Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons. Seems like it would be easy with two astronauts. Have the one bend over and spread the cheeks wide with both hands, the other basically does the hand in the dog poop bag trick right as the poop is coming out and wipes them up after. No worse than what a nurse does every day for work.
Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots.
I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!
IIRC from the book " packing for mars" the American man astronauts begged NASA to provide them with diapers at some point, which is what women astronauts got, because the earlier male-only system was a sort of sucking condom which was incredibly bad.
This really tells you how "bad masculinity" pervaded everything. I'm speaking of the designers here, not the astronauts. Why not a diaper also for male astronauts from the beginning? Isn't manly enough? Does it show weakness, like a toddler or an old dying man?
> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.
I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.
On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.
I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut, but yeah… pass.
Weird a silicon-like pants that strapped up so there was no leaks (like fisherman’s pants), that has a vacuum you attach (almost catheter style) isn’t used. Actually now that I think about it, it’s weird that astronauts aren’t using catheters 24/7!
I mean this has also been a problem for fighter pilots as well. The "piddle packs" for F-16 pilots are implicared at least one crash due to the complexity of using them.
The US was sooo close! This was exactly how the proposed Click-to-Cancel rule worked from the Biden FTC under Lina Khan. The Trump administration came in and killed it before it went into effect, though, because of course they did (technically: they stopped a mandatory impact study and let the judiciary kill it, same same).
Double Insulation was dire in the early 20th century as well. It works great for self-serving elite politics until, to stretch the analogy, the voltage gets high enough. Then it breaks down.
I wouldn't rely on a single human being to fix this kind of issue. It's only solvable through massive collaboration and communication among those who want to fix it.
Movements that ignore the need for a charismatic leader fail, often spectacularly. It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure. Who was its leader? Is the human megaphone a species of "massive collaboration and communication"? Can you name me one leader from that movement who was nationally recognized as such?
Strong leaders are always required. Such people reduce the cost of messaging and communication which would otherwise be insurmountable to cohere a movement and actually make change. You don't elect a mob. Find leaders you trust and spread your conviction without apology. Roosevelt was not Roosevelt until after his works were done. We don't need some amorphous "massive collaboration and communication" we need to elect leaders who will fight for what we believe. So many of your friends, family and neighbors are willing to elect sell-out leaders. You could start there, that is if you actually want to fix the problem rather than invent new ones.
> It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure.
This claim is enormous. I would instead argue that the movement lacked cohesiveness because it basically complained about too large a set of (correctly identified as interconnected) issues and lost momentum because the surface was too large.
That said, I agree w your point about a face being important. Even in software, where tech can speak for itself, we see this heavily: Torvalds, Matsumoto, van Rossum, Jobs,
...which is typically done by building a movement around a leader who represents the values a movement wants to achieve.
FDR is a good example of an American leader who made substantive, wildly successful, left-leaning policy changes that ushered in decades of prosperity and (in part) last to this very day despite facing heavy opposition from the business elite of the time. They even tried to coup him!
At the time, the long term trends were dire for the American left. Double insulation was strong and getting stronger. Then the Great Depression hit. Around the world, populists and radicals were elected to office, and one way or another they changed things. In America, we managed our reform process without trying to conquer the world and without starving millions. Not Hitler, not Stalin. Roosevelt. I think that's a worthy goal to aim for again this time around.
Perhaps I mean to ask a question then, how did FDR manage to become such a widely heard leader back then with so many less ways for people to talk together? Did it make a bigger difference that he had to exist as someone people spoke to other people about? Shouldn't it be easier to find these leaders with so much more access to everyone nowadays?
Communication friction is only one cost of running a campaign among many, so the structure of parties and campaigns and primary / general elections has largely remained the same. Even if the technological barriers went away, I suspect the human factors would still hold up the structure because only so many people are willing to spend years of their life building legitimacy and promoting a political platform and each voter is only willing to spend a certain amount of time participating and choosing.
Exactly how that may have played out in the last century could be explained by many, many chains of causes and effects. But it wasn't a great leader that made it happen. At the bottom of everything, I believe it was this:
Decades of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death destroyed not only capital but huge swaths of the labor pool. With labor at a premium, it became more valuable and power shifted.
I think that without a similar apocalypse, it will not happen again.
Yes, economic disaster is the driver (tangential: a lump-of-labor supply shock was not the transmission mechanism), but big political movements always happen from the pieces lying around. Everyone can feel that a disaster of one form or another is coming. We need to make sure the right pieces are lying around.
Yes, and many people have an extreme incentive to retreat to that framing because
* In 2024, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2020, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2016, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
There was plenty of evidence of this association in 2016 (bragging about creeping into Ms Teen USA dressing rooms, bragging about being Epstein's best friend in the same sentence as acknowledging he's a pedo, victim testimony under oath that he diddled kids, etc etc), so "I didn't know" isn't an excuse if they cared one iota about the children at any step of the way.
It should be good news that the powerful pedophiles are largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in one party, but those who put them in power will do anything to avoid admitting culpability.
Hillary has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2016.
Biden has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2020.
Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
>Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
Who was in charge when Epstein got the sweetheart deal on his first conviction?
