It’s a real fear, but they can’t outright fire most federal employees. It’s why they’re so into the schedule f thing, because it allows them to reclassify a ton of jobs as at-will appointment jobs and that would allow them to summarily terminate and replace those positions.

It’s why they’re planning so many other moves like arbitrary relocation (they say ok your agency is now gonna be based out of Iowa, you can move or quit) blocking and cutting funding so that hiring is impossible and people don’t get raises, can’t find projects, etc.

But based on the rhetoric I would agree that there are some very nasty things brewing, and being reclassified and then terminated for being a democrat isn’t a crazy outcome, which is bad.

I have read that at first they’re gonna tread lightly, because if you outright destroy major agencies it causes huge visible blowback. So it may be slow at first. But on the other hand, it’s pretty clear after this election that no one cares about what people want, and they may be assuming that there won’t be more elections that they can’t fake so they don’t have to worry about people being pissed off after they get rid of all the agencies that work to keep things functional.

Yes exactly. I’m super effective under deadline, with tons of crap flying my way. Problem is, it’s hugely damaging for me to operate in that state for any long period of time. After burnout for the nth time, I made a decision to switch jobs to something way lower stress (which somehow also paid better). I struggle with the low pressure sometimes, but my god am I a happier and healthier person most of the time.

Also: why would they expect people with ADHD to get better. It’s a fundamental baseline in how exec function systems work in our brains. You can mediate it with medication and practice better routines and habits to avoid some of the worse aspects, but until we can physically manipulate neurology at the cellular scale, I doubt you can cure it.

According to the totally unintentional and legit executive leak, they stacked 100 them!

‘He apparently told brother Bobby, not exactly a monk himself, "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day."1

That’s JFK talking to Bobby about his sexual needs—or maybe we should call them his sexual pathologies, since he apparently requires novel sex in order to prevent brain malfunction and pain.

Note the bit about how Bobby was “not exactly a monk himself”

So personally, I see RFK Jr’s rapacious sexuality as him proudly carrying on an old family tradition.

Richard k. Morgan’s foray into to fantasy “the steel remains” trilogy might meet that requirement. He’s the guy who wrote the altered carbon books, so it’s basically hard-boiled pulp fiction applied to swords and sorcery fantasy. Similarly Joe Abercrombie’s books operate similarly. Genre is… Grimdark I think.

Steven Erickson’s “Malazan book of the fallen” series also would meet the definition, but watch out—there’s a ton of them, and they can be a bit narratively challenging sometimes.

Gotcha so the idea is they’re just gonna give it a shot and try to eat you, regardless, because the stakes, they are high?

To be fair, in a moral sense, they should absolutely try and eat every human they can get their claws on; we have done a bang up job on making their habitat and food sources disappear.

Go all in on milking generational divide and do like a Taylor Swift / Kendrick Lamar ticket. I definitely think either of them could do a better job at being president than our current batch of options.

“It’d be a real shame if something happened to your work file. If you pay us monthly, we can make sure your work is protected”

Despite? How about: “because”

I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.

Yeah I mean that’s fine, but you’d run the same risk there with bluff-calling and standoffs. Like clearly Texas is trying to bait the feds into either rolling over for a cheap win, or doing something that they might be able to use to spark something more significant. Not sure which is worse, but I know which one will look more weak/will incite further escalators acts on Texas’ part.

It’s about lift generation and gravity. Planes stay aloft because of the lift generated. So plane takes off near horizontal, with engines creating thrust in a near horizontal vector. The shape of the wing, combined with the near horizontal thrust vector creates lift, which is perpendicular to the thrust vector, and is what exceeds the pull of gravity, so you climb, while also moving forward. Depending on how you angle the wing, you change that lift force/vector so you can climb, fly level or decend.

If you angle a conventional plane vertically, it will still generate “lift” but that lift will be angled perpendicular to to gravity force. In reality, the plane “stalls” before vertical—this stalling means the wind angle has gone beyond where it can generate enough lift to keep the plane level or climbing. Simply put, most aircraft engines are completely insufficient to escape gravity on their own, they’re using a mechanical advantage via wing generated lift to stay up.

Space rockets use an immense amount of force to escape the atmosphere, they’re basically using a direct vector force to cancel out and exceed gravity, as well as friction. This requires fairly mind boggling amounts of fuel (energy) to do, which is why pounds of cargo capacity are extremely limited.

A VTOL aircraft that has thrust vectoring, can aim thrust down vertically to rise off the ground vertically for a period of time, and then rotate the thrust to the rear to enter into standard lift based flight. I don’t know this exactly, but I suspect the vertical portion of the VTOL sequence is much more energy intensive than the horizontal portion.

Helicopters are neat because they generate vertical lift, but that rotor plane is also capable of behaving like a wing, allowing them to mimic some aspects of fixed wing flight. For instance, if your engine does, you can use autorotation (basically as you fall, it spins the rotors, and you get wing lift so you can “glide” in to land safely).That said, helicopters are less efficient than a fixed wing, which is why if you fly across the country you’re in a large plane, not a helicopter.

I’m sure there are scientific details I’m missing here, but that’s my layman’s understanding of why you can’t point a standard aircraft vertically and fly straight up.