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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • Rods from God deliver the energy of about 12 tons of TNT.

    For comparison:

    The British used 12 ton “Tallboy” bombs, carried by Lancaster bombers, in WWII against submarine pens.

    The “Little Boy” nuke delivered the energy of 15,000 tons of TNT.

    Some modern ICBMs carry 10 warheads, each of which delivers the energy of 475,000 tons of TNT.

    One benefit of dropping a tungsten telephone pole from orbit is that there’s no good way to stop it, because its just a chunk of metal moving very fast. Hitting it with a missile might scratch the paint, but won’t significantly alter its course.

    The main drawback is the expense of getting them into orbit. Falcon 9 can lift 2 of them if the poles are cut in half to fit under the fairing, at a cost of about $70 million. That does not include rocket engines, fuel, and targeting computers needed to get those 2 tungsten rods out of space and onto target.
















  • KSA has given up on trying to defeat the Houthis, and now wants to buy them with a promise of revenue sharing from the oil fields that were recently captured by UAE-backed STC.

    KSA hopes they can reduce the frequency of attacks against their oil infrastructure and economic diversification mega-projects. They’re betting that the cost of the Houthi attacks that will still be launched against them, plus the cost of the bribes aimed at reducing the frequency of those attacks, will still be less expensive than a full ground invasion of Yemen.

    Furthermore, KSA is racing against the global trend away from burning oil for energy. They need to diversify their economy while oil is still valuable, and a ground war would halt that progress because investors won’t want to put their eggs into an exploding basket.

    So KSA is willing to act against members of their own anti-Houthi alliance in order to prevent a UAE-sponsored break-away state from metastasizing on their border - a break-away state that would control the oil revenue that KSA hoped would buy them a temporary reprieve during this fragile economic moment.



  • Its been done - link goes to a PDF of the study:

    Patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) frequently report episodes of interidentity amnesia, that is amnesia for events experienced by other identities. The goal of the present experiment was to test the implicit transfer of trauma-related information between identities in DID. We hypothesized that whereas declarative information may transfer from one identity to another, the emotional connotation of the memory may be dissociated, especially in the case of negative, trauma-related emotional valence. An evaluative conditioning procedure was combined with an affective priming procedure, both performed by different identities. In the evaluative conditioning procedure, previously neutral stimuli come to refer to a negative or positive connotation. The affective priming procedure was used to test the transfer of this acquired valence to an identity reporting interidentity amnesia. Results indicated activation of stimulus valence in the affective priming task, that is transfer of emotional material between identities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.