They always force me to get the 80$ lenses… Still pretty cheap, but it ends up more around 100$ so I only change every couple years.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

Hay is basically cut grass, straw is the part leftover from harvesting wheat and taking the seeds. Both are baled, but they’re used for different things. Hay is food for any animals that eat grass like horses and cows, buy straw is not edible so it’s used as bedding.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Says right in the article that the rate is 9%, and they give up a 10% stake in the company.

I got better terms than that on a CAR loan last month…

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.

Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…

Gen Alpha’s main influence for slang is Cocomelon.

The motherfuckers who do this take said turn at like 2km/h, they’re not racing at all

Have you watched Idiocracy? I consider myself a smart guy, and having children is my way to fight against the world getting stupider.

Also, it is a joy. Yeah, it’s expensive, and yeah, it’s a ton of work. But it’s like working on a very big project that you know you’ll be proud of when it’s done. I didn’t understand it before because I only experienced other people’s children, but it’s different with your own children in a way that’s hard to explain.

They say it themselves: SpaceX specializes in turning the impossible into merely late.

When Starship was announced, people were saying it wouldn’t fly with so many engines because the Russians tried and failed with their N1 rocket. Now that it did fly, it’s that the heat shield will never work.

Are they late compared to what they announced? Absolutely. Are they still faster than anyone else? Look at Blue Origin and you have your answer.

Isn’t that already illegal? As far as I remember, ad breaks during my morning cartoons were either for other shows on the network or Swiffer and laundry detergent.

It’d probably depend on the tide.

The lining in question is very thin (akin to a layer of paint) and just burns up when the cans are re-melted.

Recycling beer bottles is indeed pretty easy once you get them to the processing center intact, but it’s getting there that’s the hard part. They’re fragile, pretty heavy and don’t stack well unless you put them in some form of packaging.

Once they’re broken, they’re basically useless; glass isn’t recycled much except as grit material for sandpaper; re-melting it is resource-intensive and sensitive to impurities.

It’s taught in Québec.

Yes, they do. I think the Swiss partly do a as well.

Haven’t watched the video, but what do you think circularization is? If you’re “just a circulization away from orbit”, you are indeed going a bit slower than orbital velocity. There’s no point to going orbital velocity if your trajectory still brings you back inside the atmosphere. To get to orbit you want to raise your periapsis outside the atmosphere, and you do that by doing a burn at the apoapsis, which is what we commonly call “circularization”.