That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.

Actually, not the wrong place. The similarities are enough that I think Ted was probably in the middle of a Ketamine bender when they told him about the Timor swarm

I mean, we probably won’t be putting boots on the ground. I don’t think Iran could realistically run a ground war against our special genocide boys, and we bombed the everloving fuck out of Libya without officially putting any boots on the ground. This is probably going to be similar.

• Never cut spending

• Cut taxes on the rich

“Wow, that’s a lot of debt”

• Cut taxes on businesses

“Wow, we’re really broke”

• Cut taxes on the rich

“Golly, this is a serious problem!”

• Cut taxes on the rich

“Nobody really knows why we’re in so much debt or how to deal with it, but it’s probably the fault of poor people. Guess we better cut taxes for the rich more lmao”

I want you to know that you nerd sniped me with this comment and I started doing the math. To raise the apparent size of Betelgeuse to the apparent size of Jupiter (at its largest to the naked eye), you’d need a minimum 20 inch aperture telescope to pull the required 1000x magnification. Mind you:

• 20 inches is not a mass produced telescope size, but there ARE custom makers who produce reflectors at and well beyond this size. There are certainly terrestrial telescopes that can achieve what we need.

• you’re still not resolving any details at that size, it’s just raising Betelgeuse to the same apparent size as Jupiter at its naked eye largest.

• most places on earth are not conducive to magnifications over 300x. You can certainly do it, and sometimes the atmospheric conditions are ridiculously clear and you can pull off stupid levels of magnification, but there’s a reason why observatories get built up on mountains a lot. 1000x is… Well, good luck. Especially since Orion and Betelgeuse never get too close to the zenith, meaning there’s always a substantial amount of atmosphere to deal with.

Edit: let’s go with raising it to the same apparent size as the full moon, which occupies about 30 arcminutes or 1800 arc seconds. Jupiter is 50 arc seconds at the largest, and Betelgeuse is 0.05 arc s. To figure out how much we need to magnify Betelgeuse by, we take the apparent size of the moon and divide it by the apparent size of Betelgeuse, yielding 36,000x. Assuming a spherical cow, telescope aperture is what limits the maximum useful magnification, and the equation to derive that is roughly 50x aperture. So, if we divide 36,000 by 50, we’ll get our minimum required aperture of 720 inches, or fifty feet. IIRC, we have at least one terrestrial telescope that’s at least that large, down in Chile, though I’m almost certain there are more and larger ones, too.

Isn’t this functionally true for objects on the infinite focal plane? I.e. a star? Betelgeuse might actually be huge in absolute terms, but from earth, and even in a large telescope, it’s still a pinpoint whose circumference is not meaningfully distinct from its diameter.

Two words

For me, as a DM, real shit always happens on session 1, you swim together or fucking die.

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.

Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?

I mean, I read this as Romabooposting until the stormtrooper part.

Conservatives be like:

[Shoveling Jews into the furnace] “What’s your problem, lib, it’s the law! You don’t think we should follow the law?!”

Holy based LA

Yeah, the LA “riots” where super tame by riot AND LA standards. Like, they didn’t even have to bust out the water cannons. A skateboarder tanked some tear gas and flipped them off. It’s not like a bunch of people stormed the capitol building or something. This is the flimsiest excuse ever for martial law, so I have to assume it’s another step towards tyranny.

I was a paramedic for 15 years, I would routinely use peanut butter right out of the tub on a spoon or peanut butter on white bread sandwiches to treat hypoglycemia in patients who were alert and able to follow commands. It works great, it’s probably the best food for the job; I preferred it over OJ because it has a little more sticking power than just straight sugar as in OJ.

This must unfortunately be said based on having treated patients where this happened: NEVER PUT FOOD OR LIQUIDS INTO THE MOUTH OF SOMEONE WHO ISN’T ALERT AND ABLE TO FOLLOW COMMANDS.

They’ve been raiding Home Depots in the San Joaquin valley too. Wishing them nothing but a mouthful of ashes, a lifetime of swampass, and bitter regret.

cia.world gave me a giggle

HEGSETH! PATEL! WHERE IS AMMUNITION CORPORATE SUBSIDIES?!

I’ve never seen a dwarf planet go this hard