planes and drawings
skies
Joined February 2022
- Tweets5.7K
- Following915
- Followers700
- Likes7.6K
Great White North Joe retweeted
I think about this clip a lot...
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Great White North Joe retweeted
A no-brainer reality show idea would be to pay zoomers to follow Xers’ and boomers’ advice and use hidden cameras to record the results.
You could also record the reactions of the advice-givers as they watch the footage.
Attention Young Men:
I am surrounded by 20 year old girls in my life that are smart, capable, hard working and cute. Nobody is dating them. Not sure what the deal is, but I don’t get it.
Step 1: Stop playing video games
Step 2: Head to great clips and get that lettuce cleaned up
Step 3: Hit a shower (when dating hygiene is critical)
Step 4: Go clean your car
Step 5: Sign up for a yoga class
Step 6: Go to the yoga class
Step 7: Ask a cute for her phone number at yoga class (yes you can meet girls IRL and not just on the apps - 10/10 the Dirt Dog highly recommends)
Step 8: Follow up within 2 days with a phone call and ask them out for this coming weekend Friday or Saturday night.
Step 9: IMPORTANT - come up with a good game plane for date night. Get a dinner reservation, get an activity planned. Let them know in advance what you are doing so they can dress appropriately. I know you are gunna roll off the couch and head to date night, but they are not. They are going to stress about what to wear and call at least 6 different people on FaceTime to ask their opinion.
Step 10: I highly recommend you bring flowers to the door step. I’m not covering that you go to the doorstep, because if you don’t do that you have no hope here. Women want men to date them. You don’t need to break the bank on flowers. Head to Trader Joe’s. Grab 2 different kinds of flowers. If you don’t know what matches find the closest looking lady to your mom at TJ’s and ask her. Wrap the 2 flowers into 1 bouquet with paper. Bonus Points you can cut open a TJ bag and use that as the paper.
Step 11: Be a gentleman on the date. She isn’t there to hear your life story. Ask her about her. For every 1 question you answer, ask her 3. Open Doors, pay for the meal, be polite.
Provided you follow most of this guideline you are highly likely to get yourself an opportunity for date number 2.
Keep going until you find someone that you can’t imagine not being around all the time. That’s when you have found a good one for you.
My life is complete with my wife as my companion. I wish you the same fortune in life. Happy Hunting.
Great White North Joe retweeted
Weird phenomenon where most explicitly RW art is shit, so we end up with a form of DEI for “based” artists.
This is, objectively, not a very beautiful statue. Yet because it’s “cool” and “Promethean” and “right-wing,” we all have to clap like trained seals.
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Great White North Joe retweeted
Young women are fun to date because when you make plans they say stuff like
“Yay”
Just amazing.
They are that excited to go out with you. They say YAY.
Great White North Joe retweeted
On March 16, 1968, US troops were raping and massacring Vietnamese civilians including children and babies at My Lai.
Then an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson Jr. saw what was happening — and decided he could not stand by.
Thompson was flying a reconnaissance mission in an OH-23 Raven with his two crewmen, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn. Their job was to scout ahead of the ground troops and identify enemy positions.
But something was terribly wrong.
From the air, Thompson noticed bodies everywhere — women, children, infants and elderly people. There was virtually no return fire.
He marked wounded civilians with smoke so they could receive medical help.
But when he came back, he discovered that some of the people he had marked as wounded had been shot dead.
He watched a wounded Vietnamese woman lying on the ground. An American soldier approached her, prodded her with his foot — and shot her in the head.
Thompson was horrified.
He then saw a group of 12–15 Vietnamese women and children fleeing toward a bunker while American soldiers pursued them.
He landed his helicopter between the civilians and the soldiers.
Thompson confronted the Americans and ordered his crew to cover the civilians. He told his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, to train his M60 on the American troops and fire if they opened fire on the Vietnamese.
Think about that.
An American soldier had reached the point where he was willing to risk shooting fellow American soldiers to prevent them from committing more war crimes.
Thompson then helped get the civilians out of the bunker and called in other helicopters to evacuate them.
His crew helped rescue Vietnamese survivors and wounded children.
After returning to base, Thompson immediately reported what he had witnessed to his superiors.
Hugh and his men deserve to be remembered, not because they were American soldiers, but because they chose humanity when others had abandoned it.
While others were killing innocent people, these three Americans risked their lives to save them.
That is courage. That is humanity. This is Thompson Hugh Jr.
Great White North Joe retweeted
You're right, it was an elementary school not a military base. I'm sorry for the confusion.
Would you like to learn more about elementary schools?
#BREAKING: Pentagon blames flawed intel and AI for strike that killed at least 123 Iranian children.
Great White North Joe retweeted
A thousand years from now, someone will still be trying to understand what Jimi Hendrix did on ‘Machine Gun’
Great White North Joe retweeted
The Americans who think that everyone outside the
USA wants to be part of the USA, have never been outside America
Trump propagandist and Fox News host Jesse Watters:
“If I were a citizen of another country and a neighbor of the United States, I would consider it a privilege to be annexed by the United States of America. That’s what everyone in the world wants — American citizenship. For some reason, you Canadians find that completely unappealing. And personally, I find that offensive.”
What a stupid, arrogant bastard. Then again, I guess no one else can work for Trump.
Great White North Joe retweeted
Main Street, Deadwood, Dakota Territory, 1877.
Photographed by F. Jay Haynes. This is the boomtown more than a year after Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed there in August 1876.
