Zron

Zron , 2 days ago

The comic isn’t talking about love, it’s talking about marriage.

I’ll preface this with the fact that I’m a straight male atheist, and I’m married. My wife and I have had rough patches, as every relationship does, but I made a commitment to her. I swore an oath that I would support her through whatever happens in this life. I didn’t swear this to God or anybody but her and myself.

I’m a very principled person, one of those principles is that if you say you’re going to do something, you should try your level best to do it until it becomes clear it’s not possible. I don’t make promises I don’t expect to keep.

The thing that strikes me as off about this comic is the fact that they are married. If they’d just been partners, then that’s one thing, there’s less commitment there. But marriage is a commitment to a person. It’s not a promise to having sex or feeling romantic every single day, but just a promise that you’ll be there with them during the good times and the bad times. That you’ll support them in what they want to do. There’s no need for these people to divorce if one of their sexualities is changing, because marriage isn’t about the sex.

If my wife told me out of the blue that she thought she was interested in women, or might be trans, I would never offer divorce first. We’d have a conversation about what that means for our romantic relationship, but I still respect and care for her as a person, and would feel like I’m failing as a husband if I wanted to cut and run during a hard transition like that. I made a commitment to her, and if that’s what she wants to do, then I’ll ride it out and make sure she has as many resources as she can for a major change like that, and I know she’ll do the same thing for me. Hard times and changes don’t mean the end of a marriage, it means it’s time to buckle down, come together with your partner, and come up with a plan on how to face it together.

I also respect that nuance like that is impossible to fit into a single page comic like this, and there does seem to be that message of supporting your partner in their decisions. I just have issue with the flippant call for divorce. Relationships and people do change, and it’s good to talk about that and acknowledge that that we should support people when they change, but divorcing them is not supporting them. The comic would have been just as good if they left out the panel about divorce and just went to “my wife is single” because an open marriage is still a valid marriage, it just means you’re not devoting your genitals to one person.

I agree with you that our society puts a lot of importance on love, maybe too much. I’ll always love my wife, eventually. Believe me, marriage is hard, you’re not gonna feel the warm fuzzies every day, or maybe even every week, but the point is that you try. I promised myself to her because I love her. But my takeaway is that I loved her so much for years, that I promised I would always be there for her even if we’re both sick, or I’m mad at her for something, or if she’s changing as a person, and she promised the same thing. That commitment is more important than the love, because love is temperamental. You marry someone because you love them so much, you promise to be there even when you may not be feeling that love.

Zron , 4 days ago

That’s why they made it a pin.

Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.

Zron , 9 days ago

If only that philosophy existed today.

NASA landed on the moon with 1960’s technology, not because it was easy in the 60’s, but because every single aspect of the mission was planned, tested, rehearsed, and made as simple as possible where it couldn’t have a redundancy. The only time something went really wrong was when a faulty tank exploded on Apollo 13, but due to having an entirely separate craft in the form of the lander attached, the astronauts were able to ride out the failure all the way around the moon and back to earth. Oh yeah, even the orbit they picked would let the whole spacecraft fly around the moon and come back to earth without having to do any engine burns.

Look at planned missions today. Launch the Human Landing system. Have it sit in space for an unknown amount of time while anywhere from 6 to 12 refueling rockets are launched to refuel the lander. Relight lander engines in earth orbit, go to moon, relight engines again to orbit the moon. Launch the Orion spacecraft with crew on board, this also must burns its engines once at the moon to enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous and dock with the HLS, transfer crew and supplies over. Undock Orion, relight HLS engines for a 4th time to deorbit and land HLS. Use an elevator to get from HLS to the lunar surface for the next week or so. Board the HLS, which needed at least 6 refueling tankers full of cryogenic fuel to get to the moon and has now been sitting on the 200 degree lunar surface for a week, and light the engines a 5th time to take off and enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous with Orion, and return home. NASA has demonstrated that Orion can do the mission. But HLS has not even shown the technical capability of doing this. Its engines have never been relit in space, it has never sat in space for a week to see what happens to the engines. The entire interior isn’t even built yet and NASA is just using a 9 meter steel circle to train astronauts on the airlock section because no one knows what it will look like.

This mission couldn’t be more complicated if you tried. Apollo needed a total of 1 engine relight on the transfer stage, and 2 engine relights on the command module: one to enter lunar orbit, and one to leave and return to earth. The lander used pressure fed engines that only needed to work once each. One engine got them from orbit to the surface, one got them from the surface to orbit. If the Ascent engine didn’t work, NASA had plans for everything from literally jump starting it with the descent module’s batteries like it’s a dead car, to having an astronaut use bolt cutters to cut the safety pins on the engine so the valves can be manually opened.

