• 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Maybe you should take the time to understand American history and culture before forming opinions on those topics. Just because you don’t understand the reason it exists doesn’t mean there’s no reason.

    As an American, I love that people who love this country so much they’re willing to move their family halfway around the globe to live here have the ability to do this. Absolutely I want these people to be citizens. This country was literally founded by people doing exactly this.

    This ability wasn’t an accident. It’s not a mistake that this is possible, it’s deliberately written into our constitution.


  • That’s just complete bullshit. A company doesn’t need to spend millions of dollars in legal fees to figure out which tariffs apply today to understand that locally made products don’t have tariffs. They need to know for certain that it’ll be more expensive to import in the future than build a domestic factory. It takes years to build a factory, today’s costs don’t matter, the costs in 5 years do.

    If the goal of the tariffs was to increase domestic production, they should have been phased in over time to give time for the factories to be built. The last month of chaotic tariffs meant that no company could figure out what production to move domestic. At some point in the chain, some things must be imported because they don’t exist in the United States. If a product contains rare earth elements, some portion of it will be imported from China since they process 95% of them in the world. So the question isn’t do we import it not, it’s what piece do we import. If companies knew exactly what the tariff rates are going to be, it still takes years to build a factory. That process won’t start until there’s a cost benefit analysis between paying tariffs and building a factory, and that analysis can’t start without knowing what the tariff rates are. With the tariffs being introduced, paused, resumed, cancelled within a month meant that no cost benefit analysis could be done because the costs might be wildly different tomorrow. Businesses won’t invest if they’re not certain the investment will pay off eventually, and with how chaotic tariff rates have been, no one can be certain, so no one is investing.

    Tariffs can be used to spur domestic production, but the way they were used over the last couple of months is not going to. Just like any tool, they need to be used the correct way to achieve the desired results.


  • I don’t agree at all. Before the crash even happened the controllers sounded stressed. There was absolutely an opportunity for ATC to call out to the helicopter pilot again to clearly state how close they were, but there was so much else going on that no one could monitor the helicopter that closely. When you have a helicopter flying through an active landing path it’s not enough to simply tell the pilot “don’t fuck up”. Why was there a training flight there in the first place? Unless the training was how to fly in the D.C. airspace, it could have taken place somewhere else. There were plenty of opportunities to do things differently so that a mistake from the pilot couldn’t have caused this many deaths.

    In reality, the root cause of the accident is more likely from the airspace being far too crowded and the the lack of enough controllers to properly manage the area. The pilot couldn’t have made the fatal mistake if he was never in that situation in the first place. This is more a symptom of the long term staffing shortage in ATC, but the added stress of the head of the agency being fired, hundreds of their colleagues being fired (or maybe not, no one seems to really know), and the chance that they could wake up tomorrow without a job certainly meant that the controllers had more stress to deal with than just the aircraft in the air. We’re probably just going to have to wait a few months for the NTSB report to fully understand this.

    Trump didn’t directly cause the accident, but his actions very likely could have contributed to it. Aviation safely is built on is built on layers and layers of systems to prevent the conditions for an accident in the first place. At the end of the day, taking a sledgehammer to a federal agency is going to make it run worse, and when the agency in question is the FAA, that means a higher risk of accidents.



  • Yeah, they’re pretty easy as long as you already have the outlet under the sink. The hardest part is maneuvering the drain pipe into place. Once you have it in place there’s just two or three nuts you need to tighten. If you’re really worried about it, you can stick a bucket under it for a couple days it to check for leaks. I’d say it’s a pretty good project to get an intro to plumbing. In the worst case if you get in over your head, you can call a plumber to come in and finish it, and they’ll get it done within half an hour.