This table seems suspect. I spot checked Texas, and while the party affiliation is correct, the dates are not. You put Sept 19, 2023 as the date for Texas, but Wikipedia[1] says it "Enacted September 1, 2024" and "Enacted June 13, 2023". Looking at the other dates, I'm not sure how you got Sept 19, 2023, even through a typo.
No, it's bipartisan and even fucking international. I think there is a very obvious conspiracy to get this done, but maybe it's a big coincidence that governments and politicians everywhere suck now.
I was talking about the party. This shit is and always has been pushed from both parties. Even democrat states like California and Colorado are on board. See also, the OS age verification legislation.
TBH California one doesn't require age verification (while many other states do). It only requires the OS to provide a mechanism for the user to indicate their age group and apps should use the information (instead of asking for PII themselves). It's a fake one, but somehow drew most attention.
If that is true about the California case, it is basically a fluke. Lobbyists don't have total control of the legislation after all. It sounds almost benign when posed that way, but it is the wrong solution either way. The better solution is to tell people to install filtering software to block content that they don't want. Then you don't have to worry about compliance of individual sites, personal information, or any of it. This filtering strategy also makes sense for privacy and handling the subjective nature of what is age-appropriate or offensive.
I don't know the precise combination of stupidity vs evil that compelled the "think of the children" crowd to choose the single most publicly implicated man in the Epstein scandal as their champion and elect him over someone who wasn't and hasn't been implicated at all in the slightest, but they did. Either way, they receive the culpability for doing so and we should expect their future decision making to be equally compromised.
We are in the hell dimension. Headphone manufacturers are sent to punish us. It's the only explanation that makes sense: these are not the headphones we need, but they are the headphones we deserve.
After removing buttons and switches with physical semantics, extending response latency, and decreasing reliability, they were running out of ways to torment us. The slow, obnoxious voices gave them a bit more runway. They even deal bonus combo damage when the headphones try and fail to connect to devices you told them to forget with their app (which made you sign up for an account, of course) and the slow, obnoxious voices agonizingly narrate the saga of failure before you are allowed to listen to your music.
I am currently on Bose QC Ultra 1 specifically because it allowed disabling the voice whereas WH-1000XM5 didn't (it had a setting, but it only applied to a subset). Did they get rid of that on QCU 2?
The latency is annoying, and based on the fact that there are 8K hz poll rate mice, latency doesn’t have to be an issue with wireless.
Happy to be corrected, I bet you can via the app. Thanks for the tip, I’ll look into it! My wife’s QCU 2s are absolutely luxurious and live up to the “comfort” name 100%.
Mice can do that because they require so little bandwidth. Bluetooth has a latency/bw tradeoff (this is why Bluetooth microphones are so horrible, though the handsfree profile is also neglected generally).
I took that to be what it was intended it convey, and what Dimon wanted people to feel about what he said. That maybe they should poke around their own books but he wasn’t telling people “well ‘08 all over again”
My own read of the subtext was something a bit different. Dimon saw something he really didn’t like and my guess would be that more than just a handful of people at JP Morgan were having their next few days or longer personal plans cancelled—- or that it had already settled from something like that— to find whatever they had in the way of cockroaches. And so Dimon’s public statement was a soft nudge to try and get others to do the same, cautiously and slowly without panicking.
It’s tea leaves but the time since then seems to bear that out, with right now’s world economic volatility being a good opportunity for many places to go a little more aggressively in reigning in whatever they have in cockroach’s with some cover from that volatility and distraction to not have to explain too much more or get too much scrutiny that would accelerate things beyond manageable.
Overall, my take was that Dimon is still probably pissed off about SV bank and trying to make sure whatever shape or size this private credit rot may have doesn’t go down quite that haphazardly.
The regulators were modeling a scenario where private credit was dragged down by a problem elsewhere in the economy, not one where the rest of the economy was dragged down by private credit. Everyone understands that center of a financial implosion is always worse than its effects on the broader economy, but regulators aren't tasked with stopping the explosion at ground zero, they are tasked with stopping contagion dominoes from falling, so that's what they model.
Of course, but the fundamental problem is that difficulties compound. It starts with: pooping is much harder when gravity isn't there to persistently tug on the turd. Something that is slightly obnoxious on Earth (using a bag, using a suit flap) turns into an absolute trainwreck when you have a bag, a suit flap, and turd separation failure. Now you have to do precise mechanical manipulation of an object you don't want to touch behind your back through a bag and a suit flap, every failure multiplies the work, and now the turds can float away to multiply the work outside your immediate vicinity. Ditto for kneading the antibacterial into the poo: if you fail to do this thoroughly on Earth, bacterial offgassing causes the bag to vent, but in all likelihood that's the end of it because you can arrange for gravity to keep the poo away from the vent. In fact, you would probably do this without even thinking or imagining how it could go wrong. In zero gravity, you can't simply arrange "vent on top, poo on bottom", so the event is likely to launch aerosolized poo into your living environment where you have to put up with it for the next few days.
It's difficult to fully appreciate gravity until it's gone.
Astronauts are heroes for the risks they take, but they are also heroes for dealing with this.
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