If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you might call off work and get it towed to a mechanic. What do you do when you’re trying to leave the moon, and your rocket engines won’t light because they’ve been sitting in space for almost 2 weeks? The nearest rocket engineer is 240,000 miles away back on earth, and so are all the spare parts. And what do you do if only some of those engines light, and the others either don’t or explode while you’re on a suborbital trajectory. Complexity kills on harsh environments. Space is one of the harshest environment we’ve ever been in, so things need to be as simple as possible and known to work.

Zron , 9 days ago

If it really did, then nasa would not have committed to this hare brained scheme of musk’s.

The fact that the SpaceX proposal was accepted by an interim director who then went to work at SpaceX 6 months later, and no one has investigated this or challenged the acceptance of this contract tells me that safety is clearly not the priority. If safety was the priority, the new director would have looked at the current proposal and demanded a renegotiation or reconsideration.

Zron , 10 days ago

Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.

Zron , 10 days ago

The fact that this was your take away is concerning.

No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.

Zron , 14 days ago

You want to know a better system?

What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?

We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.

As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.

Zron , 16 days ago

No, that’s a card that’s been standard in Google searches for years. It basically copy pastes an excerpt from an article written by someone else.

The AI card is an entirely new feature that is being rolled out where an LLM attempts to fill the same roll without deliberately copying a third party source.

Zron , 17 days ago

It has not made orbit.

It has done a suborbital flight.

The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.

Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.

Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.

If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.

And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.

I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.

Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.

Zron , 17 days ago

Making it to space and making it to orbit are 2 different things.

Zron , 16 days ago

It is a significant difference. When it comes to orbit, there is no close enough, either you’re going fast enough or you’re not. They have not shown this thing can do what they say it can.

IFT-3 was completely empty and the tanks were full. Where is the weight of the crew decks, the solar panels and batteries, life support equipment, docking mechanism, food, water, and cargo? These are not trivial things, and they weigh a lot. Proving an empty shell can achieve a suborbital flight and be just barely not be in orbit is not proof of anything useful.

If they had shown there was a significant amount of delta-v left with this empty test article, then that’s one thing. But those tanks had a whisper of fuel left in them. I don’t believe for a second that it would have gotten that close when it was full of over a hundred tons of additional equipment.

Zron , 16 days ago

While completely empty.

An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.

Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”

Zron , 15 days ago

DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.

To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.

That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.

Zron , 25 days ago

They make it to five seconds?

My wife maybe watches the first 700 milliseconds before deciding if she’s going to watch a video.

TikTok has melted her already short attention span. We’re working on cutting down on it, but she’s truly addicted to social media in general.

Zron , 29 days ago

No, despite easy anticheat having Linux support, epic flat out refuses to enable support for Linux.

It’s stupid and actively hostile to the Linux community

Zron , 1 month ago

Paraplegics still need to move or be moved.

If they don’t rotate into different laying or sitting positions, they’ll develop bed sores they can’t even feel, which can be extremely dangerous. They also still need to move their limbs to avoid blood clots.

All this shows is that Neurolink isn’t ready for one reason or another. Either the wires are so fragile they become dislodged or broken by gentle movements during physiotherapy, or the surgery damaged the brain. Either way this is a major issue with the technology. No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.

Zron , 1 month ago

Adding new and complicated aircraft to an industry of already overwhelmed and under trained private pilots?

This can only go the Florida way: with some dude, blasted on meth and bud light slamming one of these bad boys into the side of a resort.

Zron , 1 month ago

I’ll bet 10 that there’s an instagram influencer who booked the flight 5 hours before as the passenger

Zron , 1 month ago

His arms randomly fall off while he’s walking.

Zron , 1 month ago

You managed to learn about block chain and the internet but not faking your own death and stealing an identity?

Zron , 1 month ago

If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.

It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.

A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.

Zron , 1 month ago

At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.

Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.

Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?

Zron , 1 month ago

Imagine depending on a company giving you the privilege of turning off ads in the operating system you paid $100USD for.

MS can get bent, I’m sick of advertising. Read the news, ads, watch any video without Adblock, ads, go out in public to enjoy a day out with my family, ads on every road and square foot of space. Now they want to put ads on the main menu of an operating system I only use to for relaxation and entertainment, but they were oh so kind to give me the option of turning them off for now. I’m not waiting for them to decide to remove the option, I’m going to remove myself from the equation.

I already gave these greedy bastards my money, I just want some peace and quiet while I relax, but that’s too much to ask for these days.

Zron , 1 month ago

Depends on which karma system turned out to be right.

If Hinduism is correct, then you’d earn a lot of bad karma by committing crimes that would get you 3 life sentences, so your first lie sentence would be as a human obviously, but then your soul would get reincarnated into a different living thing. You could be a tree, or a frog, or a dog. Assuming they could identify your soul in the new body, does the life sentence apply to a human lifetime, or the lifetime of the thing you’re reincarnated as? If you reincarnate as a tree and live for 200 years, do they just move you and plant you in a field somewhere until you die, sentence served? Or does the tree have to die and you still owe a life sentence as an ant or something?

