The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.

Eeeeexactly. My wife is lobbying for it (because she loathes air travel, mostly) but I have no interest in moving to Cold United States just for a marginal and temporary gain in freedom. It’d be a last-ditch option.

EU politics generally seem to be taking a sudden rightward lurch of late, with immigration being a major driver. All that history of African colonialism coming home to roost is making people with a fixed, racially-homogenous sense of their national identity into very unhappy campers. Of the countries not actively sliding into fascism, Putin seems to be ogling with hungry eyes in anticipation of NATO’s defanging. Things look pretty dire across the board, to be honest – between fascism, looming war, and climate change it’s all about least-bad options right now.

We’re looking in the same direction, since I qualify under the same program. I’m looking at companies to start communicating with about job opportunities now.

The “easiest” would be Israel since my wife qualifies under the Law of Return, but we’re both staunchly anti-Zionist, so… ugh. Right now I’m looking closest at Ireland, since my profession is on the Critical Skills Employment Permit list and I work in a niche that is well-matched to the Irish pharma/life sciences sector. In a pinch I’d lobby for a transfer to my company’s Canadian branch office, but that’s not optimal for a few reasons.

ETA: for permanent emigration, the thing you want to do is find a country where you can speak or at least quickly learn the language, and where you can get employment in a sector that’s on their list of critical needs. In most cases you can’t get a visa that lets you stay and work long-term without first getting a job offer. In terms of flexibility, someplace in the EU has a lot of appeal, since you can work basically anywhere in the Schengen area after you gain permanent residency. Australia and New Zealand are attractive mainly for being well-isolated from all the regional wars that seem like they’re waiting to kick off just as soon as American muscle isn’t backing up NATO or Taiwan, but it’s a lot harder to get those visas.

Yeah, no, I’m literally making escape plans. Just this week the street between our house and our kid’s daycare got shut down in the middle of the day for an unannounced parade, and my wife had a fucking panic attack thinking it might be some sort of Proud Boys or Oathkeepers-type march and they were gonna run amok and we’d be cut off from him. I don’t plan to stick around long enough to see that happen for real when Project 2025 kicks off, thank you.

The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.

…and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only “the right sort of person” got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.

The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers’ intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit – the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it’s assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.

So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue’s camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that’s by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.

At this point I’m not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won’t play dirty with the tools they’re laying out for their incipient god-king, and it’s looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.

I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?

Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying “actually we shouldn’t burn it all down for no reason,” Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting “NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN’S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!” while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides “won’t one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We’d like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren’t affected by any of this, please.”

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

Different Vance. Cy Vance was the prosecutor who treated Epstein with kid gloves. J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who was briefly the darling of liberal media types for showing how the folks of Appalachia and the Rust Belt have been abandoned by those in power, before realizing he could do better for himself by gargling spraytan-orange mushroom dick and riding Trump’s coattails into right-wing demagoguery. He’s a Senator from Ohio now.

Unfortunately I can’t bring reciepts on account of your screeds getting rightfully binned by the moderators, but there is a difference between:

“The Jewish people have a strong history of valuing education that’s put a lot of them into the middle and upper classes and have also historically been the victims of vicious oppression, and the Israeli state has never been shy about using either of those things as a cudgel to get away with their own human rights abuses”

and

“Israel is secretly in control of Intel and other vast swathes of the Western economy and are manipulating everything behind the scenes for their nefarious ends!”

The latter of which is what you were spewing in the Technology community a few weeks ago and earned the ban-hammer over there, and which makes up a not-inconsiderable part of the rest of your comment history. I find Israel’s history of oppression – which, to be clear, extends not just to Palestinians but to the non-Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora as well – and their current war crime spree in Gaza utterly abhorrent, but you’ve let yourself run all the way to “actually the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were kinda true” in opposition, and that’s some racist shit which you’ve been rightly banned over from multiple communities. You can oppose the Israeli state without engaging in rank antisemitism.

Absolutely nothing? Were you spinning “Israeli interests secretly control the entire world” conspiracy theories over here too, or was that just in c/technology?

There’s definitely going to be a shift back in his direction amongst the faithful as conservative media does its work, but the thing to look for is whether than holds for low-information “undecideds” who make up about a third of the electorate. Depending on how much his case stays in the media, how much it affects his own ability to reach voters (i.e., does he get sentenced to prison pending appeals? Does he end up under house arrest with a parole officer looking over his shoulder?), and if people like the Minutemen or Proud Boys engage in violence over it, people in the middle who might have otherwise voted for him on the basis of “economy feel bad, maybe different big man make economy feel better?” might continue to peel away from him, and that’s a greater risk to his chances than what the diehards will or won’t do.

Any time you see perovskite-based cells mentioned, you can assume for the time being that it’s just R&D. Perovskites are cool materials that open up a lot of neat possibilities, like cheaply inkjet-printing PV cells, but they have fundamental durability issues in the real world. When exposed to water, oxygen, and UV light, the perovskite crystals break down fairly rapidly.

That’s not to say that the tech can’t be made to work – at least one lab team has developed cells with longevity similar to silicon PVs – but somebody’s going to have to come up with an approach that solves for performance, longevity, and manufacturability all at once, and that hasn’t happened yet. I imagine that when they do, that will be front-and-center in the press release, rather than just an efficiency metric.

This is actually becoming somewhat commonplace. For example, in many cutting-edge cancer therapies, blood is drawn from the patient, processed in tissue-culture suites on site to extract the patient’s immune cells and sensitize them to some marker expressed by their specific cancer cells, and then the modified immune cells are returned to the patient room and transfused back into their bodies. It’s not cheap per se but it’s something that most top-tier cancer centers can do, and to do the similar process of extracting stem cells, inducing them to transform into pancreatic islet cells, and transplanting those into the patient’s pancreas isn’t that big of a jump – and it’d be cheaper than a lifetime of insulin in any case. It also points the way towards treating other kinds of organ failure without the risk of rejection, too.

Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.

On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.

Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.

I was going to say so, but the NY state code requires the defense to assent to the replacement of an unfit juror, and we all know damn well that they won’t do that.

According to reporting on the jury selection process, one of the jurors reported that their primary news source was Truth Social… so it’s a distinct possibility. In the case of a lone holdout, though, the judge and the rest of the jury are both likely to lean hard on them to get with the program.

Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.

My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.