SpeedSifter

Pete Buttetieg: Inflation has tripled from just one month ago, and it’s higher than when he took office. Not only has Trump failed to deliver on his central campaign promise to make life more affordable - he is actively, directly driving prices up.

cuando Dostoievski escribió "Quiero hablar de todo con al menos una persona, como hablo conmigo mismo" describió todo lo que el ser humano anhela de una conexión en una sola frase

We live on a planet with 1.3 billion habitable years left. We've had rockets for 69 of those years. In that time, the cost of reaching orbit dropped from $54,500 per kilogram to $2,720, and SpaceX is targeting under $100 with Starship. If they hit that number, getting to space becomes 545 times cheaper in a single lifetime. 329 orbital launches happened in 2025. Almost one a day. The space economy crossed $626 billion last year and should hit a trillion by 2034. SpaceX just filed for an IPO targeting a $2 trillion valuation, worth more than every airline on Earth combined. Starship, their fully reusable rocket (both stages fly back and land), can lift 150 tons to orbit. The entire International Space Station weighs 420 tons. Three flights could put the whole thing up there. The engineering side of this is solved. What remains is a survival problem. Researchers published a paper in Scientific Reports calculating the natural extinction rate for humans, how often we'd get wiped out by asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, the stuff we can't control. Less than a 1-in-14,000 chance in any given year. At that rate, we'd survive millions of years, more than enough to spread across the solar system. Toby Ord, a philosopher at Oxford who spent a decade studying how civilizations end, puts the odds of a civilization-ending catastrophe before 2100 at 1-in-6. The threats aren't from space. Nuclear war. Viruses engineered in labs that could spread before anyone understands what hit them. AI systems are smart enough to act on goals we never gave them. All things we built ourselves. A 2017 NASA paper made this case: we have a roughly 50-year window to lock in spacefaring infrastructure before resources run thin and energy costs make a restart nearly impossible. We're 9 years into that window. Given enough time, the math takes this to 100%. The only question that matters is whether we make it through the next few decades without blowing our shot.

sick of these catholic converts showing up and saying "well I have a different interpretation of the scripture" no you don't. that's protestantism and a heresy. don't like it there's the (incredibly beautiful and heavily ornamented with precious metals) door

I don’t understand. Do you guys think the instacart shopper is just doing you a favor?

Wow, that's extremely rare for a U.S. treaty ally. South Korea's president, addressing Israel: "It’s disappointing that you don’t even once reflect on the criticisms from people around the world who are suffering and struggling due to your relentless anti-human rights and anti-international law actions." He said this after posting this yesterday (x.com/Jaemyung_Lee/s…), a video of IDF soldiers throwing a young Palestinian off a rooftop and commenting that "there is no difference between this and the Japanese wartime sexual slavery issue we raise, the massacre of Jews, or wartime killings." Israel's Foreign Ministry responded that his post was "unacceptable" but President Lee obviously - and courageously - chose to double down 👇 Also probably says a lot about where U.S.-South Korea relations are at right now.

Coal ash is almost twice as radioactive as spent nuclear fuel and they're gonna let them dump it into your drinking water

We are Donald Trump’s 7th and final bankruptcy.

Genuinely a better question than most people realize. Apollo 11 left a 2-foot wide panel of mirrors on the lunar surface in 1969. No power source, no wiring, no maintenance. Scientists have been shooting lasers at it from New Mexico ever since. The beam travels 239,000 miles, bounces off the mirrors, and returns in 2.5 seconds. That round trip is how we know the moon is drifting away from Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year. So yes, in a literal sense, they were checking if it would still be there. The seismometers are the part that gets wild. Apollo 12 deliberately crashed its lunar module into the surface at 6,048 km/h. Scientists expected a brief shudder. The moon vibrated for over 55 minutes. On Earth, seismic waves from an equivalent impact die in seconds. Nobody had predicted this. So NASA did it again. Apollo 13 dropped its S-IVB rocket stage from orbit. Hit with the force of 11.5 tons of TNT. The vibrations lasted nearly three and a half hours. The reason is water, or the lack of it. Earth's interior is damp. Moisture in rock acts like a sponge, absorbing seismic energy. The moon is bone dry, cool, and rigid. Shockwaves have nothing to absorb them. They just bounce back and forth through solid stone until the rock itself stops vibrating. Scientists described it as the moon ringing like a bell. The seismometers ran for almost 8 years and detected over 13,000 seismic events. Turns out the moon has four types of quakes: deep ones caused by Earth's gravitational pull, shallow ones from the crust shrinking as the interior cools, thermal ones when sunrise thaws the frozen surface, and impacts from meteorites. In 2023, Caltech reanalyzed old Apollo 17 data and found a fifth type: the lunar lander itself creaking and popping every morning as the sun heated it. Every five to six minutes, for five to seven hours straight. They went up to prove the moon was once part of Earth, measure how fast it's leaving, and figure out what's happening inside a world with no atmosphere, no water, and no tectonic plates. "Checking if it was still there" is honestly closer to the truth than most people's actual answer.

He wrapped himself in “American steel” to win Pennsylvania then built his own ballroom project with foreign steel. You weren’t supporters. You were props.

There’s a reason why the sound of birds singing feels so peaceful to our nervous system. Because birds only sing when there’s no danger present.

Not a SINGLE SpaceX mission has ever garnered the kind of press & goodwill of Artemis II. And that's for good reason: humanity can never truly rally behind a corporation. NASA is for the people and by the people. SpaceX is for the shareholders.

Girl. the recovery time for burnout is 3-5 years, NOT a spa day or even a spa week

@aakashgupta cognitive behavioural therapy: nobody gives a shit what you did so its saul goodman

The "invisible guest theory" is a 25-year-old psychology experiment with a TikTok rebrand, and the actual mechanism is more useful than the viral version. Cornell ran this in 2000. Made students wear a Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of strangers. Students predicted 50% of the room noticed the shirt. Actual number: 23%. Less than half what they expected. The researchers called it the spotlight effect. The mechanism is anchoring. Your brain starts with your own experience of the moment, which is extremely vivid and detailed because you're living it, and then tries to adjust for how much less other people are paying attention. The adjustment is always too small. You feel 100% of your own embarrassment and assume everyone else feels at least 60% of it. They feel about 15%. But here's what the viral version leaves out. Gilovich ran a follow-up and found the effect works in BOTH directions. People also overestimate how much others notice their positive contributions. You think your clever joke landed with the whole room. It didn't. You think everyone saw you handle that tense moment well. They didn't. The spotlight shines equally on your wins and your failures, which means both are mostly invisible. The real freedom isn't "nobody's judging you." The real freedom is that nobody's paying nearly as much attention as you think, to anything you do, good or bad. Once you internalize that, you stop performing entirely.

This is why “love yourself” is reductive and incomplete advice when people talk about body insecurities driven by conventional beauty norms. People generally treat you better and nicer when they consider you beautiful. Being outside of that box is a dehumanising experience.

when i was 260 pounds, people treated me like a dog. when i was 200 pounds, people treated me like a dog who did a cool trick & deserved treats contingent on more cool tricks. when i was 120 pounds, people treated me like a person! then i hit 90 pounds & everyone was like Omg Why

For those keeping track, MAGA is now Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Apple, Google, Miriam Adelson, Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Microsoft, Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and the Ellison Family

The hardest part of wisdom is learning to stay silent when the ego wants to speak.