Hey, that sounds exactly like Amelia Earhart! Shitty pilot (notoriously bad in aviation circles) who was promoted because she was pretty and photogenic.
Amelia's navigator and radioman Fred Noonan was reportedly one of the only people who would fly with her. He had a well known drinking problem and was seen drunk on the day they departed.
Amelia didn't know how to operate her own radios. She could not use Morse Code. She did not follow the guidance signals from the coast guard.
By all accounts she missed the tiny island that was her refueling stop and crashed on an atoll.
Now do Kara Hultgreen.
Oh wait. Here is a very authoritive video on the subject.
I didn't say that, and I haven't read Imp saying that either.
But thanks for your input.
Isn't this the point in the thread that it is traditional to ban Imp for months?
I mean, fuck him for being (mostly) right, amirite?
Polymers (plastics) become strong through a process called cross-linking.
A polymer is a ultra-long molecule. Think of a regular molecule as a pea, where as a polymer is a strand of noodles.
When a plastic is poured into shape, cross linking ties every noodle together where they touch. This gives the plastic a fixed shape.
When you recycle the plastic, either through heating them (for thermo-plastics) or melting them with solvents like acetone, most of the polymers are conserved. That is the macro-molecules remain long.
However the properties that allow cross-linking between the polymer strands is severely degraded.
I will give you an example. DVD cases made out of recycled plastic are brittle and break easily. They are utterly shitty for the job of keeping your DVDs safe.
Some plastics are more recyclable than others. Some plastics are strong enough that even at 50% strength they are still useful. MOST are not.
For example, recycling plastic milk jugs would see milk jugs shredded and then combined with 50% new plastic to produce a milk jug that is 50% recycled plastic.
A Leaf, eh?
There was a court case here in Australia. Nissan was selling a replacement (discounted) battery for more than the resale price of the car. This was in spite of there being a serious design fault in the early Leaf batteries that seriously degraded their lifespan.
Early Leaf models had batteries that didn't have an active cooling system, that is a fluid pump and radiator. The heat issues drastically shortened the battery life.
Step 1 for an Authoritarian state is to control the media.
Step 2 is to create a crisis that can be solved by Taking Strong Action.
Step 3 is to demand temporary sacrifices from the citizens.
I still like the "fractured his own skull while working out with weights"
The Honey Badgers have remained true. They are OG MRAs and Mike and Alison do it as a full time job.
Mike's interviews are always interesting. Alison has the kind of laser focus and relentless determination that is required to actually make progress in world hostile to their message.
Alison gets bonus points for being thrown out of Canadian pop-culture cons forever (more or less) for supporting GamerGate and making feminists uncomfortable.
Karen has a deep knowledge of history and some of the most lucid takes. Hanna used to be a professional news reporter, and she is immune to bullshit.
There are other regular contributors, and they are not really into the whole "brevity thing" but I am grateful to have discovered their channels.
Bret Winestine was pretty frank about his settlement with Evergreen State College. He was absolutely in the right and had the receipts. It would have taken five years and a huge bankroll to prove it in court.
He and his wife (a fellow professor) took the settlement because it was a good start on switching to another career. It should have been two or three times as much, but they were not going to get it soon enough to be relevant.
For the record, I think Bret is a douche. He immediately moved to Portland and then launched a Youtube career by making a bunch of stupid comments about the election. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
How fucking unrealistic! As if women would take turns letting the alpha chad ride them like a skateboard!
It is just crazy to see so many of these two kinds of posts:
"I am SO sorry that Imp is right, but he really is. Here is an example:"
and
"Fuck Imp! Fuck him to death with a pineapple!"
Otherwise Australia would literally be run by foreign nations.
What could we even learn from that?
Besides if that actually happened, I think I would have learned about it in school!
Stick with it. It gets steadily better as the author finds their voice. More of the universe gets explained as things happen.
Enjoy.
I have been thinking about what to recommend for you.
Try Black Ocean: Galaxy Outlaws by J.S. Morin.
It is space opera in the best way. Interstellar travel is made possible by wizards or enchanted star drives.
Imagine if you needed to have a Jedi onboard to jump to light speed, or a FTL drive made and maintained by Jedi.
The magic is great, the tech makes sense and the whole thing takes place on a ship full of interesting characters as they try to make their way. The author was clearly inspired by StarWars and Firefly. They do a great job of pulling it together.
There is an audiobook omnibus if you prefer that or you can pick up the kindle versions for reasonable prices.
Tell me if this hits the spot, because I thought about it pretty hard!
The products of your labor belongs to the a workers, Comrade!
Were you to keep anything for yourself, that would be cheating the Workers and trading in the Black Market! It would be the gulag for you!
How about SF dressed up as fantasy?
"The Magic Goes Away" by Larry Niven. It is hard SF in a magical setting.
Now you want to SAVE Lincoln?
Well, this is awkward.
The very early ones don't suck as much. Eventually Piers Anthony wrote one or so a year and just stuck to a formula.
The aforementioned precocious, nubile tweens show up a lot. They are (relatively) innocent, but there are a couple plot points that revolve around relationships or kissing or something with girls of about ten or so. It isn't filthy, but ... yeah. It hits differently today.
The first one is the Blue Adept series. I don't know about the second one.
Piers Anthony was not a great author. Eventually he discovered that he got paid by the word and churned out huge tomes of low-effort crap.
His most successful series is a fantasy setting called Xanith or something close. It is about adventures in a magical kingdom where most of the magic is based on puns. Piers writes long, 'educational forwards' that don't age well.
I can recommend other, better series. Try out Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Was that written before or after Piers Anthony wrote a lot of books prominently featuring precocious, nubile tweens?
I think you are talking about the Incantations of Immortality, which I have read, or Blue Adept, which I have not read.
Incarnations of Immortality starts well, but every book is worse than the last.
Have you read "Protector" by Larry Niven?
It is a first contact story, where an alien ship enters the Sol system with a single occupant.
It turns out the pilot is a super-intelligent humanoid on a mission. The alien is soon dead, but the Belter who made contact with him is changed forever and becomes the Protector of the human race.
It is an older book and from early in Niven's career before he discovered swinging and got weird. At the height of his power Niven was a great author, and this is one of his better works.
Larry Niven writes great aliens.
Niven and Pournelle co-wrote "The Mote in God's Eye"; the best first contact book ever. The aliens are very alien.
In Larry Niven's Known Space universe there are the Man-Kizin Wars.
There are very good reasons for most aliens having a compatible biology (I'll tell you if you like) and the Kizin are pretty great as an alien species. They have a lot more in common with panthers than they do with humans.
Lets make a new country for them! We shall call it Liberia 2.0!
Reminding people that Bret and his wife immediately moved to Portland, started a Youtube career and made a bunch of stupid comments about the election.
Bret is an excellent teacher, no doubt, but he was at Evergreen because it was one of the most left-wing campuses in history.
Events have seen him (somewhat) red pilled, but he still has a long way to go.