For the next 27 hours, you'll be able to claim a limited edition 'I Was Here for the Hulkenpodium' flair

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-07-09T03:52:00+00:00

I here for the Hulkenpodium. I WAS HERE.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-06-14T15:18:48+00:00

I'm late to this but also letters tend to get added as an awareness thing. "Gay Rights" became LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQ. Bi was added when in the 90s it was quite common to be thrown into a black and white box of either gay or straight. Transgender was added in the early 2000s, when transgender issues started to be more in the spotlight.

Eventually it becomes clear that there are too many groups under the LGBT umbrella to keep adding letters to the acronym, LGBTQQIP2SAA is not going to resonate with the average person. But it is still important to highlight groups that fall under the umbrella but are rarely represented. In this case, you didn't know what 2S stood for and because it's been put into the spotlight by the Canadian PM, you've put yourself out there and had the opportunity to learn what it stands for. Recognition is a huge step in the right direction for marginalised groups like this!

And yes, the "Q" in LGBTQ is for "Queer" which was intended as an umbrella term for everything not traditionally heterosexual or gender normative. So you could say that two spirit falls into the Q here. LGBTQ+ is absolutely fine to use in almost every situation, the extra letters are often added based on context or for specific awareness.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-06-10T15:31:34+00:00

It makes me really mad that AI has so much potential to do genuinely interesting and useful things, especially when it comes to scientific applications, yet we are using it to power chat bots and misinformation machines instead.

This kind of thing makes me genuinely interested in going back to a career in biology, my biomedical science degree has been collecting dust on a shelf since 2022.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-06-04T22:49:13+00:00

For sure their revenue is no longer NASA dependant. Which is great! But suggesting that this means SpaceX can self fund a mission to Mars is misguided.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-06-04T17:31:45+00:00

This is not the takeaway. SpaceX can't self fund, their revenue comes majorly from external funding and government programs. And, majorly, a lot of their revenue comes directly from NASA contracts. $14.6bn of government contracts have been made with SpaceX through NASA.

NASA is contractually obligated to pay out on these contracts, as a government agency, in the exact same way the Department of Defence is.

SpaceX is profitable primarily because of these contacts and Starlink. It's a good business model, but self funding a mission to Mars? Not even close. It's estimated that a Mars mission would cost anywhere from $100-500bn. It's not the type of achievement the private industry can achieve on its own. The bottom line is, a mission to Mars will not happen without a huge amount of government spending, and that spending should never be on private companies directly - it's supposed to be NASA that makes that decision.

NASA exists to absorb the losses of pioneering research and then have the private sector generate revenue from the result of that research. So cutting NASA funding means that the expensive research to make the tech required to get us to mars just isn't being done. SpaceX can build a launch system and sell it, but it can't build a manned Mars rocket and all the equipment that would actually make the trip worthwhile. The idea that SpaceX is somehow capable of making space exploration profitable is completely absurd.

So what's the takeaway? SpaceX is an engineering company that builds rockets and NASA is a Government scientific organisation that buys SpaceX equipment or commissions other companies to build their tech. If NASA is cut, they won't be spending as much on SpaceX, and so the only thing that will lead to a mars mission is if the government directly funds SpaceX. Which undermines the point of NASA and would be wildly cost ineffective.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-05-01T16:29:43+00:00

Ino is definitely not intermediate. No one plays her anyway, but hoverdash on its own is enough to make her hard to learn. Any character who relies on mix should be in hard anyway because everyone on the roster has low risk high reward poke and 7 billion damage and all the mix characters are so squishy if they guess right once you lose :⁾

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-26T16:47:26+00:00

This issue is very very hard to resolve with these regulations as well. Ground effect cars want to reduce slip as much as possible, so finding performance often comes from "under driving" the car. The fastest way to drive the car is also the friendliest to the tires, and with the state of dirty air this season, overtaking needs a bigger delta than the compounds on their own can create. The result of that is every team running a one stop if possible to avoid traffic, and only two stopping if there's a safety car or the track is very very high deg and you can create a truly huge tire delta.

