hand gestures

Are you angry about the cultural appropriation?

How?

First as tragedy, then as farce.

If you don’t stay busy or in touch with your friends, you’ll just fall into a hole and post crazy shit online to get attention

Terry Pratchett had a good take on this in his book “Men at Arms”. “Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well…human beings.”

Throw in childhood lead poisoning and COVID-induced brain damage and you’ve got a recipe for wild times.

I hate to be that guy, but why are we paying for this?

Because we as a species can walk and chew gum at the same time. I’m all for re-examining where public funds are spent when it comes to space exploration. There’s a lot of defence contractors who got fat and happy on cost-plus aerospace contracts, and who need to be reined in with fixed-price contracts. But before we start looking to axe rovers on Mars, let’s look at excessive military spending as a comparison.

Perseverance, the latest NASA rover, is planned to cost under $3 billion USD, which includes costs to launch and operate. Curiosity is estimated to be a little more at just over $3.2 billion total for launch and operations.

For the same total price as Perseverence, the US taxpayers are getting about 1 1/2 next-generation B-21 bomber, about $2 billion per aircraft when including costs to operate.

Perseverance and her sister Curiosity are making astonishing discoveries about the early history of Mars, and therefore insight into the early history of Earth. Would you rather have those astonishing discoveries coming from those two rovers, or would you rather have three extra bombers in the USAF fleet? I think the USAF has enough toys to play with.

Fuck space, man. We got problems here those scientists should be solving.

I’ll bite. Let’s take climate change as an example, because it is the problem from which so many others spring. Scientists need accurate climate data over the long term, using many types of telescopes and sensors, operating 24/7. And one of the best ways to do that is with a whole lot of satellites. Rocketry R&D is effectively required to do proper climate science. We need rockets. We don’t need more bombers.

I lost my virginity with my best friend’s girlfriend, while my best friend was in the same hotel room, while he was taking photos. And I did it with a hat trick.

I don’t think I need to take this quiz to know what I’d score.

My approach in the broader federation is going to be this:

1. Freely and viciously dunk on public figures. “Joe Biden’s brain is pudding, and that evil asshole has no fucking business deciding what to have for dinner, let alone holding the highest office on the planet, and I’ll celebrate his eventual death from natural causes with a month-long party.”

2. Educate posters with facts. Be as civil as is reasonable, but don’t fetishize civility. “Your respect for Joe Biden is a mistake, and here’s why.”

3. If the poster is 100% confirmed to be a public figure, see #1. “Joe Biden, I hope you spend your final years in untreatable pain.”

I have some free time in between jobs coming up. I’m thinking of working on some hobby programming projects. I think it’d be fun to work on some lemmy-compatible bots. I’m open to ideas on what they should do.

Oglaf, as always, has this covered. (NSFW)

Best advice I can give is to take a formal intro-to-bookkeeping course. It’s not hard to learn basic double-entry accounting but there are some subtleties to it that a self-taught approach might not prepare you for.

How does one find a leftist accountant?

Well technically I’m not officially an accountant because I never went on to get my CPA designation. But I’ve got the education and job description. I mostly went into it because I’m good with math and computers, and every business needs a bookkeeper.

I think you’re more likely to find leftists among accountants than in other business-education fields because accountants have to deal with the real world. It’s not like modern economics where one can make up whatever bullshit one wants in order to please one’s paymasters.

They’re afraid.

That’s terrible. What’s the site name so I can avoid it?