Actually basically yes. NASA has had decades of practice at minimum viable operation capability, making their spacecraft and rovers all but drag themselves along even when anything else would stop working.

Logistics has ALWAYS been the US backbone since WWII. We’ve always prided our army’s ability to put damn near anything damn near anywhere within 48 hours. This is FAR more alarming than a lot of people seem to get.

You forgot one factor that’s also highly important: sports. College sports ALONE makes a lot of universities an eye popping amount of cash, and also costs them a boatload too. Couple that with donations and profits from those sports being earmarked ONLY for those sports (can’t use your basketball money to do anything but improve your basketball facilities and pay the staff), and you’re putting a stranglehold on a lot of ways to reduce cost.

That being said, it’s important to know how to sanity-check the math, especially in the era of Copilot in Excel. We just found that our company’s configuration enables it by default on new workbooks, as we found when it was just…making up numbers when asked to do simple addition.

You forgot ‘and a friend to pull you out in case’.

I will also point out that the idea of a pre-tribulation Rapture is not biblically well-supported, and was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by dispensationalists in England as a way to make the idea of a doctrine focused on Revelation more palatable (“see, you’ll be taken to heaven in secret one day before all this happens”). It’s taken a LOT more root in America than it did in Europe, to the point that it’s mainstream doctrine among a lot of churches (thanks Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins for doing that, you weird fucks).

There were some survivors. Some died willingly knowing what they were doing, a lot of them wound up being forced at gunpoint. The entire compound was being guarded by men with rifles, since they were rightly afraid the US was just going to come down and kill them because the cult had legitimately just murdered a US congressman.

Fun fact: the actor ad-libbed in “locked” instead of “encoded” originally, and it worked well enough that it became a thing right then, pretty much.

This mission especially brought the “space travel is fake” crowd out. The rocket launch explodes over a deserted area, nobody’s onboard, all the missions are faked, and the splashdowns are in restricted waters to sell the simulation.

Usually this is on top of “well you can’t survive the Van Allen radiation belts”, as if radiation safety and shielding is not a problem we understood and solved before we even lit off Mercury.

Ultimate reasoning for it is either a vague notion of “control”, bread and circuses, or “they do this to defy God”, because space isn’t real and the Firmament lies above the sky.

He pardoned a literal war criminal. Eddie Gallagher shot at civilians so much his team fucked with his sniper equipment to make sure at least his first shot or two missed, to give people time to get away.

My brother gets this a lot when he goes out with his daughters, and I have been told my dad got this a lot when I was a young child.

7, but yes, he’s said that he’s the same person he was in first grade.

You’re not throwing propane bombs at libraries if you’re doing some sort of “precisely targeted attack”.

Don’t forget that they’re also very much into the idea of eugenics.

Yeah, this should’ve been going since at least the ICE bullshit started, at latest. One resolution fails? Another one, right then. Keep it going, constantly, Enemy At The Gates style. Make them defend the position, make them justify it to their supporters.

Trans people all over the US still go to Thailand and similar markets because to literally fly to another country, get bottom surgery, spend the 3-6 month recovery period there, and THEN fly back to the US is STILL cheaper and faster than trying to get it done here.

The issue is that these surgical robots are a goldmine for companies specializing in medical devices. I work for one. They look fancy, they’re available to buy on loan if you can’t afford the several million dollars, and they sound modern.

Meanwhile, the instruments are not cross-compatible (meaning you can’t run Medtronic instruments on a US Medtech robot, for instance), so while they’re reusable and sterilizable (unlike most other handheld devices which are designed to be one-case-only), you have to buy a whole suite of endocutters, staplers, and whatever else you want that robot to be able to do in order to make it do that. PLUS there’s a proprietary computer system, an imaging system, the software to run those, often a televisual rig at the other end for the surgeon to run…you can get really pricey for these, real quick, and that’s not to mention the staple cartridges, the trocars, all sorts of stuff that can be proprietary.

Officially, they’re just housing them until their official removal procedures. Unofficially, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these people aren’t disappearing into the slave trade as soon as it’s convenient.

It actually assumes that Iran doesn’t know the capabilities of its own neighbors, since a lot of Middle Eastern nations, including Israel, are operators of the F15.

I was about to say, you can’t even do a “teachable moments” sort of kid’s show with it because half the books are “teachable” in the sense of teaching a child to fire an RPG. Like, by only the eighth book (out of 56), one of them has already nearly died (maybe twice), and we also start getting thoughts like “could I murder my own brother if it came down to it”.