ekuNNN posted:

Frog Act posted:

I keep hearing that about the labor market and it’s probably on me for foolishly earning a master’s degree in history but it sure as gently caress does not feel particularly hot right now. everything is as bad or worse as it was in 2018 when I was first job searching only on top of everything else a new round of austerity has gutted all the local universities. it’s really hard to reconcile all this stuff about low unemployment with the depressing reality that myself and people like me are more likely to die in the gutter than revive the mythologized middle class

HashtagGirlboss posted:

Huh I wonder if anything happened over the last three or so years that might have taken millions of people out of the labor pool?

Frog Act posted:

yeah I was laid off from a decent university job in may and have been pursuing private sector work, I never want to go back to academia. the institutional collapse has so much inertia basic systems no longer function at all, I had six supervisors in four years because all dean level positions have become revolving doors for mendacious, acquisitive liberal scum with no actual scholarly interests and all the actual scholars are terminally precarious adjuncts. it’s a trend that probably will not change until the system more or less completely collapses

Professor Shark posted:

lol

Ham Equity posted:

Like, I'm pretty sure game development offers a better quality of life at this point.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

If I had to tell a teenager in the 2040's what America thought of itself in the early 2000's I'd have them watch Traffic, Crash, and Babel. And to let them know what it was actually like living through those times I'd have them watch Starship Troopers

Frosted Flake posted:

The Catholic Church rose to prominence by taking the place of the shrinking Roman state in aid to orphans, widows, poverty and disaster relief. It was the largest driver of Christianization, creating a Maoist dual power within Roman society.

Frog Act posted:

yeah I was laid off from a decent university job in may and have been pursuing private sector work, I never want to go back to academia. the institutional collapse has so much inertia basic systems no longer function at all, I had six supervisors in four years because all dean level positions have become revolving doors for mendacious, acquisitive liberal scum with no actual scholarly interests and all the actual scholars are terminally precarious adjuncts. it’s a trend that probably will not change until the system more or less completely collapses

POWELL CURES KIDS posted:

if you spent less time learning six dollar words like mendacious and more time violently beating the poo poo out of administrators this never would've happened

Biplane posted:

Libraries round these parts have heavily restricted access to ebooks, if at all, to protect small businesses like major international publishing houses. I was able to search my local library online to see if they had a physical copy at least (they did not)

Halisnacks posted:

If librairies hadn’t already been invented, there is no way they could have been created for the first time now.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Yeah according to the church, attendance minus Yule and poo poo like that is less than 1%. Lmao just convert them into Hesburgers already.

Shame Boy posted:

It's the Pinellas Plant in St. Petersburg, Florida. Wikipedia doesn't even give it the dignity of its own article, it's just mentioned in the notes on an article about the current thing on the property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young-Rainey_Star_Center

I'd just "update it" as suggested but there actually aren't many good sources online to reference, what I've been able to figure out has been from reading through the enormous docket of the EPA cleanup, because they had to interview people and figure out what processes were being used so they knew how to clean the fuckin' thing up. The only other mention I've found that gets what they did there correct is in this self-published book about nuclear weapons I bought a little while ago (mostly because it was 2000 pages long and contained eye-watering amounts of detail about every declassified aspect of every nuclear weapon America has ever done). Even in that book he only mentions it offhand while talking about the development of the stuff they made there and doesn't go into any more detail, though at least he provides a picture of the actual devices that I've found real helpful. Neither of those are really great wikipedia sources.

The one non-environmental-cleanup-related wikipedia cite goes to the current website of the property, here: http://www.young-raineystarcenter.org/about-us/ which doesn't really say anything other than "it made nuclear weapons components". The WSJ link is just an aggregation of superfund data, and it's also... kinda wrong? Like here:

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/waste-lands/site/364-pinellas-plant-general-electric-co/

So "radioisotope-powered" would imply something like an RTG used on spacecraft, but that's not what they did there. From deep in the EPA interviews and from the one book that mentions it, the thing they did was build the electronic neutron initiators, which are basically tiny fusion reactors that generate a burst of neutrons right as the primary reaches critical mass, to ensure it fires at exactly the point when its most dense. In fact, they built every single neutron initiator used in every single American nuclear weapon manufactured over the course of 50 loving years, right up to the 90's.