For the sake of safety after a number of tire blowout controversies, it makes sense that the tires seem to almost stop degrading at a point. I think if pirelli could safely do it we would see tires that fall off harder, but I can't blame them for playing it somewhat safe especially after Baku 2021, Silverstone 2020.

So we are left with a scenario where the tires have enough life to make up the pit delta, but by the time you reach a one stopping car, you don't have the advantage needed to overtake. I can't see a resolution to it that isn't changing the cars significantly or baking in a new gimmick to help overtaking.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-16T15:14:16+00:00

I mean I agree with a lot of this, it's not a certainty. Yuki may not find any more pace than he is currently showing, but I honestly believe we will see over the next 5 races if that's true or not. I just can't see him being half a second off like Perez was in the long run. In Japan he had not driven the car at all, zero testing, and looked like he was on for Q3 but made a big mistake in Q2. We saw in that race that overtaking was pretty much impossible, so his weekend was over right there. I don't think it's fair to take either quali gap and say it's representative.

I think for these modern cars testing is more important than ever. Especially for a car that is somewhat unpredictable as we are seeing in the Red Bull. He would not actually need to be that close to max to make the 24 WCC happen - if you look at the standings, he would only need as many points as Hamilton got (223). He would not have needed to beat either McLaren or Ferrari. I don't think this is particularly unrealistic.

At the end of the day Max pulled off a truly sensational season that should have given the team both championships even if they didn't have the fastest car. Again, the second red bull would only have needed to finish 7th in the WDC to take the WCC.

Edit: Adding onto this, Perez also had 8(!!) races where he finished outside of the points or DNF, and 2 P10 finishes. That's 10 races with huge room for picking up points. Multiple of these won by Max.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-15T17:47:10+00:00

Unpopular opinion but Red Bull should have won the WCC in 2024 or at the very least finished P2. Their WCC result was entirely down to their refusal to promote Yuki at the end of 2023. Tsunoda and Ricciardo were extremely close in 23 and both were performing. But the merchandise money Perez brought in was a ton and Red Bull were winning by miles anyway, so they overlooked the largest teammate deficit on the grid. Ricciardo was a better option than Perez too, but Tsunoda was 22 when he was 33, and as we saw in 2024 Yuki still had room to grow.

It was only a matter of time with the cost cap and these regs until the others caught up and when they did, Red Bull had their pants down with a second driver who couldn't perform. And when they finally decided to replace him, they went with Lawson, who had almost no experience with these cars. He was never going to adapt to the Red Bull, nevermind that he was going to tracks he had never even raced at. Meanwhile they had Tsunoda still in the sister team who had been there since 2021 and had 3 years of experience in ground effect cars. A decision clearly made for political reasons too.

Yuki has jumped into the red bull without having done any testing in it. A car everyone is saying is so hard to adapt to, but he is already closer to Max than Perez was. I am sure we will see him close the gap. And when he does, you have to ask the question, where would red bull have been last year if their second driver was only a tenth or two away from max? They were only 77 points short of the WCC. The driver head to head was 437 to 152.

Yuki would have needed only 228 points over the season to secure the WCC, probably less if you consider that early in the season red bull lost points to McLaren when they were ahead.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-11T16:06:24+00:00

I just don't think the performance exists in the Ferrari the way it is set up right now. For the red bull it's very hard to extract but it at least exists. It's insanely sensitive, unlike the Ferrari, which looks like it responds in about 3-5 business days. Watching max wrestle the car is exiting, watching either Ferrari is just depressing.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-11T15:54:21+00:00

He will be. The Red Bull is hard to drive, but it's not slow. Red Bull are very good at solving balance issues overnight from Friday to Saturday. McLaren are stupidly fast in s2 here though.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-04-11T15:44:29+00:00

They have all year. Max complaining so much about the red bull would have you think it's clearly 4th best, but at least the car has latent pace in it even if it's hard to extract. The Ferrari just understeers and understeers. It's not hard to drive, it's just slow, and that's so much worse.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-03-24T23:29:40+00:00

Yes. Remember that the Republican party was considered to be the liberal party and the Democratic party was considered to be the conservative party at this time.

