Stephen Fleming

Bear in mind that Sony literally has to keep making Spider-Man films *forever* or else they lose the film rights. It’s in their contract: use it or lose it. You’ll be watching Spider-Man films the rest of your life, and so will your kids and grandkids. It’s gonna be incredible.

The NASA logo is recognizable around the world because of the near-impossible feats we have accomplished and all we are still capable of achieving. In some years past, we became comfortable moving at a different pace, one inconsistent with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or Shuttle. We started outsourcing capabilities that should be essential to any organization built around technical, operational and engineering excellence. For a period of time, we tried to make everyone happy. In most cases, that means no one is happy, because the headlines the interested public was waiting to read took far too long, cost way too much and, in many cases, were never realized at all. The best and brightest across NASA show up to work each day looking to change the world, and that meant dusting off the playbook from decades past and getting after it. We are rebuilding the workforce after a level of outsourced staffing that was indefensible. We are pausing and pivoting away from programs that were not on a path to success, freeing up billions of dollars in resources, and refocusing on the President’s national space policy and the objectives outlined through Ignition, including the missions no other agency, company or even nation is capable of achieving. And we are off to a good start. This is how NASA made the history that inspired so many of us, and this is how we will do it again.

One of the great things about the Zoomers is that they do not care about real diamonds. Girls walking around with 2 and 3 carat engagement rings for $2,600. It's actually great.

The part that gets me about this story: It's a truly beautiful waltz. One of the best I've ever heard. (And, yes, I occasionally listen to classical.)

@Alexphysics13 Mars has been there a long time. I can wait a decade.

@StephenFleming The eleven billion dollars estimate was using traditional contracting and mission planning. It also counted-in the money already spent in the Mars 2020 mission with Perseverance which is somewhere between 3-4 billion dollars. Half a billion won't happen for more than a decade

Hot take: NASA should and must work on a Mars Sample Return mission ASAP to grab the samples Perseverance took.

@Alexphysics13 Good thread. I agree with a lot of it. But… at what cost? Latest estimate I saw was eleven billion dollars. The samples aren’t going anywhere. Let’s wait until we can retrieve them for half a billion.

@StephenFleming It feels silly to give up on a high-visibility goal that the Chinese will accomplish way earlier than the US and on top of that is relating to Mars no less.

@Alexphysics13 You’re the one with the strong position on the topic. I was asking you why. “Why not” is perfectly fine justification if it’s your money. But it’s mine, too. Sell me on the idea.

@StephenFleming Why not?

@imha_midnight @HLC_actual Lord, no. Mandatory voting would be a disaster. Brazil has it. They elected a literal clown (full makeup) to Congress, and a rhinoceros to São Paulo city council. We should aspire to fewer people voting, not more.

Vote should be mandatory in all the countries as a civic duty only for citizens. this changes the game, the campaign and government no longer works inly for the cities, they have to include all the countryside in concensus... and this consensus and bigger voter volume permits a more stable mandate and development in the whole State and not only around cities. without making a ficcional two tier citizenship that US has today. (the ones who vote and the ones who doesn't) That splits the government atention towards the first.

If you receive government assistance you shouldn’t be allowed to vote until you are self sufficient. You don’t get to tell me how to run my house if you don’t pay the bills.

I feel kinda bad for these guys. The amount of badass engineering that went into building satellite internet in 1996 (!) is absolutely insane - same tier as what anyone at Starlink is doing today. Of course, that was also 30 years ago, and the business itself was run by MBAs and not Elon, so it turned into a joke. That is not the fault of the badass engineers who made it work back in the day though. So I understand their death as a business, but I won't celebrate it.

Notice how devious the communist is: Mamdani forced his minion to say the part about needing government ID to buy celery, so he wouldn't be in the everlasting clips saying it. Sneaky sneaky socialist.

@Jringo1508 @x_Aurelion @fasc1nate Francisco de Orellana, 1542

Based on current evidence the Amazon basin hosted as many people and civilizations as India at the time. There are traces all over the Amazon you can see in the pattern of the trees (have been noticed since flight) but only now with so much of it uncovered plus Lidar are they accepting the reality. @grok What was the diary from the conquistador that was considered apocryphal by the anthropology community for centuries that they're starting to realize was real?

