partial_accumen

Woah there buddy, the start of the line for the 5 1/4" floppy is back there. No cutting.

4116s are DIPs. I'd de desolder those myself for installation into my Intel 8088 luggable.

He also needs that revenue to personally enrich himself from taxpayer money. He gave himself $10 billion of taxpayer money for creating his Board of "peace".

The population of the USA as of Feb 2026 is 342.3 million people. This means that trump personally took $29.21 from every single American living today (including newborn children and aging senior citizens) and put that money in his personal bank account.

Its things like this that I cannot understand how poverty stricken trump supporters are still okay with him and his actions.

...yes but what about the second play through. There's changes to the game after you've beaten it once?

What is your favorite Zelda memory?

Drawing in the missing map squares from the published map that came with the game:

What I'm surprised hasn't happened yet is RAM ICs being recycled at the retail level. As in, you could bring in an old laptop or phone with 32GB of soldered RAM and it would be desoldered and sold for cash or possibly even soldered into a new device you buy from that retailer.

I wonder how close we are to that business model arriving.

Do you not remember what happened after the the acquittal of the officers that brutally beat King? The LA riots happened. The video was what catalyzed so many to action even when the truth of police brutality was well known before that.

This is true of Eric Garner which was also caught on video and lead to large demonstrations.

And again with Philando Castile where the video showed Castile totally complying with officer orders, yet was still shot dead by that police officer. Again demonstrations against police brutality.

Its the video that makes people take notice. Sadly, it doesn't sound like we have video of Ruben Ray Martinez final moments yet.

Pro America programming:

Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of our nation. Acting to disenfranchise citizens from voting with plans from our current administration of jackbooted paramilitary thugs at polling places is a threat to America.

Headline leaves out this important distinction:

In Sri Lanka, a lawmaker was previously entitled to a pension after serving a five-year term. The new law stops payments to anyone who already receives, or qualifies for, the pension.

The pensions being scrapped those that are only received by elected politicians (or sometimes their widows). There is no scrapping of general government pensions for regular people with this action.

There are limits to appeals. Each appeal up the chain requires that court to agree to hear the challenge of the appeal. Depending on the jurisdicion, I think the limit would be only 3 or 4 appeals with that last one being the Supreme Court of the United States. If the next higher court declines to hear the appeal, the lower courts ruling stands.

Of course he will. That new approach will be challenged in court, but will take another 12-18 months for there to be a ruling against it, meanwhile trump will keep using tariffs against our friends and allies further alienating and isolating the United State globally.

The challenge is that the counterpoint of Boeing culture change causing things like the Starliner is about as valid when regulatory capture happens.

We'll its not "regulatory capture" because we're not talking about regulatory agencies, but you're right if you're talking corporate capture.

I know its going to sound counter-intuitive, but Starliner was actually necessary to break corporate capture.

The entrenched interests in Aerospace as well as Congress had almost no desire to change. Aerospace loved their "cost plus" infinite money printing machines paid for by government dollars. Contractors had zero concern for cost overruns/ballooning costs. Congress got to land Aerospace jobs in their districts. NASA got working but VERY EXPENSIVE space vehicles every 10-20 years. Fat cats on all sides were very very happy with this arrangement.

A very small set of politicians concerned about costs (and likely some campaign contributions) along with NASA wanted much cheaper vehicles then they were getting at that time. So they got a proposal to have private companies bid for fixed price contracts for space cargo flights. "UPS for space shipments" essentially. It worked. Law passed It was cheap. It was reliable.

So then with the success of private cargo, questions were raise why we were spending orders of magnitude more on human flights to the International Space Station? There was much clutching of pearls about these new hotshot private space companies and if they could handle human spaceflight. Somehow Boeing, the trusted legacy maker of the Space Shuttle and Apollo, was convinced to bid on human private spaceflight. There was now a company Congress would be confident would deliver a working solution, and they still got to tell their districts they were bringing ~~pork~~ jobs. Those other untrustworthy "newspace" companies could fail, and Boeing would still deliver human spaceflight as they had for decades.