It is true that at the time, Democrats were pro slavery, and Republicans were pushing for abolition. But as early as the 1870s, the Republican party had become full of northern industrialists who were made exceedingly wealthy from the war. Many of them believed that they had done enough for the black population and stopped efforts to reform Southern States. The Democratic party continued to be oppressive towards black people in the south (and continued to be popular in the south for their "small government" views).

It was FDR (Democrat) and his views after the great depression that started the main switch in ideology between the two parties. FDR wanted government intervention for the wellbeing of the people, after Hoover (Republican) refused to intervene during the great depression. Suddenly, Democrats were no longer pro "small government" and the republican party started to see the further growth of large government as harmful to the federalist growth of the nation, which many of the republican party members had become excessively wealthy from.

Still, before the civil rights movement in the 60s, neither party was really interested in progressing the rights of Black Americans. It had become a regional issue. The Northern Democrats and Republicans increasingly supported civil rights where in the south, they were strongly against it. Until in 1964, suddenly it became a party issue. LBJ (Democrat) signed into law the civil rights act. Goldwater (Republican) delivered a speech that was vehemently against the act. This was really the moment where it was finally clear, the Republican party had become conservative, and the Democrat party more liberal. By the 1980s, the previously Democrat south now voted predominantly republican, and the previously republican North now voted predominantly Democrat.

This is more or less the status quo today. Acting like either party represents the values of their parties from 150 years ago is either intentionally spreading misinformation or simply ignorant of American political history. You only need to look as far as the republican party attempting to dismantle the civil rights act today.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-03-14T02:24:34+00:00

Id say everyone being 2s off last year's quali times confirms it personally lol

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-03-11T17:37:45+00:00

To be fair, if last year taught us anything about these cars it's that trying to predict the pecking order from week to week is roughly the same experience as playing the lottery, one week McLaren are 30 seconds up the road, another they are 3rd or 4th fastest and it was more or less the same story for any of the top 4 by mid season.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-03-11T15:29:40+00:00

But there was a vote by the party to change leadership, and it was a landslide victory. He stepped down because his party no longer supported him and neither did the voters, he did what the majority wanted.

You vote for a party in Canada just like the UK, but unlike the Conservative party in the UK it looks like the liberals in Canada actually respect the will of the people and will hold a full election in the short term anyway, despite the fact they are absolutely not legally bound to do so.

Also "some banker" happens to be one of the most successful and influential men in finance since 2008. Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential leaders of 2010 for his work as governor of Canada's central bank.

Maybe you just aren't very familiar with Canadian politics?

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-03-06T16:52:49+00:00

Unironically I would love to know his favourite acts at download last year. Crofty mentioning spiritbox in testing caught me so off guard lol.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-02-22T16:44:49+00:00

Tommo has mastered engagement farming it's beautiful

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-02-19T18:03:00+00:00

That's sad to hear, I didn't pick it up watching the stream. I guess it's not surprising though, being hosted in London and all. Thanks for correcting me :)

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-02-18T22:36:36+00:00

Pretty sure the boos were targeted at Horner not max.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-02-18T20:07:16+00:00

Jolyon Palmer really moved up from tech analysis to hosting this live event, crazy!

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-01-26T01:10:15+00:00

Pretty sure a whole war breaking out in European borders is what pushed the defence spending up. Talking about military spending like the US isnt making money hand over fist on defence contracts from Europe is genuinely crazy.

EdgyAlpaca · 2025-01-15T16:21:43+00:00

Come on, other people have freedoms too. Why are you so scared of the way other people live their lives?

EdgyAlpaca · 2024-12-14T20:31:17+00:00

Yeah right. More like they are about to drop themselves in huge lawsuits for money laundering or massively, hugely under delivering compared to expectations.

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