Launch services isn’t a contract to launch anything, it’s just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.

They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.

The thing they changed was cutting holes in the area where the fire was last time to “ventilate” it. I think it’s the same fire just blowing out the holes and melting something different.

I don’t know if you’re falling for it or this is just how you feel, but Newsom was talking to Charlie Kirk who popularized the “groomers” line, calls June “groomer month” all the time and constantly talks about executing “groomers”. Newsom softballed it to make it seem like Kirk just cares about sports, and repeatedly dog whistled a lot about how much he agrees with Kirk keeping it ambiguous about what exactly he agrees with.

Maybe you believe Newsom is deep down a good guy and he’s just doing this to shill for right wing votes, and once you give him power he’ll be normal. But right now all he’s doing is telling his audience of out of touch liberals that the “I don’t want to see a black pilot on my plane” guy is the kind of sensible conservative Democrats should be bipartisan with.

IMO based on how he talks and the trans bills he’s vetoed as governor, Newsom is the type of liberal that likes the idea of being the big guy protecting “these poor people” from dirty rednecks, but is also extremely suspicious that all this gender shit is some kind of Tiktok trend that might get out of hand if he lets trans people have it too easy.

They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

The story also goes on to say about how the deaths caused by the soviet-era disaster cause is disputed. How is that a pertinent thing to add?

It’s not disputed those are just different parts of the same IAEA report. 2 people died in the explosion, 28 of radiation poisoning, 1 from a heart attack, so 31 known, then 19 with high radiation exposure died years later for ambiguous reasons, so 50 potential direct accident deaths. And then they estimated about 4,000 as the total eventual cancer deaths.

Their definition of “anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) content” is dialed way up into treating “China will fall in 7 days” like good content and anything less than that is Chinese propaganda. If they search for Tienanmen Square and get “pictures of the square without mention of the massacre” they classify that as “pro-CCP”. If they get “unbiased historical content” or news coverage about bad shit China does they call that “neutral”.

They also don’t do anything to compensate for Tiktok’s overall censorship, they went looking for massacre and genocide on the platform where people say corn and unalive, they don’t compare how Tiktok deals with China vs any other subject.

They did a survey of how pro-China people are and how much they use Tiktok, but don’t do anything to adjust for Tiktok being publicly associated with China. They could’ve put a question in the survey about whether people were boycotting Tiktok for anti-CCP reasons but didn’t, which looks like they were fishing for a result.

I remember NCRI from back when they did the study comparing Antifa to ISIS, and they’re still doing weird shit like that, if you like Luigi you’re “Killing with Applause”, colleges being too woke and anti-genocide is the “Corruption of the American Mind”, if you do DEI it’s your fault white people are racist.

That’s only because they’re designed with passivation to vent tanks and disconnect batteries to remove sources of explosion when they start to die. If that fails the tanks eventually pop from thermal cycling or the solar panels overcharge the battery until it blows up like a Russian satellite did earlier this year.

Leaves out the one catastrophic demand that the US actually cares about

(D) taking appropriate steps to return to United States citizens (and entities which are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government from such citizens and entities on or after January 1, 1959, or to provide equitable compensation to such citizens and entities for such property;

“At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports. … The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company.” - JFK

The second one is more like what the original razed 17th century mosque looked like. Deng was the one who gave orders to open fire in Shadian, he’s not good guy liberal here. Mao’s strategy was to yell at people to be atheist. Deng’s strategy was a religious red light district. Keep it alienated from secular society, make the mosques look like they were air-dropped from Saudi Arabia instead of having been there for 500 years, and give people the choice to be religious or Chinese but not both.

Starting before Xi China realized that wasn’t working, especially in Xinjiang, so the new strategy was to integrate. That means less of Deng’s “laugh at this weird foreign religion” architecture and more of “respect China’s history of patriots who are Chinese first and Muslim second.”

“Other devices” means manually-emplaced munitions and devices including improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.

It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.

“Booby traps and other devices” is one legal thing, there’s no legal distinction. Pager bombs are always a war crime regardless of circumstances.

From a liberal perspective what’s the difference between MLs having “critical support” for the Soviets or China and anarchists celebrating historical anarchists like Makhno and the CNT-FAI who burned churches and killed kulaks too? If anarchists are online supporting US foreign policy then liberals can assume you’re just a liberal and any claimed anarchism is just larping, but if anybody throws a brick through a Starbucks window that’s tankie authoritarianism stealing rights and freedoms from the Starbucks shareholders.

Tankie was coined by trotskyists to insult a slightly different kind of Leninist. Then anarchists picked it up and started calling trotskyists tankies. Now liberals call anarchists tankies. It’s the circle of life, in a few years if you say tankie people will assume you’re talking about Kamala Harris.

SpaceX has a regular scheduled launch that’s been sitting around delayed waiting for Starliner to leave the ISS, so kicking two people off it and replacing them with the Starliner crew is convenient and minimizes the schedule disruption.

Soyuz only has three seats and launching a Soyuz with only one crew or empty is something Russia hasn’t done since the 60s and would be more work.

I think you’re thinking of Xiaomi, Louis Rossman did a video assuming they were doing Apple-style serialization but all it was doing was blocking installation of self-driving if the headlights weren’t standard. It wasn’t DRMing brake pads or preventing buying headlights from a junkyard, there was a functional reason.

They don’t treat launch water, it runs off into the wetlands through open ditches. The SRBs that the Shuttle and SLS use are 100-ton bricks of perchlorates that contaminate and acidify water for miles every time there’s a launch, so treating the direct runoff is deck chairs on the Titanic. Kennedy Space Center is already a Superfund site, so they focus on things like underwater fencing to stop KSC fish full of teflon and cadmium from being eaten by normal fish.

Type of metal doesn’t matter, it’s any particle that leftover CFCs from the 1970s can stick to and make it more likely for them to react and destroy ozone. The ozone hole is over Antarctica and changes size seasonally because high altitude ice clouds do the same thing, smoke from forest fires also does it.

having no outstanding, individual, or unusual features; unremarkable or impersonal. “the anonymous black car waiting to take him to the airport”

It’s a gigantic library, #1 in the world by visitors by a lot, #4 by number of books, and they’re doing that in NYC in buildings that look like this and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington’s handwriting on them, so it’s real fucking expensive.

If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.