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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The more I have read about this, the more disgusted I am. This company generally, and the CEO personally, took all sorts of shortcuts to build this thing.

    The CEO stated that he didn’t want to have any ex military submarine experts as part of the team, because they were “uninspiring” and “50 year old white guys”, and he’d rather have young college grads who are inspiring. The real reason: the college grads were simply cheaper. He didn’t want to pay the ex military experts. That’s it.

    The CEO lied to CBS news in their CBS Sunday morning report and told them that Boeing and University of Washington consulted with them on the design of the submersible. Both organizations told the NY Post today that they had no involvement with it. So that was a fucking lie. All he did was use the UW lab after hours.

    The use of a Logitech PS3 style controller to navigate the vehicle…what the actual fuck.

    Because this was a submersible in international waters, there are virtually no regulations. That needs to change. If the UN needs to draft a treaty for countries to ratify to regulate these things in international waters, then that’s what needs to happen.














  • I don’t think people actually would, if push came to shove. They’re just expressing nostalgia for a simpler time, which is pretty easy to understand, given all the dystopian effects of social media and smartphones.

    I think smartphones have done a lot of harm, but they’ve still done far more good, which is why we use them. Especially in poorer countries where smartphones are often people’s only access to the internet.

    That said, there’s nothing stopping any of these people in the article from being the change they want to see in the world. Not to send anybody to Reddit, but r/dumbphones is a fast growing subreddit for people that want to try that. A lot of the users are Gen Z who never got to try them and want to give it a whirl.








  • I did a 6 week study abroad trip to Prague in 2009 in college, and it was the best experience of my life. One of the things I like is how the city is organized into districts (Prague 2, Prague 8, etc), and so as a visiting student I could judge how far something was when someone said “that’s in Prague 9”.

    Also, obviously the beer. I distinctly remember being stunned by the fact that beer is quite literally cheaper than water. Here in America, water is like the free thing that you order when you don’t want to spend money. But when I was in Prague, water was not free, it was the nice stuff that came in Perrier bottles and was poured into a bespoke glass. Whereas beer was absurdly cheap. When I was there you could get it for the equivalent of less than 1USD for a pint. It’s probably more now.

    Not to mention all of the beautiful buildings. Prague is one of the few large European cities that managed to get out of WW1/WW2 virtually unscathed, and has a ton of very old buildings. Vysehrad Castle is excellent and is not as known about as Prague Castle. I highly recommend it.