Oh I thought this was a real photograph

These stupid motherfuckers.

It’s immoral, it’s anti human, so that’s problem number one. And what’s worse, they did such a shit job at it that the social media companies identified the accounts quickly, so surely our adversaries could do the same.

And there was this bit in the article: “The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate.”

So I expect we’ll see reports of other shithead operations before long.

Good points! I know my last couple jobs have had “partner” companies that were similar to us in each major metropolitan area. So if we had a pop up request beyond the backup gear we packed, we could still get it from a warehouse less than an hour away. (And there’s always the wholesale rental houses like Rentex)

Can’t imagine this is relevant to a lot of folks here, but corporate event audio visual:

Don’t use the audio visual company that’s “in house” at a hotel. They’re paying nearly 50% commission for the privilege of being there and getting business shunted to them, so only half of what you pay is going to goods or services.

That said, make sure your hotel contract leaves you free to bring in an outside vendor without having to pay too many fees. Cross out any lines related to things like “load in/out liaison,” paying for polytak floor covering, or paying some percentage of your outside AV bill to the in house company. It might help to include a proactive clause like “client will not be charged any fees for bringing in our own audio visual partner”. Include a line that you won’t be required to pay surcharges like “event technical support” which is just a “we’re charging you a fee” fee.

You will still have to pay the in-house AV vendor for any power, internet and rigging. For internet, confirm what your rate will be before signing the contract. We see a lot of cases where they’ll say “the meeting room wifi is discounted (free) if you use us for AV too, but if you don’t it’s $20k” (actual number, and could be even higher) Once you sign without negotiating they’ve got you over a barrel.

If you already have a contract you may be able to mitigate these issues by leaning on your hotel salesperson. Trying to negotiate with the in house AV rep will usually be ineffective (sometimes they’re cool). The hotel is the in-house AV vendor’s number one customer, so if the hotel says they need to do something, they’ll do it. Usually leaning on your hotel salesperson after signing a contract only works if you have some leverage like potential for future business.

Might help if you try to understand where people are coming from. This guy was stupid for video calling while driving, period. That said, if my license was supposed to be reinstated two years prior, I think I’d be driving too (while being very careful about avoiding any complications with law enforcement). Comparing that to sovcit stuff isn’t reasonable.

You don’t have to go, but unless the parties have tens of thousands attendees you’d probably have decades between invites. So it would be like, “it’s my turn for the big dope party!” Or even if it wasn’t your thing, you’d probably tell your friends “what the hell, I guess I’ll go.”

Plus imagine what innovations in party throwing will be developed with this infusion of funds into the party industrial complex!

Yeah, party!

You wouldn’t say this if you were following the industry at all. Please see my other comment in this thread. SpaceX is dominating, for good reason, and seemingly in spite of musk.

Please see my other comment in this same thread. It’s not like Tesla or Twitter where they’re clearing slipping and releasing bad product. Look at the actual accomplishments!

As much as we on lemmy might look down on consumers of conservative news, I’m really surprised by how similarly reflexive and uninformed a lot of the comments here are.

Meaning no disrespect, it’s clear from your response you’re not familiar with space history. And that was my point - a lot of people are jumping in here and making negative comments just because of the Musk association without knowing or caring about the reality.

The space shuttle (the U.S.’ s previous manned “reusable” vehicle) was retired in 2011, and the Crew Dragon was ready in about 2020. NASA was not forced to use Soyuz because of a delay in the Crew Dragon, it was because the Space Shuttle had two previous fatal disasters, was way more expensive than planned, and would be even more expensive to keep running. I didn’t know this until looking at the wikipedia just now, but early safety estimates put the chance of catastrophic failure and death of the crew between 1 in 100 to as low as 1 in 100,000. After those two disasters they re-evaluated and put the risk as high as 1 in 9.

NASA was willing to take a chance on other contracts for commercial vehicles because it had no other options. It awarded contracts both to SpaceX and ULA. The first is doing dozens of uncrewed launches per year and has flown 12 crewed missions. The other is doing like 3 launches per year, has yet to fly Starliner with a crew, and costs more per launch.

The space shuttle vehicle itself was re-usable. The “external tank” was discarded and not re-used. The solid rocket boosters would fall into the ocean, and then would have to be recovered, examined and refurbished. Those tanks/boosters represented a huge portion of the cost. While the space shuttle was slightly more re-usable, other rocket launches would be single use. What SpaceX did that no one else had before was a controlled vertical landing of the booster. In other words, it landed under power and standing up. That’s very difficult, and a game changer since it skipped the recovery step, and they didn’t require the time and cost of examination / refurbishment the way the space shuttle components did.

What is it you want to say about Artemis?

You’re right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.

I think around here most people agree that billionaires don’t earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don’t we recognize those people’s work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn’t have anything that could launch people into orbit.

Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They’re still around and still for the most part suck)

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn’t and still doesn’t really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn’t much of a private market in space.

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.

And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can’t speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.

Elon Musk didn’t do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I’m concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I’m hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.

Good lord, everyone please learn a tiny bit about spacex and the state of the space industry instead of letting your (justified) hatred of Elon do the typing.

Guess we’re getting pretty far from the “things to place” idea, but there’s always “preaching to the choir”

Yeah, I’ve only ever heard it in the “he could sell…” formulation.

What does the phrase mean?

That seems like a lot of reps… Do you know of any comparisons with other democracies and their legislatures?

As far as letting parties emerge I think we should have proportional representation / ranked choice voting.

Seems to be the elf is setting themselves up to receive the human’s inheritance money. If they play their cards right they could pull this scam many times

You’re right they have a fiduciary duty. I think what the other commenter was saying is that the interpretation of that duty can be twisted into all kinds of shapes. If someone believed in pro social ideas they could make the case that treating workers with respect and growing sustainably is the best way to continue making money. That a shareholder would demand other crueler or more short-sighted policies doesn’t mean a legal requirement.

Yeah what the heck? How does this guy use electric for regular things, let alone a car?

I think this is a good argument. That said, seems like adding gambling to skeeball or pervasive sports betting apps are good candidates for prohibition by regulation.

I’m concerned about regulatory capture - the industry infiltrates and ends up controlling regulatory bodies because there’s so much money to be made.