In 1925, explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared in the Amazon during his third expedition to find the legendary Lost City of Z, an ancient civilization many believed was nothing more than a myth. Nearly a century later, modern technologies such as LiDAR have revealed vast networks of settlements hidden beneath the rainforest canopy, suggesting that large and complex societies once flourished in the Amazon. historydefined.net/percy-fawcett/

There is a law that cages are conserved You can either put criminals in them or you can make decent people live in them but one way or another there will be cages

So the longest total eclipse on land in modern history is going to occur over the Valley of the Kings next year. That’s gotta be when the mummy wakes up, right? Since the 2020s haven’t been wild enough yet.

The Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928 made war illegal. It was originally signed by 15 countries, including the USA, and eventually joined by fifty more. It’s still on the books today. Maybe, for its 100th anniversary, we could formally withdraw?

My high trust town has a You Pick fruit and vegetable farm that operates on the honor system. It works because there’s a social expectation that most people will do the right thing even when no one is watching. But someone shaped by a low trust society might look at that same farm and think, “What idiot is actually paying?” That’s the difference between high trust and low trust cultures. The social contract you grow up with shapes what you expect from everyone else.

All that needs to be said about pit bulls was said by S-tier dog trainer Stonnie Dennis in 3 minutes

If the government controls your access to food… and your access to healthcare… and your access to transportation… then they control YOU. Without firing a shot.

Generation Jones occupies a unique place in history. I don’t think any generation before or after us has witnessed such extraordinary change in such a relatively short period of time. We grew up in an analog world and then spent our adult lives adapting to a digital one. We’ve watched technology transform nearly every part of daily life, yet we still remember when none of it was there. That gives us a perspective few generations will ever have. Our social lives revolved around people, not devices. Music wasn’t something playing in the background. It was woven into our lives. Every song has a memory attached to it. We spent hours at the skating rink talking with our friends, waiting for the fast backward skate, hoping the right person would ask us to couples skate, watching all the teenage drama unfold, and laughing until we couldn’t breathe. One song today can still transport us back to those nights as if they happened yesterday. The shopping mall wasn’t just a place to buy things. It was where we met our friends, wandered for hours, flirted, laughed, and somehow always ran into someone we knew. Cruising Main Street wasn’t about getting somewhere. It was about seeing who was out, stopping at the drive-in, and spending time together. If your friends weren’t home, you got on your bike until you found them. Nobody texted ahead, nobody shared their location, and nobody worried about documenting every moment. We simply enjoyed being together. We learned responsibility early. We mowed lawns, babysat, delivered newspapers, worked after school, fixed our bicycles, changed our own oil, and figured things out because there wasn’t always someone or something to give us the answer. Trial and error wasn’t failure. It was simply part of learning. Travel was an adventure all its own. We unfolded giant road atlases across the dashboard and carried Thomas Guides in the car. Then came what felt like an incredible breakthrough. We could actually print directions from the computer before leaving the house. Those MapQuest pages felt like we were living in the future. Today we laugh because now a voice from our phone tells us exactly where to turn without us giving it a second thought. Photography required patience. We had 24 or 36 exposures, and every picture mattered. We couldn’t check the back of the camera to see if someone blinked. We dropped the film off, waited several days, and hoped a few pictures turned out. Somehow those photographs became priceless because they captured real moments instead of hundreds of images we’ll never look at again. Our generation also witnessed history unlike almost any other. We watched the Apollo program inspire the world, lived through Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War, the energy crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of personal computers, the internet, cell phones, smartphones, social media, and now artificial intelligence. We didn’t just read about these changes. We lived through every one of them and adapted as the world transformed around us. This isn’t about saying Generation Jones was better than anyone else. Every generation has its strengths and its struggles. It’s simply recognizing that we lived through one of the most remarkable periods of change in human history. We remember the world before the digital revolution, and we’ve embraced the incredible innovations that followed. We understand both worlds because we’ve lived in both. Maybe that’s why we still treasure a handwritten letter, a long conversation with a friend, an afternoon that didn’t need to be photographed, and a song that can instantly carry us back fifty years. I’d love to hear your memories. What takes you back? The skating rink? The mall? Cruising Main Street? Your first concert? Waiting for your film to be developed? Folding road maps across the hood of the car? Printing your first MapQuest directions and thinking, “This is incredible!” Let’s make the comment section a Time Machine!