Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.

But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.

It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.

My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.

Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.

Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.

This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.

DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.

It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.

Stainless steel that gets coated is no longer stainless steel. Stainless steel requires exposure to sufficient oxygen in order to maintain the protective oxide layer.

These are rudder bolts from the same gudgeon on my sailboat. The black stuff is anoxic corrosion.

“I got mine, fuck you.” With a little dash of “Nothing like the afternoon delight of some bootlicking.”

I know plenty of staunchly feminist women whose entire personae (or life goal) is the 50s US housewife fantasy. But, that’s still a matter of self-determination. Nothing about the GOP’s actions indicate self-determination is part of their platform, except for oligarchs. This is yet another play in their ongoing Big Lie Tactic: tell a big enough lie enough times, and people will start to believe it.

Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.

That’s a new depth to “Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.”

Except the results from DDG are also a dumpster fire of affiliate spam “listicles,” Pinterest garbage, and unrelated SEO BS. Oh, and Reddit sure has risen in all the results since the APIpocalypse. Almost like big business is all starving each other’s backs.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” - Jonathon Swift

So now you’re investing time and effort to publicize why this bill was broken. Your political opposition successfully got you on the defensive. These strategies play a part of why fascism and authoritarianism are succeeding in the USA.

In my case, Inventor and AutoCAD. I hate AutoDesk with the fury of a thousand suns, but FreeCAD just isn’t stable enough.

Oh, and currently needing .NET automatic source generation (long story), which is very difficult to develop on anything other than Windows.

Holy hell, they said “older,” not “antediluvian.” 😆