My ultimate goal would be to write, at the very least some kinda article, maybe even a little book about the place, and then maybe that can be cited on wikipedia. It's very weird to me that the factory in charge of making the tiny fusion reactor that blows up nuclear bombs is so hard to find any information about, and today the most visible thing at the site is... the DMV.

Consolidated Ed posted:

so i'm gonna need the title of uli's self-published "history of american nukes" (please)

Shame Boy posted:

Volume 1: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HTD9YKX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1718121369/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

A few notes:

- The ebook version doesn't include the actually pretty valuable pictures for some reason, so prolly don't get that (which I did initially like an idiot, then went back and bought the physical books)
- The dude desperately needs the services of an editor. There's plenty of obvious mistakes, including entire pages that are just duplicated here and there. Ultimately most of the book is fine, the dude's pretty smart and literate so he gets away with not having an editor most of the time, but it's not anywhere near up to the quality of like, an actual proper textbook and it shows.
- The story of why he chose to write the book is pretty funny, apparently he was at a museum and the guide couldn't answer his questions and that frustrated him enough to spend the next ten years just digging up all the publicly-accessible information he could on every aspect of American nuclear weapon design.
- Okay I guess it's only 1200 pages across both volumes, but they're big pages. The thing is like phonebook-sized.

Frosted Flake posted:

It was mostly this. There are some books on the "politics" of sacrifice. In Greece, for example, sacrificing livestock was essentially throwing a BBQ for the working class and could build support for members of the ruling class in return. The coalition that opposed Pericles were popular because of their observance of sacrifice. Yes, piety, sure, but also they were the ones working class shlubs associated with pit beef, and got their votes in return.

Shame Boy posted:

Eh plenty of stuff sure but like, the Saturn V really didn't have much military potential or even transferrable technologies. I know we like being cynical as all hell (and for good reason) but c'mon we walked on the loving moon and even in the deepest of cold war rah rah bullshit tensions the plaque we left still says "from the planet earth" and not "from America" and idk, that's something at least

Next one we leave is gonna be an ad for FritoLay, isn't it

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

https://twitter.com/takesAEGIS/status/1678481056520101889

Shame Boy posted:

Consolidated Ed posted:

are you trying to get finland invaded by the united states of america? because this would absolutely do it, and ted cruz would be the architect

Milosh posted:

Danny McBride is the only person in entertainment that genuinely understands the South.

Frog Act posted:

I keep hearing that about the labor market and it’s probably on me for foolishly earning a master’s degree in history but it sure as gently caress does not feel particularly hot right now. everything is as bad or worse as it was in 2018 when I was first job searching only on top of everything else a new round of austerity has gutted all the local universities. it’s really hard to reconcile all this stuff about low unemployment with the depressing reality that myself and people like me are more likely to die in the gutter than revive the mythologized middle class

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

https://twitter.com/takesAEGIS/status/1678481056520101889

PostNouveau posted:

https://twitter.com/suumitshah/status/1678460567000850450

Coolness Averted posted:

drat musk was right about ai, pretty hosed up it forced this man at gunpoint to fire all of his staff, pocket the profits and make his customers less satisfied

spacemang_spliff posted:

gonna lol when this company has to rehire everyone because their chatbot devolves into an incomprehensible string of racial slurs

Milo and POTUS posted:

Six dollar word? Goddamn nothing's safe from inflation

Shame Boy posted:

https://twitter.com/suumitshah/status/1678460601670967307

You, uh... you don't know what that song's about do you.

Also as far as I can tell his only metric for success he ever mentions is "the bot closed a bunch of tickets by itself" which, uhhhh

Coolness Averted posted:

Our new ad campaign is our pistachios gently caress, but not their usual partners.

tokin opposition posted:

swinging is poly but for prudes

Shame Boy posted:

https://twitter.com/suumitshah/status/1678460601670967307

You, uh... you don't know what that song's about do you.

Also as far as I can tell his only metric for success he ever mentions is "the bot closed a bunch of tickets by itself" which, uhhhh