Kid is lucky to have you.

I had a mum and a dad, and they did their best, but I wish they had been more interested with my well being in this way.

You’re doing great.

Fair enough.

The only reason things burn up when they enter the atmosphere is because they’re moving so fast that the friction from the air generates too much heat.

So yes, if you slow yourself down enough then you could just float down like a feather in the wind.

I have no idea how fast is too fast.

The answer to this depends on how much the magic device with the oxygen weighs.

Also just going to set aside anything to do with sky diving and space suits and having friends and everything else that I don’t know anything about.

I only know this from playing Simple Rockets on android but basically you direct your thrust in the direction you’re moving in order to reduce your velocity, and you’ll fall down to earth.

Think of an orbit as the balance between falling towards earth and zipping past earth. If you fly past too fast then you just fly past and maybe the gravity pulls you a bit but not much. If you fly past too slow the gravity pulls you down to earth and you crash. If you fly past at the same speed you fall towards earth the two directions balance out and you end up just spinning around earth.

Therefore, If you’re in a stable orbit on the space station, and then you slow down, you’ll start to fall down towards it instead of “falling” around it in an orbit.

If you only slow down a little bit you’ll start moving towards Earth but you’ll be moving way too fast for an unshielded human to enter the atmosphere without burning up.

You’d have to slow yourself down, by directing thrust towards the horizon you’re headed towards, enough so that you’re not going fast enough to burn up.

Whether or not you can slow down enough, quickly enough, depends on how much thrust your magic device can provide and how much that device makes you weigh.

Telling an employee how they should speak could potentially be micromanaging, but providing constructive criticism for drafting emails et cetera is not.

I don’t think that thin skinned is the right word for this. It’s great to take pride in your own writing style and natural to feel somewhat offended when someone is critical of it. However, it can’t hurt to at least listen to criticism in an objective way before deciding whether it’s author is being a toxic micromanaging prick, or may indeed have something useful to say.

Oddly enough, just 2 days ago I told a team member to make some changes to the tone of an email. He’s a tax consultant, he was emailing an employee of a client who does their bookwork. It was a long email regarding multiple ways they could improve their records in future in order to minimise our fees. My team member didn’t really intend it but he’d drafted something that just made him look like an asshole “I’m better than you” type missive to someone who’s doing their best with no support and no formal training.

I explained that a good relationship with that person will be far more valuable and helpful to us in future than whatever improvements in their records might arise from the email itself.

The skills involved in drafting good communication can be continually improved over a lifetime.

Plenty of answers here but I don’t think anyone has answered this part:

Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism.

So here’s my take …

Musk did the sig heil as a fuck you to everyone that doesn’t like him. That’s it.

They just won the election by basically lying, ignoring, and playing for time. They can literally do whatever the fuck they like for the next n years with impunity.

Imagine if Harris had won and in her victory speech said something like “Don’t worry Don, I’ll make sure they give you diapers in jail.” It would’ve been a low blow but we would’ve loved her for it because it’s poking fun at the conservatives for no other reason than to stir them up.

I think there’s another, longer conversation to be had about why racism (and by extension nazism) resonates with voters in 2025, but I’m too weary for that I think.

Yeah.

Sadly I think email will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s broken, sure… but it’s just so fundamental to the web.

An alternative would need to be ubiquitous, and that seems unachievable.

Old mate didn’t provide any fascinating insights into the manufacturing practices of soviet era communism, they just trotted out some meme-level anti-capitalist vibe-based hyperbole.

I’m not going to engage in a silly argument about the merits of communism as opposed to capitalism.

I don’t think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.

In my case it was recipients with bonkers microsoft exchange servers that just had weird ideas about who should be sending them emails.

For example, one thing that tripped me up forever ago was grey listing. Apparently the receiving server just wouldn’t acknowledge the sending server for an arbitrary period of time, say 12 hours or so. Spam senders would usually give up long before then, while a legit server would keep trying because it’s legitimately trying to deliver an actual email.

So my email-in-a-box type self hosted set up was fine really. Compliant you might say. But to send emails to this one in a thousand recipient I had to investigate what was going on and reconfigure things to ensure their server would interact with mine.

Another thing that can happen is that spammers just put your email address in the “from” field and fire off a few million emails. Obviously the DKIM signatures and SPF won’t match but it still just makes your future legitimate emails look spammy. Having the credibility of a larger organisation goes a long way in this type of instance.

I’m absolutely in the “don’t self-host email” camp. That said, I think it could be done reliably if you wanted to use someone else’s SMTP server and let them worry about deliverability. As in, have your mx records on your domain route to your MTA and dovecot, but set your DKIM and SPF records to match a third party SMTP server. You could use mxroute as an SMTP server very cheaply. There are others like the email API type services. I still can’t think of why I’d want to self host with all this drama but just an idea I’ve heard.

Indeed.

The whole mess seems to have gotten so much worse.

I think most places keep a brush in the toilet in a fancy caddy. That’s because the expectation is that everyone scrubs any skid marks before leaving.

I suspect that the plunger is to do with standard sewage pipe guage rather than just “shoddy” workmanship or whatever. That’s why bidet spray is more or less mandatory in South East Asia, the sewage pipes just aren’t wide enough to handle toilet paper.

Water bottles for bikes suffer from this.

You gotta get them really dried out really regularly.

Like if you only have one that you use every day it’s just going to get gross no matter what.

It needs to be bone dry for a few days to kill everything.

If you have 2 and switch once a week, the one that’s out of rotation will dry out and any funk will just die off.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plunger of any kind kept in someone’s toilet.

Is this an American thing?

Weird take on counter tops.

Things designed for many people to use need to be the best height for most people. I feel confident that most countertops are the best height for most people.

I acknowledge that they are too low for a tall person, and that they’re too high for a short person.

You’re pretty much just saying you want things to be designed for you and that everyone else should adapt to you, rather than you having to make concessions for others like everybody does.

I agree with you, but I’m not sure how great it would actually be.

I don’t know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn’t this a feature of soviet era communism?

As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.

I’ve had these dual wall glass mugs at home for a few years. So civilised.

https://www.house.com.au/products/baccarat-barista-cafe-double-wall-thermal-glass-mug-2-pack

1. Spray bum
2. Pat dry with TP

The tricky part with phase 1 is managing water pressure. Too little is ineffective. Too much blasts shit everywhere.

Do a test squirt into the bowl so you know what you’ve got to work with. Start with low pressure to get most of it, adjust angle of necessary, then hit it with everything.

Yeah it’s just bonkers.

A criminal tried to seize power in a violent coup.

Not only was nothing done but voters elected him to be fucking president because they were confused about Palestinians and concerned about the price of eggs.