I feel like this could be a great short story

Zron , 1 month ago

Marques is actually very balanced even in his critical reviews.

Even with the Humane AI pin, he did commend them on their physical build quality, even if the rest of the device was practically useless, he never outright said that, just points out the flaws.

Although I do wonder sometimes how much he tries to hard to be balanced, as some products, especially cars due to the price, don’t deserve kind treatment for noticeable faults.

Zron , 1 month ago

It’s tor-tia

Not Tort-illa

Having a Mexican wife, and having learned Spanish, it makes me irrationally angry when I watch British cooking shows and watch them butcher the pronunciation of basic ingredients. Especially when those same ingredients sound fine when spoken in American English.

I also didn’t know wtf Gordon Ramsey was taking about when he kept saying Picko-Da-Gello, until they showed it on screen.

Y’all spend hundreds of years conquering the planet in search of spices, and failed to learn not only how to use them, but what they’re even called.

Zron , 1 month ago

Avocado

Pico de Gallo

Tortilla

Garage(from the French, and absolutely butchered by the British)

Aluminum(not really a loan word but what’s with the extra letters)

Those are the ones off the top of my head, but I might actually make a list.

Zron , 1 month ago

Maybe it’s just because I had the proper pronunciation drilled into me, it bothers me that I had went through a lot of arguments and effort to make myself better understood, and the people on these shows don’t even vaguely try despite having access to professional consultants or even just the internet.

I try to make myself understood, and hearing someone casually butcher a language I worked very hard to learn is frustrating.

Zron , 1 month ago

But a bunch of other elements don’t follow that pattern, why don’t they say “ironium”?

Zron , 1 month ago

I use Tampico

I’m too poor for the gallons of orange juice I’d need at a party

Zron , 2 months ago

I think it’s more to due to the radius.

It’s hard to tell the exact size from the picture, but the diameter of that loop seems to be at least several meters.

The one at action park was like 2 wide.

A bigger circle means less G forces while going around the loop, and less injuries. But action park rides were designed and built by the owner, who was not an engineer and apparently did not know any engineers. I’m pretty sure if you mentioned angular velocity to him, he’d just say that’s a sick name for a ride and then run away to get to a hardware store as fast as possible.

Zron , 2 months ago

My goal is to build a fusion reactor.

I will hire Indian call center workers to add fuel to my diesel generator until the fusion is up and running.

This plan makes sense to certain people on the internet.

Zron , 2 months ago

You’re giving me flashbacks to the online training my work makes me do every year.

I almost failed the first of 7 courses because I made the mistake of trying to do actual work while listening to the training, and didn’t realize there was a 5 minute timer for inactivity on the video player. And no, there was no additional time provided to complete the training. It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.

Zron , 2 months ago

Tell me you don’t know how tips work without telling me.

I had a small coffee shop put a 100% tip on my card. Went back the next day and they wouldn’t fix it, so I called the credit company and had it charged back.

Something like this would be very helpful to someone who doesn’t check their statements weekly like I do.

Zron , 2 months ago

Credit card isn’t a bank account, it’s a line of credit. you can freeze credit and charge it back for fraudulent purchases.

I guess you never buy anything off the internet then either.

And if you do buy off the internet, you should use credit, as it’s much safer to freeze a credit card than your entire bank account if your card gets leaked.

Also don’t get why you’re being so hostile to a comment that’s simply explaining how a different works. Must be a European thing.

Zron , 2 months ago

If I got millions of dollars every time a company went down in flames around me, I’d carry around a can of gas and matches.

He was CEO, he could have implemented policies to alleviate these issues. Instead he kept the status quo.

He belongs in jail, not another board room.

Zron , 2 months ago

The slime people are worse, but I’ll leave that to your imagination in case you haven’t read all the books

Zron , 2 months ago

You grossly overestimate the intelligence of libertarians.

Zron , 2 months ago

It’s almost like letting a people decide how to run their country for themselves leads to a more stable government. Who would have fucking thought

Zron , 2 months ago

First it was no booze but you could kill.

Then it was no smokes but you can kill people.

Now it’s no titties but you can kill people.

I’m starting to think these assholes think murder is a fun hobby.

Zron , 2 months ago

Did not have an identified serial killer until 1903. Both of these killers were white and killed white victims.

I don’t think the police were really looking into crimes against black people in South Africa at the time. It’s entirely possible there were several serial killers that targeted non-white victims to avoid detection.