We know now how wrong that was, but without that as a possible future, no human private spaceflight would have happened. If it had just been newspace companies like SpaceX and Sierra Space, Congress never would have passed the legislation to allow Commercial Crew to happen.

So you can see that Starliner needed to exist to break the corporate capture. That had to existed for use to break the corporate capture model that plagued human spaceflight.

I’m not saying nationalizing companies would help, but a government with good oversight (which is more and more of a question under Trump) could also help.

I don't have much faith in that idea. Look at what NASA was before private spaceflight. I love them for other reasons, but look at what ESA (European Space Agency) is today. Safran is a company that is the Boeing to ESA with all the same problems of Boeing for NASA.

I’m not NASA or BOEING, but I’m going to imagine that before, Nasa would be calling the shots, essentially designing the craft, and overseeing (as in breathing down their necks) what contractors built.

You're exactly RIGHT on this part. This, in the industry, is called a "cost plus" contract. What this means is that NASA can ask for whatever they want no matter how outlandish and the aerospace contractor (such as Boeing in for Space Shuttle) will build it for them. NASA is bill for all of the actual costs of the design and construction PLUS a set percentage which is pure profit for the contractor. Aerospace contractors LOVE "cost plus"!

What frequently happens with big space projects like this is that design objectives change or material limitations are uncovered during construction over the years. NASA may start by saying "we want this to carry 10 Astronauts". Contractor designs and starts building the main vehicle. Then during a unit test, they find the G forces produced on the angle of the seats is too high for safety, so the angle needs to be changed. All the money spent designing and building the old seats NASA still has to pay, and the contractor still gets their fixed Plus profit. The new design and construction of the safe seats are ALSO paid by NASA as well as a Plus profit for the new seats.

Now NASA goes “I want a thingy that goes up” and the contractor makes the decisions, cuts the corners it wants, and creates mind boggling cost overruns.

You're exactly WRONG on this part.

Now what was used for private spaceflight companies (SpaceX cargo, Northrop cargo, SpaceX crew, Boeing Crew) is called "fixed price contracts".

Ideally, NASA writes out the specs of the vehicle they want to exist. The aerospace contractor looks at the specs, determines how much money they would need to design, build, and profit from the exercise and gives NASA a fixed price. They compete with other contractors bidding on the same work. The Commercial Crew program had 3 bidding contractors, Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Space. NASA looks at the general designs, considers the contractors, and makes their choice. This is the end of how theory matches reality.

In reality, some of the same problems found during construction come up, or NASA changes their mind halfway through the construction. NASA originally wanted the crew vehicles to carry 6 Astronauts. However during landing tests, they found the G forces were higher than they liked on the humans. To lower the G forces, they had to lean the seats back at a less steep angle. However this means that they now can't fit 6 seats in, but only 4. In a "cost plus" contract this would be business as usually, and the contractor would simply carry on charging NASA more money, but this is supposed to be Fixed Price. But the contractors didn't sign up for 4 seats in the contract, and they've already done a lot of work they won't be paid for, so contractors reasonably pushed back saying "no we're not going to work for free. We built what you asked. Now you say you want something different. You want a change, pay us.". NASA agree, and there were some additional payments made to the contractors.

So "Fixed Price" isn't exactly fixed price when NASA changes the specs halfway through. Even with ALL of these challenges, Fixed price SpaceX and Northrop commercial cargo and SpaceX commercial crew have been HUGE cost savings over the old "cost plus" model.

The problem with Starliner is that NASA kept paying Boeing for milestone completion when Boeing didn't complete the milestones.

If you want to see how much, check out the costs of the most recent "cost plus" human space vehicle Lockeheed Orion capsule. Your eyes will pop out of your heat.

I'm not sure you understand who makes spacecraft that NASA uses in the past or present. There are not "NASA [built]" spacecraft.

Orion is built by a private company Lockheed Martin
The Space Shuttle was built by a private company, Rockwell International, which is now Boeing
Apollo command module was built by a private company North American Aviation (which was acquired by Rockwell, which is now Boeing)
The Lunar Lander was built by a private company Grumman Aerospace Corporation, which today is part of Northrop Grumman.

