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24 Jun, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The best thing you can do to get through a checkpoint is to scale down this security theater, now in its 20th year of making us less free.
Someone needs to have the moral courage to restore the 9/11 status quo ante for passenger screening, or we'll be taking our shoes off and getting lotion confiscated down to the seventh generation.
My favorite example of TSA bullshit is the six-seat planes that fly to the town near my mom. The "checked" and "carry-on" bags go in the same compartment, and you sometimes physically sit in the co-pilot's seat at the controls, but they will make you throw out a bottle of water.
(If you want the "sit here and don't touch anything" experience in the copilot's seat of this bad boy, try to find a CapeAir flight that normally has no passengers in one direction).

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Pinboard Profile picture
23 Jun
I love that the vertical moon dildo is still the official landing plan. This configuration was rejected in the sixties because the moon is lumpy and standing a pencil on its end is not the stablest way to land, but now we have computers and Elon says it's okay.
The last time NASA flew a new design of spacecraft was 1981, and that lack of experience in the current generation of managers (whose careers were shaped by the orbiting bureaucratic Habitrail of ISS) is really showing in the Artemis missions.
The plan as I best I can understand it right now is to fly people around the moon (Apollo 8 reenactment), then put a space station up sort of nearish the moon, and then make all later astronauts change planes there to use the space dildo to land on the lunar surface.
Read 9 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
22 Jun
Congress is also about to send itself home on the first of a series of recesses, just like it did at the height of the pandemic. You can't blame everything on Republicans if our elected Democratic majority refuses to stay in D.C. and do the work.
Two things in particular can't wait—massively expanding our vaccine production and exports, and saving the lives of thousands of Afghan citizens who helped us during the occupation and will be murdered if we don't let them immigrate. The lack of urgency and focus is deplorable
If you're arguing the Republicans are obstructing your entire policy agenda with the filibuster, then don't send everyone home on vacation. Turn off the A/C in congressional buildings for the summer if you have to. Use the damn levers of power while you have them.
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
21 Jun
I'm taking an entirely remote course this summer, so naturally they're requiring me to take an extensive online training about sexual health. I've been letting it autoplay in the background, but this caught my eye. The "and/or" here raises more questions than it answers.
There didn't use to be such a heavy focus on rimming or microaggressions before one could enroll in a correspondence course in linear algebra, but the internet is a great canvas for the Michelangelos of academic bureaucracy to paint on.
My first trigger warning in the wild! I wish I had been prepared for this.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
21 Jun
The shutdown of Apple Daily in Hong Kong is a big deal. The paper has ample money, but the banks in this notionally independent and free financial hub are refusing to do business with them. This was one of the red lines that Beijing was supposed to be afraid to cross.
A second red line crossed recently is Internet censorship. Hong Kong police got an Israeli ISP to take down a pro-democracy site; when the ISP later restored the site, it was blocked in the territory.
The operating theory (or hope) in 2019 was that either of these actions would be intolerable to expats and endanger the territory's status as a financial capital. And China needs Hong Kong as a conduit for corrupt gains in the PRC to connect with the world financial system.
Read 10 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Jun
This piece by Dan Rather is a good example of the motivated reasoning that has poisoned the discussion over covid origins, and ironically a very unscientific approach. Whether science is under attack or not should have zero bearing on investigating how the pandemic started.
If the pandemic was iatrogenic, then Stewart is in fact completely correct that certain avenues of scientific research pose a major threat to humanity. And scientists are not neutral arbiters in that discussion, but have an enormous interest in the exculpatory answer being right.
The answer to the covid origins question will help us decide whether we should be building new coronavirus research labs or tearing them down. Whether this answer helps the opponents of science, or helps Trump, or upsets China, or destroys public confidence is irrelevant.
Read 9 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Jun
I just read about the Lunar Gateway project and... oh my God. They're going to build a pointless ISS Jr. in a hipster lunar orbit and make everyone stop there on the way to the Moon, for no reason. When did NASA become space Amtrak? Why do they love these shitty space stations?
Hopefully relations with China deteriorate to the point where we start firing big rockets at stuff to see who can get there first. The international cooperation model leads to these awful bureaucratic Habitrails that accomplish the unthinkable—making space flight boring.
Rule of thumb for space exploration—nothing worth doing ever had a Canadarm attached to it
Read 4 tweets

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