That navigator probably weighs north of 6000 lbs with 4 people in it. 6000 lbs moving at 20mph is a lot of energy. And that’s not a tanker truck loaded with water, it’s a “smaller” truck with a single axle in the back from what I can see so it’s not going to be one of the heavier trucks. Weighs maybe 20-25,000 lbs?…

I’m not sure why you’re still pushing the “political climate” and “other priorities” thing. I have never argued against either, and my initial comment closed with a very plain statement that upgrades haven’t really been necessary for most of the last 65 years.

Right, which is kind of my point. There wasn’t a real reason to make changes until relatively recently when they doubled the capacity. I’m just saying it’s well past the time when it makes sense (to me at least) to blame colonialism. Did they make the world’s best canal when they built it? No, but they at least…

I actually just happened to be reading about this earlier today. They completed some upgrades, to much local fanfare apparently, in 2015. The upgrades were designed to allow the canal to handle about twice the traffic of previously (which was capped at around 50 per day). But what they did to accomplish that was to…

Grew up in southwest Wisconsin, and worked near Green Bay for a number of years (just during the week, actually lived in Chicago). He’s not really far off in Green Bay. It’s a very white city, and largest minority is hispanics by a long shot. Very small black population. I can totally see how if you were black and…

While we may not have quite the same density as you, the charger situation here is really not an issue in populated areas. There are plenty of places to charge. My small town has about as many charging locations as yours, for example (though it’s a little larger, so as I said the density isn’t quite the same). When…

Hahaha, fuck off, Taiwan hasn’t been part of China since the late 40s, and in fact the island has literally never been under PRC rule. Just because the Chinese government says so doesn’t mean shit.  China is the only one peddling in propaganda here.  

You’ll see a bunch of people in a control room, some commentators doing their best to keep it all interesting to the average Joe, a whole bunch of animations showing what’s going to happen, is happening, or already happened, and likely toward the end of the coverage we’ll see some photos. I don’t think we’re going to…

A) you’re right, we won’t be seeing anything landing live, and much of it will be watching people in a room at NASA. But we did get some photos immediately after landing with Curiosity, as part of the live coverage. Don’t see why wouldn’t expect to get some more of those with Perseverance.

Unless we make the fictional ansible a reality, we’re tens of millions of miles (at a minimum) away from being able to watch a truly live feed.  And that won’t change any time soon. 

Negligible? Mars is currently over 125 million miles from Earth. At its closest, it’s under 40 million. By my math, you’d by down to about 3.5 minutes delay at that point, from 11 currently. Pretty decent improvement. Though functionally you’re still completely disconnected from any immediate ability to see/react to…

Same, generally pretty tough to watch, no matter how into it the girl is/seems.  Never understood why they seemed to be so popular.  But then I don’t understand the fascination with anal either.  

So hey, that area has had a lot more than an inch of rain over the last few days.  72 hour totals in that area are around 16 inches.  The last 24 hours misses most of what was about a 48 hour persistent downpour.  

I actually just checked the 72 hour total (from here) and it’s showing 15-16 inches in the area that feeds rat creek. So yeah, a lot more than 1 inch.

It was also way more than an inch over the last few days.   An “atmospheric river” dumped upwards of 12" of rain in that part of California for about 2 days.  The “last 24 hours” only includes the very tail end of that. 

“An inch in the last 24 hours” is extremely underselling how the last few days have been. I live a little south of where this happened. We got north of 6 inches in about 2 days, and we got off fairly easy. Closer to where this happened they were expecting 12 inches over about 48 hours. So yeah, one inch in the last 24…

I don’t know, man. The headlines have all been bitching about the state of the last gen releases, which is totally justified, but the game seems to be extremely popular among people who have a system that can handle it. It’s hit something like half a million concurrent players on Steam every day since it released. It…

Don’t get your hopes up.  It won’t be fully operational until 2035 and it’s just a big experiment.  No actual electricity produced.  

It’s neither the first fusion reactor nor will it be actually creating power. It’s a test. Theories hold that scaling up that particular reactor design could lead to a net positive system, which will actually produce electricity. This is the first big step in that direction. But it’s not the first one to exist.…

Yep.  As usual, xkcd pretty much nailed it.  Especially with that last paragraph.