The difference between what you're calling "private company spacecraft" and "NASA [built]" is just contract terms used on how to pay for it.

You're also leaving out how (fuck Musk) SpaceX Dragon is also a private company spacecraft and has been wildly successful and saving billions of dollars of tax payer money over running the Space Shuttle in its place.

I’ve yet to have anyone adequately explain how it’s not going to rain in the future…

Its a pretty well covered topic if you're interested in an answer. Here's a TLDR version:

increase in atmospheric temperature means more water is held in the air as vapor instead of liquid water (and its not as equally distributed around the Earth then) The atmosphere holds 7% more water vapor for every degree Celsius.
the disruption in the water cycle from lack of snow pack to changes in global air currents means it doesn't rain nearly as often, but when it does its a monsoon. This means most of the water runs off because it can't be stored, and ground soil, baked by drought the rest of the time, doesn't absorb water either.
at the far extreme, look at the planet Venus. Rising atmospheric temperatures boiled all water away to steam. So, yes, there is water on Venus, but not liquid or solid.

source

source2

source3

It’s exactly for these kinds of anachronistic things that when I see someone right now agitating to have some kind of age cutoff for people in office, I have a lot of skepticism.
It’d be ironic for government to put a cap into place for age of 65 (say) and then soon after, humans often start having longer and longer healthspans, extending over 100 and possibly beyond.

I would certainly entertain an age cap on office holders. What we have right now with almost entirely geriatric leaders is the lack of representation of those not in the senior citizen demographic. Its a version of tyranny of the few. This is exacerbated by the voting power being focused in those that don't have the suffer the consequences of their choices, and instead leave those for younger generations.

I'm open to other ideas about how to address this too, but I don't dismiss an age cap on office holders immediately.

For that matter, it’d be interesting to see how the Social Security system responds to longer and longer healthspans.

You don't have to wonder. We've experienced this already in the life of Social Security. The original blueprint wasn't designed to have a large retired population. You were supposed to die before reaching retirement. Social Security was to support the aging survivors that didn't die yet to keep them out of abject poverty.

Retirement age increase is only one of three or four big levers on how to alter how Social Security operates and is maintainable.

That’s why 401k’s exist and not pensions

Honestly, pensions in the USA today are more risky than 401ks. Pensions require the parent company to still be solvent 30-50 years. A number of formerly bellwether companies with heavy pension burdens have gone under an the the pensioners only receive a fraction of the promised benefits.

Some of the public pensions look very worrisome too. As an example, I have no idea how Detroit is going to manage their pension commitments with its rising costs, declining population, and high number of pension members.

For all its faults, 401k money is the employee's the moment its paid with no dependency of the employer to be around afterward.

If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards.

It looks ass-backwards when viewed in isolation and today's tax policy. When the cap rule was put in place in 1937, the marginal tax rate was 79% and this would be for income over $5million ($115million in 2026 dollars). The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn't increase above the that income.

We broke the system by removing that large marginal tax, but leaving the Social Security income cap in place.

Social Security would be the easiest thing to fix, and honestly, it’d be hugely popular, too.
Just raise the cap.

I would be "negatively" affected with the raising of the cap. I still support raising the cap.

I'd also like what Al Gore wanted to do in the year 2000, a "social security lock box". Stop letting Congress spend the annual contribution surpluses on non-social security spending.

partial_accumen

@ partial_accumen @lemmy.world

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partial_accumen

CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

Trump vows to raise worldwide tariffs to 15% ‘effective immediately’

Today is the 40th Anniversay of Zelda!

Today is the 40th Anniversay of Zelda!

The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

A Fatal ICE Shooting Occurred in Texas Months Before Renee Good’s Killing

FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

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Trump attacks Supreme Court justices after he is handed a major tariff loss

NASA boss says Boeing Starliner failure one of worst in its history

NASA boss says Boeing Starliner failure one of worst in its history

NASA boss says Boeing Starliner failure one of worst in its history

The future is here

Social Security payments predicted to be cut in 2032

Social Security payments predicted to be cut in 2032

Social Security payments predicted to be cut in 2032

Social Security payments predicted to be cut in 2032

Even more Star Trek wash party

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