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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • This guy s 100% accurate. When I was a contractor for the NWS in the mid 2010s they were working aggressively to get their HQ staff setup to telework at least some of the time to save on office leases. They built out a large fix work space in their silver spring building and when it went live they were able to vacate an entire floor, saving something like a million dollars in month in lease, utilities, etc costs.

    This mindset of return to office to force attrition also seems less likely to work for federal employees that often need to work in the office at least part time anyways, and often have very strong union protections that will cost a ton for the government to fight through.

    On top of that, the costs to return employees to offices will be astronomical both in fitting out those office spaces again and in terms of supporting infrastructure like transit costs. A lot of those additional costs get borne by state governments and often passed on to the federal government through grants and chargebacks for various services.



  • Our cat will put us to bed. When we turn the light off she will lay on my hip for 5-15 minutes then once she’s convinced I’m asleep (I’m not) she will hop off the bed and go do cat things (she tells us it’s catslified and we can’t know she does these cat things). She sometimes will lay on my wife for 30 seconds, maybe a minute but always lays on me. She’ll pace around too until I lay on my side so she can put me to bed.

    In the winter she’ll come back and snuggle up with one of us because she likes the warmth and we keep it cooler at night. In the summer she’ll lays a bit further away near one of us (usually pinning the blanket down so I can’t get up). She is truly a creature of habit.


  • The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.



  • In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

    The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

    I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.


  • The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).


  • I grew up in Loudoun county and lived in prince william county for a bit. It’s important to note that the wealth in Loudoun, prince william, and Fairfax counties are concentrated in pretty specific areas. Outside of Ashburn, South Riding, and the western estates of Loudoun it’s not terribly rich. The data centers bring in a ton of wealth though on top of the very large government contracting companies such as Lockheed, Raytheon, GD, etc. Additionally, DC and the surrounding cities just don’t have the density like other cities do, which spreads the wealth out a bit more (while still concentrating it in various counties around the area).