I in general agree with what you wrote, but the Israel/Iran brinkmanship does feel a bit like the portrayal in this comic at times. So the comic seems relevant to recent events.

The whole point of captchas is to train bots. Did you think they were all road object and optical character recognition based because those are the categories humans really excel at?

Won’t someone think of the tech companies in these unprecedented times.

The focus should be on the widespread devastation to peoples lives. Who cares if the semiconductor industry has to deal with worse yields and higher prices? That’s not what matters right now.

For example, I used to use generic eye drops. Then there were a bunch of recalls on eye drops made in India because they weren’t kept sterile and people were getting eye infections. So now I make sure to only buy eye drops that are manufactured in countries with actual controls on health codes. It turns out that imposing that restriction elliminated all the generic options. I’m certainly not happy to be paying double for brand name pataday, but I don’t care to mess with the chance of eye infections.

It’s not a rescue mission. It was an already scheduled mission which is why it’s 6 months long. Two of the originally scheduled crew got their seats bumped so the boeing capsule test asteonauts would have seats for a normal return. Wilmore and Wiliams could have returned in the other spacex capsule that was already up there in case of emergency. They were never stranded.

The bad flooding is because of how steep those areas are. Down in Florida, water takes a while to make its way into the creeks, streams, and rivers. The areas with the most extreme flooding is because entire mountainsides worth of rainfall drains in the span of a couple days.

Eastern TN and western NC also had a ton of rainfall from thunderstorms just before Helene so the ground was already saturated. For reference check out this rain gauge in Asheville.

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/353312082355545/#parameterCode=00045&period=P7D&showMedian=false

The rain from Helene didn’t really get to Western NC until the early hours of Friday the 27th. That gauge was already at 10 inches by that time. So really the storm before Helene brought more rain than Helene did. Either the thunderstorm or Helene alone would have been moderate, but manageable flash floods, but the two back to back was insane.

Blowing up beached whales disperses the problem, but does not solve it.

A smart tv without an internet connection is usually close enough to a dumb TV. It’s not like your TV needs regular security updates so leaving it off your home network is fine.

My guess is the clickbait title and photo.

My favorite resource for info on tropical storms is tropicaltidbits.com. It’s definitely worth checking out if you aren’t already familiar.

Revenge of the Titanic.

Or get a $25 digital multimeter that can be used for a wide variety of diagnostic purposes.

Does anyone sell yellow floodlights?

Ice cubes

Only on taco tuesdays

Some alien intern got confused and thought drawing crop circles was supposed to be done on the crops rather than in the fields of crops.

As the current owner of a 1930’s era property with tons of glass and rubble in the ground, please don’t. We have landfills so that individual properties don’t get filled with trash.

That’s $700 for a digital only edition without a disk drive or vertical stand. It’s $810 to match the features of the PS5.0

https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-international-space-station-cant-operate-forever

The ISS has gone through multiple reboosts to gain altitude because there is a small amount of atmospheric drag in its orbit. That’s not the limiting factor though.

The structure is aluminum. Aluminum accumulates fatigue damage every time it flexes. Every time the iss goes from sunlight to the earths shadow, there is significant thermal expansion/contraction. This fatigues the structure. The repeated docking maneuvers also stress the structure. Radiation and atomic oxygen also cause degredation. All those factors are relatively minor in any given year, but are always accumulating. The ISS is getting less safe and the risk of a structural failure is increasing.

On top of that all, a bunch of the systems on board were designed 30 years ago. There have been major changes in communications, power systems, etc. in the time since the modules were built. Even though new experiments are built all the time, they are still constrained by capabilities of the capsules they operate in. So there are also science advantages to moving to a newer platform.

Smart blinds can also serve a similar function. My bedroom catches some light from passing headlights and there’s enough light pollution to affect my sleep. However, my SO really struggles to wake up if it’s dark. Smart blinds have been a great solution for us. The biggest drawback is noise. Affordable blinds are not silent.