It really depends what your goals/targets are. You can still do a lot with narrowband filters that make light pollution a minimal concern.
One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.
I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.
At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.
Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.
Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.
Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.
All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”
They are sometimes told about it, tenth-hand, such as the fabled $10,000-hammer and the gold toilet seat.
Congress itself sees these costs, or more precisely, teams working for congressmembers see them. Congress members approve bills that are not lowest-cost when there is personal benefit for their careers: pork-barrel. It's very hard to justify not-lowest-cost without a pork-barrel angle.
Maybe they even saw handing over to a provider all repair responsibilities as a major advantage. No need to have this capability in the crew with the associated logistics, and the accountability is also outsourced.
This comes at a cost but looking around at comparable outsourcing situations, everyone follows the same line of thinking. Sell my responsibility for (someone else’s) money.
Maybe they are an aircraft carrier that is deployed in places that no reasonable human can expect a service technician to visit, and this level of imbecility should generally be avoided.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
I would 100% support blind screening and application where possible. Also educating recruiters and diversifying pipelines. My job had the latter, and I supported it.
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.
It is pretty much an independent system. There are only a handful of organizations on the planet operating an independent global weather model. For historical reasons the US operates two of them. A good argument can be made that the European model is better than either, so it might make sense for the US to combine some of those global weather model resources.
Oh, come on now, this one’s easy. They can just activate Textualist-mode and say that that if the founders wanted this clause to apply to tariffs then they should have explicitly used the word ‘tariffs’.
So many of the further-left’s answers follow the progression of the “step 3: ???” meme. I guess these days we might call it “concepts of a plan”. Even when the goals sound great, the paths to reach them are vague or non-existent (or even worse IMO, depend on questionable or simply outright illegal means).
You mention healthcare…I lived in Colorado in 2016 and we had a ballot measure for a constitutional amendment to establish universal healthcare. Great!
However, in the months leading up to that vote there were so many questions about details that the organizers of the ballot measure just met with some form of, “We’ll let you know after the amendment passes.”
I was a federal employee at the time, with an FEHB plan, and I was concerned that I would wind up paying for both the FEHB plan and the state tax that would come with the state plan. I sent multiple emails and asked at an information session but no one involved in organizing the ballot measure would even entertain the question.
Read it again. 40% of the 10% flagged by Cruz. So just 4% of all NSF grants were related to DEI…in some way that isn’t even apparent without actually reading the proposals.
One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.
I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.
At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.
Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.