Zron , 2 months ago

If you want to get into foraging, find a local survival teacher. No matter how many pictures and books you look at, you’ll never learn what wild foods are safe just by reading about them. The only way to really learn is to have someone show you. You need to see it with your own eyes, learn what’s safe to touch and how the safe ones feel in your fingers, and learn the smell and taste of safe food.

Especially mushrooms. Mushrooms are some of the most dangerous foods around. There’s a reason there’s a new hybrid of fruit or vegetable every few years that gets popular, but we only ever eat the same 5 kinds of mushrooms from stores. Some random white mushroom might be perfectly safe, or it might shutdown your organs and kill you three days later.

Zron , 2 months ago

You’re really trusting your country’s food safety agency.

In most countries, some government entity is responsible for reviewing foods sold in stores for safety, and regulating what the packaging can say. So if a company wants to sell a new kind of mushroom in the stores, they have to get it analyzed for safety.

There’s many mushrooms that are perfectly safe to eat, but don’t taste particularly distinct, don’t store well, or just don’t respond well to farming. There’s also many more that are incredibly toxic, and look very similar to the safe ones.

I’ve done foraging as a hobby, and it’s fun to go out and find things in the woods. However, I pretty much only go for berries and leafy greens, as there’s very few truly dangerous flavors of those in my region. I also generally only take a handful at most, as I don’t want to damage the local ecosystem, or risk a mistake making me seriously ill.

For most people, it’s much safer to just go to the store and buy fresh looking produce. Most places of the world no longer have the habitat to support even a few people going out and regularly foraging for fresh produce. If you do find something you like, you can always take a sample of the fruit and plant it in your garden. This is also great for expanding native plants in your area, which provides food for local wildlife like birds.

Zron , 2 months ago

You have no idea how a spy satellite works, do you?

They take pictures.

With really, really fancy cameras.

Cameras that are very carefully, and secretly, designed to be very good at their jobs.

No, you can’t just let some third party decide to use your fancy spy satellite, that means they now know what your satellite can and can’t do, which means they can hide things from it, which means it’s now just a very expensive lump in orbit.

And need I remind you that SpaceX is not some magical self funded space ferry service. They’re a US Government contractor, that’s where most of their money comes from. The satellites are made by other contractors. There’s not a government satellite factory somewhere in the desert, they pay companies like Boeing and Honeywell to make them the parts for the satellite, and then SpaceX gets money to launch it.

When the government pays for something, the contractor is legally required to keep their mouth shut about it, hand over the keys, and be available if it breaks. The contractor cannot just decide to let someone else play with the government’s toys, that’s called espionage.

Zron , 2 months ago

Stop licking Andrew Tates balls.

They give you bad breath and stupid ideas

Zron , 2 months ago

Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, And Washington are the states you can use this in, since the site in the OP just gives you a link to the IRS website that lists the states.

Zron , 2 months ago

Wait, is it the same Adin that shot his Cybertruck and then got mad because he broke the door he was shooting at?

I don’t know what confuses me more. The fact that he’s somehow dumb enough to do that, yet also capable of breathing and speech at the same time. Or that he probably has more money than I ever will because he’s that stupid.

I want to reallocate my stat points.

Zron , 3 months ago

Space travel is very expensive and NASA has a very small budget these days.

Back during the space race, NASA could afford to launch multiple missions per year. Now they can barely afford to maintain existing missions and are lucky to launch a major missions every few years. Which is why they’ve moved to buying space on commercial missions, as it’s cheaper to only pay for a spot on a rocket/craft than to pay for the whole thing.

NASA also has to justify its missions to congress. Sending rovers to mars and probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have actual scientific interest and can answer questions about the formation of the solar system, and the viability of life off of earth.

Slingshotting something really fast sounds cool as fuck, but there’s not much data to be gathered there. We’ve also recently beaten the “fastest man made object” record with the Parker Solar Probe, as it’s currently whipping around the sun at ludicrous speeds while it collects data about the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields. It’s moving a lot faster than voyager ever did, as it needs an insane amount of speed to orbit so low to the sun. It’s actually much cheaper, fuel wise, to travel to Pluto than the sun.

So why waste billions of dollars to fling something out into deep space? We have barely even seen all
Of the celestial bodies in our own star system, and there’s not much to be learned about the empty vacuum beyond the sun. The only justifiable reason would be to send a probe to another star system entirely. But that probe alone would have to be the largest, most expensive space craft humanity has ever built. It would need to be able to power itself for centuries, have a communication system capable of sending data over interstellar distances, and likely need a way to autonomously harvest its own fuel, as there’s very little point in sending a probe screaming past Proxima Centauri and taking a few hazy pictures of planets as it goes. We’d want the probe to be able to stay in and explore the new star system, and the only way to do that is to have enough fuel to move around an entire system, or create more fuel as it goes. Something like that has never even been tried before, and the risk is high when you won’t know if it worked or not for a few hundred years.