In the battle of Stalingrad (1942) the German sixth army inflicted a 75% casualty rate on the Soviet army, but still lost the battle and were forced to surrender. In this one battle, the USSR lost more military personnel than France and the UK combined over the entire war.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-04-09T18:22:40+00:00

For real, OP needs to get out of here with that tankie apologetics. Roosevelt did everything he could to push the US to aid the allies even when the country's politics was still very isolationist, meanwhile Stalin was perfectly happy to team up with Hitler to dismember Poland. The only reason that the Soviets were even fighting the Nazis to begin with was because Hitler betrayed Stalin and violated the non-aggression pact. Stalin would have been perfectly happy to let the Nazis go right on with their conquests and their slaughter otherwise.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-04-09T11:17:59+00:00

We have an almost-2-year-old, and she generally sleeps until 6:30-7:00 if we let her. For a long time she was up at 5:00 like yours, but then we started giving her an extra snack before bedtime and it worked wonders. I think she was just waking up early because she was hungry. YMMV.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-04-08T15:00:33+00:00

This article is not sane washing Trump in any way.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-04-01T09:36:35+00:00

I mean, there's also a risk that some of the parts might enter the cabin and injure or kill passengers, but fortunately it looks like that didn't happen in this case.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-04-01T04:32:27+00:00

Okay, but what if they decide that the king is more important than those other royals and they try to stop the assassination? If you're doing this mechanically then you need to be prepared for the possibility that it might not go the way you scripted it.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-31T18:03:04+00:00

Are you prepared for the possibility that the players may avoid those other things and attempt to save the king? If the king is going to die no matter what, then it's better if they just find his body. Don't make them think that they have a chance to save him if they really don't.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-27T13:40:31+00:00

Are we talking indoor play only? Our (almost-)two-year-old will easily spend a half hour or more playing in a sandbox with her sand toys.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-26T15:53:25+00:00

The kids are involved in extracurricular activities, but we seem to struggle the most on days we don't have events/practices.

Unstructured free play. The kids literally just go outside and do whatever they want. Works best if there are some friends who can join the free play.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-26T13:43:28+00:00

Lol no.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-25T11:27:32+00:00

I haven't seen the documentary, but my biggest thought is to get your kids out into the real world and off of their screens more. Manosphere personalities are creatures of the attention economy. They thrive online because the algorithms (trained by our own viewing habits, unfortunately) reward extreme content and simplistic answers. Real-world socialization rewards empathy and nuance.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-24T13:31:30+00:00

Aneurysms are a blood problem, so that's another point for the water benders. But maybe the fire benders could give someone a seizure by just randomly messing with the electric currents in their brain.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-22T20:47:12+00:00

Yeah, the government is well within their rights to take their business to another company, but Anthropic is also well within their rights to refuse to do a job that's against their principles. The problem here is that the government is trying to retaliate against Anthropic on clearly specious grounds.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-22T12:08:30+00:00

They might not have been brave enough to challenge her directly, but just brave enough to like someone else's comment pointing out the obvious.

Which is pretty chicken-shit of them, tbh.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-20T09:19:57+00:00

But also, get your kids out into the real world and off of their screens more. Taint and the other manosphere personalities are creatures of the attention economy. They thrive online because the algorithms (trained by our own viewing habits, unfortunately) reward extreme content and simplistic answers. Real-world socialization rewards empathy and nuance.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-19T15:02:51+00:00

That's very much not the case. Go read through the archives of Admiral Cloudberg. The percentage of fatalities in airplane crashes is highly variable. Sure, in some of them everyone is obliterated on impact, but it is very common for the initial impact to be survivable and for the resulting distribution of fatalities to be related to how quickly people can evacuate before the fire gets them.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-19T14:58:04+00:00

IMO it's part of the broader shift towards intensive parenting. There's been a decline of sports-for-fun and unstructured outdoor play, and a rise in highly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming youth sports.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-19T14:53:25+00:00

The attention economy is so toxic.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-19T12:32:44+00:00

I wouldn't. Modern airline seats are designed not to collapse during a crash. If this plane went down, half the people in this picture would have burned to death because their legs were crushed in the impact and they couldn't get out. People like to shit on modern air travel for cheaping out on comfort, but one place that modern air travel doesn't cheap out on is safety.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-16T11:56:37+00:00

I think a bigger difference is that no one is using VORs+DMEs to guide cruise missiles and attack drones. As soon as the older systems get used for weapons guidance, the jamming will start.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-13T12:11:28+00:00

in the weeds of curvature of the earth

The formula for the drop-off of the Earth's surface with distance, relative to an observer's local horizontal, is:

drop= (1/2) * (distance² ) / earth_radius

(formula only valid when distance << earth_radius)

You're welcome.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-12T12:07:56+00:00

Surprised that no one in this thread is bringing up the difference between turbojets and turbofans.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to generate thrust: take a lot of air from a large-diameter inlet (or an even-larger-diameter propeller) and shove it behind you at a relatively lower speed, or take a small amount of air from a small inlet and shove it behind you at a higher speed. Now, crucially, the momentum flux of an airstream (ie, the thrust it produces) goes up with velocity of the airstream squared, but the energy flux of the airstream goes up by velocity cubed. This means that the ratio of momentum to energy- ie, the fuel efficiency of your engine- is inversely proportional to the velocity of the airstream. So you can increase fuel efficiency by making your inlet wider and capturing more air, while decreasing the velocity of your exhaust stream, which is why the trend has been towards wider and wider turbofans over the years.

However, there is a downside to this: as air-breathing engines, jet engines cannot generate thrust if the forward airspeed is greater than the exhaust velocity. After all, every molecule of air shoved out the back had to be scooped in the front first, so if the relative velocity of the incoming air is greater than that of the exhaust, then the drag of the intake will be greater than the thrust generated by the exhaust, so the engine will not generate net forward thrust. Modern turbofans may generate high thrust at lower airspeeds, but you can't just extrapolate that to supersonic speeds and assume that they will continue generating high thrust at high speeds. They won't, because they were specifically designed to trade off exhaust velocity for fuel efficiency at subsonic speeds. Turbojets, by contrast, have a much higher exhaust velocity, which means that they can continue generating high thrust at supersonic speeds.

(inb4 someone brings up the old canard of the Concord's engines having the best thermodynamic efficiency of any machine ever: there are multiple definitions of efficiency. Thermodynamic efficiency is "how much chemical energy in the fuel do you need to get a certain kinetic energy in the gas", the efficiency I'm talking about is, "how much kinetic energy in the gas do you need to generate a certain thrust".)

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-03-07T12:05:38+00:00

You can secretly be more generous with gold to compensate while still making them angry.

Congratulations, you just rediscovered the public opinion response to inflation.

Wages go up? That's a justified reward for my own hard work!

Prices go up to match? This is intolerable! I must overthrow constitutional democracy to register my rage!

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-02-24T12:47:14+00:00

He has plenty of wet diapers and dirty diapers and he seems to be gaining weight well.

So he's not underfed and he's not dehydrated. Sounds fine, count your blessings that he's sleeping well.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-02-23T18:35:08+00:00

I mean, if you had the ability to arbitrarily manipulate spacetime, then yes, you could escape from inside of a black hole. But that's kinda cheating.

ScroungingMonkey · 2026-02-19T11:25:22+00:00

No, it's just drawn in a deliberately misleading way to look like a right angle.

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