Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred. In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said.

Sounds like they should be blaming themselves, then.

what makes flash floods so hazardous is their ability to strike quickly, with limited warning. Around midnight on Thursday, the [weather offices for the areas that flooded] put out their first flash flood warnings, urging people to “move immediately to higher ground.” The office sent out additional flash flood warnings through the night, expanding the area of danger. It is not clear what steps local officials took to act on those warnings. […] the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.

Again, that sounds like a local issue. What happened to your pride in local government and not needing the feds?

He said that climate change was making extreme rainfall events more frequent and severe, and that more research was needed so that the Weather Service could better forecast those events.

No comment.

Facial recognition apps are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to minority faces, but I suppose they think that’s a benefit :(

I like the cat :)

Paywall. Try archive.is

“Build drones”, aka cannon fodder on the Ukrainian front …

Crunchy almond butter and homemade raspberry jam, open-faced on slices of a really good baguette.

:woot:!!! Well done, Ukraine!!

Well then maybe the AI industry deserves to die.

They might see that other countries also have beautiful landscapes. They might get exposed to people with foreign accents and learn that those people are just people as well! The foreign-made films will be less subject to pressure from the US government. They might be exposed to other cultures, other religions, people of different skin tones , and accept them as actual people. All of these things are ‘bad, very bad’, from a christonationalist fascist viewpoint.

Oh very nice - your cousin should be very happy!

Space Rangers. Really cool show from the early 90s, good cast, lots of fun, cancelled after 6 episodes. The US just really wasn’t doing much SF back in the day, and especially things that weren’t franchises.

I’ll also plug Quark, a 70s science fiction comedy about the adventures of the crew of an interstellar garbage scow. It had it’s flaws and parts are dated, but they lampooned a bunch of major SF entities of the time.

You could try Chronologically Lost, which re-edited the show into chronological order.

Female, intersex, non-binary and transgender.

tl;dr: US conservatives have been generally racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic, and those traits have become increasingly stronger in the past decade or so.

when the final decisions were being made to distribute the shuttles 15 years ago, the Houston community dragged its feet on putting together a competitive proposal.

You snooze, you lose.

Space Center Houston, which would be responsible for hosting the shuttle, was not even told before the legislation was filed.

That seems an important detail to ignore.

The short answer is that it is all political, and the timing is due to the reelection campaign for Cornyn, who faces a stiff runoff against Ken Paxton. The goal in Cornyn’s campaign is to use the bill as a way to show Texans that he is fighting for them in Washington, DC, against the evils there.

Ugh.

I’ve seen them parking in spots labeled Compacts Only and making it so the person next to them has to get in on the passenger’s side.

Hang on, let me dig out my old SNOBOL book!

What is/are these tv series?

For the lathe-end stubs, are they big enough to glue together for either bottle stoppers or maybe even small egg kaleidoscopes (with layers going up instead side-to-side)?

For the long ones, can any of them be used as pen blanks? Either top and bottom as separate pieces, or a mini-pen like this or this?

I’ve also seen where they trimmed down the outside of a pen blank like it was a pen (it had a top and bottom piece joined by metal), but didn’t drill out the center. Instead, they drilled a small hole into the top and placed a soft alligator clip into the hole. It’s to hold the end of a bracelet while you clasp the ends together.

I do recognize that each of these requires sourcing the metal, glass, etc, bits needed to complete the project, but these are the things that I thought of.

Good!

[I am now on a list.]