I’m in the space industry and I can tell you that anyone pretending to be an authority on orbital mechanics on the internet is full of shit. I’ve taken entire classes called “advanced orbital mechanics.” That shit is wildly hard, vaguely inaccurate, and so slow that you can only do it effectively on a computer. Even then you have to decide which variables to throw out because you if you use them all you won’t be able to calculate predictions on every satellite in time for them to be useful. Then you have to take the predictions, predict how wrong they are, and predict again based on those predictions if two satellites will run into each other.

The truth is that nobody knows if Kessler Syndrome is even real. I personally fall on the side of thinking it’s nonsense, there are too many variables that would have to go wrong all at once. It’s like being worried about winning the lottery. There have been multiple catastrophic on orbit conjunctions that have created thousands of pieces of debris. Still no Kessler Syndrome. Even in a nightmare scenario I can only see it affecting one orbital regime. The odds of Starlink effecting the orbit that GPS is in is effectively not possible. But this is not a solved field and I am not remotely an expert, I’m just tired of people who don’t know a thing about the field thinking they’re experts because they have a JWST desktop wallpaper and have 300 hours in KSP. The real experts are ancient old men and women who have been doing orbital predictions for 40 years and I’ve seen them get into yelling matches about this sort of thing.

This post got away from me but the point is this shit is so involved it effectively can’t be fact checked because you could come to whatever conclusion you want.

The tow was (rip) the bar. That’s wild, you can literally see the change happening in real time. If you guys do work on the radar regularly we’ve probably met haha, small world.

I left not too long ago, it’s gotten significantly warmer. Rained every week of summer. I think it hit 60 one day. The tow is closed because the permafrost underneath shifted and the building is cracking in half.

Thule?

They really need a “start me after Konpeki Plaza” mode with a few thousand €$ and a handful of perk points thrown in.

The story is genuinely good but really drags on after you’ve seen it once or twice. I have the “skip dialogue” button setup to a macro that spams it like 50 times and a quick button on my mouse to trigger it.

It’s all pretty baffling when you realize there are multiple genuinely good and well thought out builds in the game that are effectively mutually exclusive without a way to reset your perks, so you really need to restart the game to see them, but this is my third run through and I can’t imagine doing this again any time soon.

Depends on the cost of living and state taxes in an area. Usually it’s $3.50-$5.00 a gallon/~4 liters. At the gas stations in Germany on American military bases it’s about $4.50 a gallon right now.

Nobody goes to Starbucks for good coffee, they go because it’s the same everywhere. Sometimes I want to go get a great coffee somewhere they know how to pull a decent shot, and sometimes I want brownish sugarmilk.

Have they been difficult to get? I’ve always been vaguely interested but never actually looked into getting one.

The end of WW2 was a complex political issue, and the atomic bombs were not the ‘press here, end war’ that most of us believe.

The Japanese we’re holding out hope (stupidly) that the Soviet Union would negotiate a conditional surrender with the united States as the end of the imperial system was unacceptable to them. The US had floated that if there was an unconditional surrender, that the imperial system would stay intact, but wanted it to seem like a US condition, not a Japanese one, because that would be a conditional surrender.

The Soviets always intended to invade, but were held by a nonaggression pact they made with the Japanese. The US pressured the Soviets very hard to violate this and invade Manchuria.

There was literally a Japanese war cabinet convened already when news of Nagasaki reached them. We have actual primary source for their reactions. They did not care.

Only once the second bomb dropped and Manchuria was invaded did some of the cabinet manage to convince the emporer to intervene which was extremely rare.

I live in Germany and I have no idea what you’re talking about for the first thing, maybe you mean yield-to-right in unmarked intersections or the priority road system? I’m not really sure. In either case you are just mentally inserting yield signs based on standard rules.

The stoplight thing I feel in my soul though. The amount of times I’ve had to stare out my sunroof to see the light above me because I stopped on the line instead of 20 feet before it.

You can find that easily. I guarantee I could find that within 30 minutes in almost any city over 100,000.

At least JJ had the decency to put it in an alt dimension where its canonicity can be properly disregarded.

I know I’ll catch flak for this but they’re what got me into Star Trek. I was completely unfamiliar with it and the movies were fun so I got into the shows. Obviously they share very little besides a vague aesthetic but the movies were a good bridge for me as a teenager

Boi if it has that bling and a transparent frosty blue option it’s over, I’m buying it day one. I miss my Gameboy advanced so much, or maybe I miss being a kid, who knows.

Ironically the BMWs here in Germany tend to use their signals in my experience

Putting aside that that whole show is pretty rough and I’ve mentally decanonized it, the guy who said it is technically a mega space nazi from the space nazi dimension so I choose to believe he just thought that Musk being an aspiring space nazi was as cool in our universe as it was in his.

Lmfao “defending itself.” Where’s the Russian military right now pal? I, too, defend my home by attacking my neighbors.

Correct. I’ll happily shill for the defensive alliance formed to ward off (the currently on display) Russian aggression. NATO would not exist if Russia weren’t so nakedly attempting to rebuild the Soviet Union by force, an alliance that had already been litigated and abandoned by the smaller nations Russia pillaged for resources, this time without even pretending to be for the workers.

Edit: no amount of tankie brigading will convince me that Russia isn’t the aggressor in the region. Imagine the brainrot required to think that the military that invaded Ukraine and is still currently there is the good team.

Tankie cringe

Honestly I’m pretty proud of how well turned the ship around on gay rights. Like in the span of a decade there was like a 40% opinion swing on that. We’re still not where we need to be and it seems like it’s getting worse though tbh. I think Europe overtook us on that front because I feel much safer here in Germany being gay in public.

How (generally) genuinely nice and outgoing everyone is in the states. (Outside of the south where it tends to be a very fake in my experience.) In the states I’m mildly introverted, in Germany I’m usually one of the most outgoing in the room.

Our multicultural foods and stuff. You’re never more than a stones throw from really good Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc. food anywhere in the US.

Turning right on a red light, the European mind cannot comprehend it.

Air Conditioning.

Handicap accessibility.

Our national parks are unparalleled.

Probably a few other American gems I could think of if forced to.

All that being said I’m immigrating to Germany right now and the grass is very much greener over here. I have no desire to live in the US again. I’m definitely not proud of America anymore, but I am proud of a few things about America.