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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2025

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  • I don’t think you understand the fundamentals of humor, my friend.

    To laugh at tragedy is how you get through tragedy. No one is laughing at this meme because they think it’s funny that a whole generation of kids got to miss out on their youth due to covid, wars and inflation.

    We laugh because we can relate and because there is something kind of ironic about how we all probably hoped that coivd was gonna be a short lived thing and that things would go back to normal eventually. The fact that the hits have kept coming every single year since 2020 is comical because it’s so awful.

    The young people of today have been screwed out of a carefree youth. Are you really gonna tone police their humor just because it offends you personally?


  • From Wikipedia:

    Cecil Houston, the manager of the KSC office of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, set up a three-way conference call with Morton Thiokol in Utah and the KSC in Florida on the evening of January 27 to discuss the safety of the launch.

    Morton Thiokol engineers expressed their concerns about the effect of low temperatures on the resilience of the rubber O-rings. As the colder temperatures lowered the elasticity of the rubber O-rings, the engineers feared that the O-rings would not be extruded to form a seal at the time of launch. The engineers argued that they did not have enough data to determine whether the O-rings would seal at temperatures colder than 53 °F (12 °C), the coldest launch of the Space Shuttle to date.  During this discussion, Lawrence Mulloy, the NASA SRB project manager, said that he did not accept the analysis behind this decision, and demanded to know if Morton Thiokol expected him to wait until April for warmer temperatures.  Morton Thiokol employees Robert Lund, the Vice President of Engineering, and Joe Kilminster, the Vice President of the Space Booster Programs, recommended against launching until the temperature was above 53 °F (12 °C).

    When the teleconference prepared to hold a recess to allow for private discussion amongst Morton Thiokol management, Allan J. McDonald, Morton Thiokol’s Director of the Space Shuttle SRM Project who was sitting at the KSC end of the call,  reminded his colleagues in Utah to examine the interaction between delays in the primary O-rings sealing relative to the ability of the secondary O-rings to provide redundant backup, believing this would add enough to the engineering analysis to get Mulloy to stop accusing the engineers of using inconclusive evidence to try and delay the launch.  When the call resumed, Morton Thiokol leadership had changed their opinion and stated that the evidence presented on the failure of the O-rings was inconclusive and that there was a substantial margin in the event of a failure or erosion. They stated that their decision was to proceed with the launch.

    When McDonald told Mulloy that, as the onsite representative at KSC he would not sign off on the decision, Mulloy demanded that Morton Thiokol provide a signed recommendation to launch; Kilminster confirmed that he would sign it and fax it from Utah immediately, and the teleconference ended.  Mulloy called Arnold Aldrich, the NASA Mission Management Team Leader, to discuss the launch decision and weather concerns, but did not mention the O-ring discussion; the two agreed to proceed with the launch.

    Dunno about you, but it sounds a lot like NASA, especially Lawrence Mulloy, practically twisted Morton Thiokol’s arms until one of them (Joe Kilminster) relented and signed off on the launch. Mulloy even lied by omission at the end there to get his way. I wonder how he could sleep at night after this stunt.


  • The issue was that they knew there were issues with the shuttle and had been warned by several engineers about launching in the cold weather they were having at the time, but NASA ignored them and sent the Challenger on its way anyways. It’s been awhile so I forget the details of exactly what it was that was wrong, but I think it was the metal in some screws that wasn’t able to deal with the differences in temperatures and the engineers said shit would go wrong if they didn’t replace them and nobody listened. It was a very preventable disaster that only happened due to laziness and impatience on NASA’s part.

    • it was the rubber in the O-ring seals that couldn’t handle the differences in temperature.

  • Thank you, my hero! 😚

    Wikipedia would have me believe that these meat drilling, bloodsucking mistakes of nature actually pollinate when they aren’t in the process of ruining the lives of warm blooded creatures so now I feel a tiny bit bad, but still. So many other bugs can take over their jobs and manage to lay eggs without feeling the need to turn someone’s skin into Swiss cheese.




  • Lol, your comment reminded me of when I got to confirmation age and I was the only one in my class who chose to not get confirmated. The priest would come to me in class a few times to convince me to join in on Bible studies and I asked him several questions that pissed him off enough to leave me alone. One of them was: do you believe in Satan?

    And he said no.

    And I said: do you believe in Jesus?

    And he said yes.

    “How can you believe in one and not the other when they are part of the same religion?”

    Only said in a 13 year old way of speaking so probably a lot more clunky. Anyway, I kept pushing him to admit that if he believes in the good he also must believe in the evil because they belong together and one without the other is just lying to yourself and making yourself vulnerable to evil - but again, in a 13 year old clunky way of saying it.

    He got mad and never spoke a word to me again.

    I still believe in this sentiment even though I’m not religious. I am painfully aware of the evil inside of me and how I must be observant and aware of how I affect the world and how the world affects me. If I turn a blind eye to evil, I will open myself up to it. That is how people end up in cults and I know I have a high chance of becoming one of those, so there’s a lot of talks in the mirror and reflections on my own behavior.

    13 year old me was nowhere close to understanding the complexities of the conversation I was trying to have with the priest back then, I just wanted him to not be a hypocrite and admit that if he believes in God he also must believe in the devil even if he disagrees with his teachings. You cannot be good if you ignore evil.