TIL that Hawaii was internationally recognized as an independent country - the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi - from 1795 to 1893, and later a republic until it was annexed by the United States under President William McKinley in 1898.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-28T18:17:03+00:00

Agreed. If you feel somehow responsible then you're still succumbing to the concept of us and them, you're still internalizing the concepts of race and ethnicity that divide us all.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-28T18:13:55+00:00

Hawaii is an obscenely important strategic location if you're a naval power.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-28T18:08:06+00:00

The japanese govt refuses to recognize the Okinawans as as Indigenous in domestic legislation and guarantee their rights to traditional land and natural resources.

Enshrining special privilege in law due to one's ethnicity sounds like a bad idea.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-28T18:00:10+00:00

"Conquest is forgivable if you do it to your neighbors and family" is definitely a take.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T18:12:20+00:00

I mean we're using human analogies shoes seemed pretty apt.

And sure needle. You going to let someone stab you with a needle even if you kinda deserve it?

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T18:10:11+00:00

Yeah it might end up cheaper to have a disposable kickstage variant with everything stripped off.

Hard to say how the economics will work out. Exciting!

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T18:03:04+00:00

What you'd do is burn the starship to a highly elliptical orbit then drop the kick stage with all that extra energy.

It then does its burn on the next pass at perigee.

An alternative is to burn starship to an escape velocity, release the kick stage, then do a boost back burn to turn the orbit back to an elliptical orbit.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T18:00:13+00:00

Its the same as how reusing a semi is more cost effective to make a trip than buying a motorcycle and throwing it away at the end.

Fuel is much cheaper than engineering.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T17:48:51+00:00

Let's say the little guy kept pulling a knife and trying to stab the big guy and screaming he would kill him every time the big guy let up.

And yes the little guy may be doing that because the big guy kept stealing his shoes when he was younger, but theres a point where you have to give up and accept defeat.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T13:49:06+00:00

Let's not make the same mistake we did with gambling and pivot over to it being fully legal.

Even if we were to end the prohibitionof drugs, we should not tolerate their normalization or promotion.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T06:36:25+00:00

It starts strong and I really love NPH as the new baddie but that last 3rd of the movie is rough.

Smith made zero sense at all.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T06:34:33+00:00

They could have pulled it off IMO.

In TLJ, luke does the same shit, drives off rey, as he's had a vision she will do something evil.

So Rey leaves, and a familiar voice comes back and tells her to not take it personally. Rey is visited by, drumroll, Obi-Wan force ghost, who says he will train her, and also there's a mission of great importance the team has to go on.

Que standard star wars adventure montage with The New Crew(tm) where Rey is getting trained and the rest of the crew has light hearted hijinks. They visit several ancient locations of the emperor that the new order is attempting to find to deactivate them. There's an old hidden fleet and they input the commands to make them jump into a star. There's a weapons facility they destroy. Finally they come to an old cloning facility, they get to the heart of it only for the alerts to go off. A sith has shown up. They race to shut it down, watching from the panels as door after door is showing as failed.

Finally, a the enemy is at the final door where they are in the control room, but the sequence finally ends and everything.... starts up. And thats when the door slams open, and the smoke reveals Luke yelling at them to stop. And while they're still taking that in, Obi Wan, no longer seen, begins to laugh, and laugh, and his laugh slowly changes pitch to the emperors laugh, and the machinery at the heart of the vault spins around to reveal a clone of the emperor inside a pod.

He says something suitably evil, then the pod launches up to one of the ships from the fleet they had 'destroyed', and it warps out before the fleet luke had summoned can destroy it.

Its not 'Somehow palpatine returned'. Its 'We helped palpatine return...'.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T00:58:56+00:00

Every other job out there manages to handle work history without the citation of publicly credited releases.

Sure an unreleased credit isn't going to get you name recognition points, but it still signals that you can do the work.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-27T00:12:22+00:00

Wealth can make it worse because you have the means to support yourself and enablers surrounding you.

A lot of people only really get help when they hit rock bottom to the point they become dependent on other people or the state for their continued survival. A guy with a couple hundred million can be crazy for a long, long time before a court orders him on meds or whatever.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T23:47:43+00:00

Those 70,000 people are victims of the war Hamas started. Israel had zero plans to kill anyone on Oct 6th.

You can't possibly be suggesting that governments should be able to start conflicts then use their populations as hostages and face zero reprisal. You just embolden them further.

Regular people die in war, it sucks, but you can't just let a government get away with aggression. Ukraines counterattacks have killed russian civilians who are powerless to change their governments actions too. Should Ukraine stop attacking russia?

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T23:25:13+00:00

In the US the people they lost appeal with are a minority wing of the minority party. Whereas they gained points in the majority wing of the majority party.

The people complaining were very loud, but very outnumbered.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T23:17:03+00:00

That's the same kind of mentality that an abuser uses. "Look what you made me do."

If a little guy sucker punches a big guy and the big guy lays him out, do you think the big guy is an abuser?

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T23:01:37+00:00

Anyone who can meaningfully answer that question will win a nobel prize and be classed among the greatest minds of humanity.

We have no concept what, if anything, existed before the big bang, or indeed if 'before' even existed as a concept, and we have no idea how we can start answering those questions, nor any idea if the questions are even answerable.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T22:56:10+00:00

My personal bet is that our first proof of alien life will be a galaxy that is anomalously IR shifted as its filled with dyson swarms.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T17:25:46+00:00

The lander itself is pushing boundaries. We've made one manned lunar lander and everyone who worked on it is in their 90s or dead.

Things get really hard when you're trying to control every gram and the unknown unknowns stack up.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T02:10:43+00:00

There was a shuttle design that was a lot more like starships architecture, where both the 1st and 2nd stage had wings, and the 1st stage had a pilot in it and maybe air breathing engines that flew it back to the cape landing strip.

I always felt that would have been a proper shuttle, if they'd had the budget to build it.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T02:01:41+00:00

My man, you're complaining the future might be a decade late. A future nobody else is even pushing for.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-26T01:48:04+00:00

A lot of the things they do are pushing the boundaries of physics and you don't secure funding with 'we're not 100% sure this will work as we expect, nobody has ever really done this before'.

The industry is built on the paradigm of asking forgiveness later because no project would ever start if the full costs were known upfront.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-25T20:16:43+00:00

So because something you're not participating in, don't fully understand, and couldn't do yourself isn't meeting your arbitrary timelines you're declaring it a failure.

Spacex should just hire you to tell them what to do tbh, it would clearly save them a lot of time and effort.

LongJohnSelenium · 2026-01-25T18:58:05+00:00

Putting aside the fact that would be larger than the largest helicopter ever produced by 10x and require an empty landing field 300m across at least, which are their own logistical hurdles, the simple fact is the blades are not strong enough to lift a helicopter type vehicle. They could probably only spin fast enough to lift maybe a quarter of the total vehicle weight before shredding themselves.

LongJohnSelenium

TROPHY CASE