__egb__

Maybe the lack of nuance is due to learning, through decades of experience, that the assumption “it won’t be done right” can be baked in.

It really depends what your goals/targets are. You can still do a lot with narrowband filters that make light pollution a minimal concern.

One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.

I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.

At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.

Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.

Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.

Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.

All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”

IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.

The Navy already does forecasting for the DoD. They have their own computing facility (called Fleet Numerical) in California and run their own models.

> They still ask for a tip.

Finally, something to do with all the old sticks of RAM I have.

Time to start keeping track of how many times attorneys from ‘DEI schools’ win on the other side of the courtroom.

Oh, come on now, this one’s easy. They can just activate Textualist-mode and say that that if the founders wanted this clause to apply to tariffs then they should have explicitly used the word ‘tariffs’.

So many of the further-left’s answers follow the progression of the “step 3: ???” meme. I guess these days we might call it “concepts of a plan”. Even when the goals sound great, the paths to reach them are vague or non-existent (or even worse IMO, depend on questionable or simply outright illegal means).

You mention healthcare…I lived in Colorado in 2016 and we had a ballot measure for a constitutional amendment to establish universal healthcare. Great!

However, in the months leading up to that vote there were so many questions about details that the organizers of the ballot measure just met with some form of, “We’ll let you know after the amendment passes.”

I was a federal employee at the time, with an FEHB plan, and I was concerned that I would wind up paying for both the FEHB plan and the state tax that would come with the state plan. I sent multiple emails and asked at an information session but no one involved in organizing the ballot measure would even entertain the question.

Is it any wonder the measure failed 80-20?

Read it again. 40% of the 10% flagged by Cruz. So just 4% of all NSF grants were related to DEI…in some way that isn’t even apparent without actually reading the proposals.

It’s all fun and games until the seat in your car—or spaceship—says, “Moisturize me!”

There have been plenty of government commissions in the past. None of them functioned anything like DOGE, not even the ones instituted by the current President during his first term.

I think this is a surprise to many…even Trump’s more ardent supporters. After all, they thought they were voting for President Trump, not Assistant (to the) President Trump.

What should Tim Cook call himself if, say, a little DOGE-ie gets into the Passport or IRS or SEC systems and actually changes all Tim Cook references to Tim Apple?