Voters

 

In this case, the customers who voted for Biden did in fact vote to put this company out of business. That’s the sort of thing that will annoy many business owners. Second… if you are a bullet maker, you’re very unlikely to be having trouble finding buyers these days. You almost certainly have far more demand that capacity. You *can’t* sell to everyone who wants to buy. So… if ya gotta pick and chose, I guess de-selecting those who want to actually put you out of business, but who hypocritically want your product – makes as much sense as any way to pick.

I’m pretty sure they can’t actually discriminate without collecting a few lawsuits (which I’d honestly get a kick out of seeing… “Your Honor, my client doesn’t want to sell his product to people who believe that his product and his business model should be illegal. What’s the problem here?”). But maybe making a few of the more self-destructive gun owners think a little bit might prove helpful in the future. And it doubtless feels good for those who set up the little test.

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 Posted by at 4:21 pm

I question the theology here

 dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 142021
 

OK, so I’m not a Christian; certainly not a Catholic. Buuuuutttt… I’m not sure about whether the Catholic Church has this much sway over Evangelicals, who I understand to generally *not* actually be Catholics. And I’m not sure what Noted Hollywood Intellectual Sean Penn’s problem with satin is. Perhaps it’s not good enough for his silk-pampered caboose.

Perhaps the Vatican should impeach all those Rabbis and Imams and Lamas and such who express wrongthink? I’m sure that’ll go over a treat. You go get ’em, Spicoli!

 Posted by at 3:56 pm

Electric vehicles are energetic

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., science, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 142021
 

Oh, boy! Mayhem!

There was likely a short in the first vehicles battery pack. Whether due to damage or bad manufacturing/materials… shrug. But lithium and oxygen make an energetic pair, and it’s generally advisable to keep them apart.

Interestingly, at about 1:20 you see the truck roll backwards. Looks like the brakes cut loose.

 Posted by at 8:26 am

The Eon of Nothing

 critters, history, Hmm..., science  No Responses »
Feb 132021
 

It seems that Earth was a dull place from about 1.8 billion years ago to about 0.8 billion years ago. Mountain formation fell to nada, and over that time the mountains that had emerged prior eroded away. The land area of Earth was thus very flat. And seemingly along with that dull era of geology, biological evolution also seemed to stall out. There may be a link: mountain erosion leads to various mineral nutrients (such as phosphorus) washing out to sea… but as the mountains eroded away and weren’t replaced, the rivers of the time had less and less interesting stuff in them, and thus the single celled organisms int he ocean had less and less to work with.

But then the supercontinent of Nuna-Rodina broke up and mountain formation began again. In about 300 million years the Cambrian Explosion happened and the diversity of life  expanded vastly.

Earth’s mountains disappeared for a billion years, and then life stopped evolving

As mentioned in a  post about the Great Oxidation Event, the history of life on Earth is complex and deeply interconnected with the geology of the place. Life seemed to arise *very* soon after the planet got completely remade by getting plowed by a Mars-sized world, throwing off rubble that would become the moon; but even though there was life,  for billions of years it remained very simple. complexity only came about quite recently. But it’s far from certain that that’s the way it has to be. there might well be worlds that have major civilizations partying down just a few hundred million years after the place cools enough for liquid water.

And of course there are also the many continents that have been subducted and are now floating around in the mantle, hiding forever the traces of the advanced reptilian civilizations that rose and fell on them.

 Posted by at 8:24 pm

Lochnagar Crater

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., history, photography, weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 132021
 

Lochnagar Mine was a pile of explosives dug under the German front lines in France by the British during WWI. This was of course during the era of trench warfare, one of the most spectacularly futile endeavors in human history, with the consequence that the Brits dug a chamber fifty feet beneath German lines and filled it with 60,000 pounds of ammonal (ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder) explosive. On July 1, 1916 the explosives were detonated creating a crater about 100 feet deep and 300 feet in diameter.

Considering that the war dragged on for another two and a half years… all that effort and destruction, for nothing. And in the end, the allies set up a punitive system that virtually ensured that something worse would come along… and of course it did.

 

 Posted by at 9:48 am

Europa Clipper to fly commercial

 Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, science, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 122021
 

And not on the bloated, far behind schedule and vastly over budget SLS:

NASA to use commercial launch vehicle for Europa Clipper

EC will instead fly on a commercial launch vehicle, as yet undetermined but very likely to be a Falcon 9 Heavy. The F9H is indeed a capable vehicle, but it does not have the throw weight that SLS is supposed to have, so instead of a three-year direct flight to Jupiter the spacecraft will take a more circuitous six-year flight that does gravity assists past Earth and Mars. An advantage of that is that after an October 2024 launch, the probe will do a  flyby of Earth in December of 2026; it should be interesting to compare views of Earth of “before and after,” what with the new radioactive pock marks, ash clouds, scorched regions that the next some years are looking likely to feature.

And from another direction, the loss of the Europa Clipper mission is just one more “why the hell are we spending money on this monstrosity” nail in SLS’s ginormous coffin.

 Posted by at 6:09 pm

Gina bounces back

 art, Hmm..., news, politics, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 122021
 

Disney fired her; a new opportunity came along.

Obviously a movie for the Daily Wire is almost certainly not as big a payday as a movie for Mickey Mao, but it’s a start. It’s a start of an alternate, separate entertainment system, as Gab is a start for an alternate social media. It’s sad that society will likely split in two, with two separate cultures and two separate economies… but that’s better than the alternative of fully half of society simply being shut out of *everything,* a clearly unsustainable proposition in any event.

The trick that the Daily Wire and similar non-leftwoke moviemakers will have to make sure they learn and live is to make *quality* products. They will fail spectacularly if they simply try to ride on The Message. As an example, pretty much *any* of the “Christian movies” that plague the world with the lamest stories, worst acting, dumbest dialog and just laughable Messages.

 Posted by at 4:10 pm

Another project: early Convair lunar lander

 art, history, models, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 112021
 

Recently finished, the CAD model for a 1/144 scale kit for Fantastic Plastic. This Convair idea utilized the same “landing boat” that Fantastic Plastic recently released in 1/48 scale. It’ll be a fairly simple kit. The design was illustrated in a number of renderings from the very late 1950’s/early 60’s, used often by or in conjunction with Krafft Ehricke as he tried to sell Americans on the future in space that they would soon have.

The vehicle had a landing boat at the top and a habitat module below it; below that is the stage with three RL-10 rocket engines, with six drop tanks around it. *Presumably,* the tanks, along with the landing gear, would be dropped shortly after launch from the Moon, with fuel in the main core providing not only the boost back to Earth but also a braking thrust to at least slow the ship, because I have *serious* doubts about that boat surviving a lunar re-entry.

 

 Posted by at 7:58 pm
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