impartial_fanboy [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2020

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  • Yes, Boeing made the first stage of the Saturn V.

    ‘Defense contractor’ and ‘small’ are oxymorons. The old guard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocketdyne, etc. all got used to cost-plus contracts and so geared their production assuming they’d always have them. Now they’re big mad that SpaceX and others are upstaging them in cost, performance and scale because, surprise surprise, decades of no accountability doesn’t foster competence.

    Rocket production has always been a public/private partnership, the only difference is SpaceX takes commercial customers too, not just governments (or companies who basically are part of their government).









  • This all comes with the caveat of it being a translation but I really don’t think it says what you think it does.

    Section I just say the employees are informed of and get a performative say in what the company was already planning on doing, not that they get an actual say in that plan. Section II is only about working conditions and not about the nature of the work itself, if it should be done, how best to do it, etc. Section III also is only about contract points which deal with remuneration and not with the actual business of the company. This part of Section IV;

    Electing or dismissing employee directors and employee supervisors

    Is suspiciously worded and makes me think that it really only means their direct managers and department heads, which of course is an improvement but they aren’t voting on whether major shareholders get a seat on the board of directors or not. Even if it did include the regular C suite, it absolutely does not include members of the company appointed by the party/state.

    Some of the better seeming parts have no teeth.

    electing employee representatives to meetings of creditors and creditors’ committees of the enterprise subject to bankruptcy proceedings in accordance with the law

    Just says they get to show up to the meeting, not that they actually have any say in that meeting. Especially the last part of section IV.

    and recommending or electing management personnel of the enterprise as authorized

    Is super weasel wordy. This could be satisfied just by acknowledging the recommendation of the assembly, it doesn’t actually require the company to follow that recommendation.

    Section V also has no teeth. There is no mention whatsoever of the makeup of the board of directors or what say shareholders have. Which leads me to believe that this is whole thing is just designed to appease workers and not actually provide workplace democracy. To be clear, it is a potentially a step in the right direction if it is given teeth but as it stands it is absolutely just as ‘class collaborationist’ as Germany’s.

    Of course all of this ignores the corrupting and profit maximizing nature of modern corporations which is not changed one iota just by changing who can vote for who is in charge (as evidenced by large co-ops like Mondragon) especially since they still have to compete against corporations who absolutely will cut every corner and cheat to get ahead.

    Edit: I forgot how to format




  • I know you’re just making a comparison but if you actually paid off the national debt you would destroy the dollar.

    Which you actually don’t want to do unless there’s a viable alternative, which there isn’t atm.

    Really their wealth should be appropriated to build sustainable infrastructure across the globe so we can survive the catastrophe they’ve created without mass death (or minimize it as much as possible). But if you have the political will to do that then you might as well just push the communism button.



  • The eccentricity of Earth’s orbit is pretty inconsequential. It’s something like a 3% difference between the furthest and closest points, the changes in tilt relative to the sun or the kind of surface exposed to the sun make basically all of the difference.

    The sun only heats the top layers of the ocean, like a couple hundred feet iirc, and unevenly at that. It would take a very very long time for all the water in the ocean to reach a true equilibrium (if the sun turned off tomorrow) but it doesn’t get to because of the day/night cycle, the seasons, wind and the Earth’s actual rotation etc. So that produces recurring ocean currents, which are chaotic in nature, thus leading to the ocean temperature to vary (drastically at times).

    This newest warming though I think is largely an unintended consequence of the new bunker fuel regulations in 2020 that drastically reduced the amount of Sulfur in it. The sulfur dioxide produced from all those container ships actually has a cooling effect so really the planet was ‘already’ this warm, we were just countering it somewhat. It also is what is mainly responsible for acid rain so we can’t just pump a bunch of it into the atmosphere.




  • Oh sorry, to clarify: The 5m one in the article is almost certainly Long March 10. They seem to have decided to make the first stage reusable, contrary to previous statements. It’s not clear if that means just the boosters or the boosters and the core but I would guess all three like falcon heavy does. It’s also, at least for now, the rocket they plan on sending people to the moon with before 2030 with an Apollo-style lander.

    The smaller 4 meter one seems to be for a commercial rocket.

    Long March 9 last I saw was still not planned to be reusable until the 2040’s but if this recent space push actually turns into a race I’m sure they’ll accelerate that.


  • Long March 10 (the 5m one in the article) isn’t a Starship/Super Heavy competitor, it’s a Falcon Heavy competitor. I.e. it’s only barely considered a super-heavy and depending on the reuse penalties, it might only be one if it’s launched as expendable. I’m guessing most of the specs on Wikipedia are very out of date so it’s hard to tell exactly.

    They’ll probably go through the same process of getting the core and boosters reusable but not bothering with the second stage and just push Long March 9 development instead. Obviously they have to walk before they can run but at this rate they’re still about ~8-10 years behind.