SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been contaminating local bodies of water with mercury for years. The news arrives in an exclusive https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-waters-in-texas-tceq-epa-found.html on August 12, which cites...
CNBC’s story on Starship’s launch operations in South Texas is factually inaccurate.
Starship’s water-cooled flame deflector system is critical equipment for SpaceX’s launch operations. It ensures flight safety and protects the launch site and surrounding area.
Also known as the deluge system, it applies clean, potable (drinking) water to the engine exhaust during static fire tests and launches to absorb the heat and vibration from the rocket engines firing. Similar equipment has long been used at launch sites across the United States – such as Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Stations in Florida, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California – and across the globe.
SpaceX worked with the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) throughout the build and test of the water deluge system at Starbase to identify a permit approach. TCEQ personnel were onsite at Starbase to observe the initial tests of the system in July 2023, and TCEQ’s website shows that SpaceX is covered by the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.
When the EPA issued their Administrative Order in March 2024, it was done without an understanding of basic facts of the deluge system’s operation or acknowledgement that we were operating under the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.
After we explained our operation to the EPA, they revised their position and allowed us to continue operating, but required us to obtain an Individual Permit from TCEQ, which will also allow us to expand deluge operations to the second pad. We’ve been diligently working on the permit with TCEQ, which was submitted on July 1st, 2024. TCEQ is expected to issue the draft Individual Permit and Agreed Compliance Order this week.
Throughout our ongoing coordination with both TCEQ and the EPA, we have explicitly asked if operation of the deluge system needed to stop and we were informed that operations could continue.
TCEQ and the EPA have allowed continued operations because the deluge system has always complied with common conditions set by an Individual Permit, and causes no harm to the environment. Specifically:
We only use potable (drinking) water in the system’s operation. At no time during the operation of the deluge system is the potable water used in an industrial process, nor is the water exposed to industrial processes before or during operation of the system.
The launch pad area is power-washed prior to activating the deluge system, with the power-washed water collected and hauled off.
The vast majority of the water used in each operation is vaporized by the rocket’s engines.
We send samples of the soil, air, and water around the pad to an independent, accredited laboratory after every use of the deluge system, which have consistently shown negligible traces of any contaminants. Importantly, while CNBC’s story claims there are “very large exceedances of the mercury” as part of the wastewater discharged at the site, all samples to-date have in fact shown either no detectable levels of mercury whatsoever or found in very few cases levels significantly below the limit the EPA maintains for drinking water.
Retention ponds capture excess water and are specially lined to prevent any mixing with local groundwater. Any water captured in these ponds, including water from rainfall events, is pumped out and hauled off.
Finally, some water does leave the area of the pad, mostly from water released prior to ignition and after engine shutdown or launch. To give you an idea of how much: a single use of the deluge system results in potable water equivalent to a rainfall of 0.004 inches across the area outside the pad which currently averages around 27 inches of rain per year.
With Starship, we’re revolutionizing humanity’s ability to access space with a fully reusable rocket that plays an integral role in multiple national priorities, including returning humans to the surface of the Moon. SpaceX and its thousands of employees work tirelessly to ensure the United States remains the world’s leader in space, and we remain committed to working with our local and federal partners to be good stewards of the environment.
what’s hilarious is that the cybertruck has a really shitty turning radius. compared to an average truck… (an f150, IIRC), it’s actually slightly worse, even with the rear wheel steering. The whole reason they added it because it was just that atrocious in the first place. Instead of reconsidering things like wheel base, wheel track and steering angle and just staying with standard, normal designs… said, “naw, you know what, lets just make it even more complicated.”
it’s basically why I will never buy a tesla. instead of using standard, proven engineering design choices like having mechanical steering that turns to x degree for y turning radius… they make that shit a thousand times more likely to break.
Or. For another example. Door handles. They had to be cool. Motorized, touch sensitive door handles that had to have all sorts of cool factor. Except it’s entirely uncessary. You could have had a flap to keep rain and stuff out, with a plate that pulls against or into a switch (of one of a dozen varieties,), letting you pull the door open with very little being around for the handle to break.
(the argument for the flush handles is aerodynamics. This of course ignores the fact that people have been making shaved handles for hot rods for decades.)
we have ours pumped every 2-3 years, house of 4. Rain wont fill it up, because it will eventually end up in the leach field and levels will go down. Solids are the risk when dealing with overflowing septic because it will get into the pipe to the leach field and clog that, causing a backup in your plumbing.
as for the smell, it depends, every house I have lived in with septic would get a wiff from time to time depending literally on the direction of the wind. The house that had the least smell was a 3 story house in the north east where its cooler, the one with the most was a house in the south east that was only 1 story.
Height of the vent makes a difference, as can using products like Rid-X to help keep things broken down particularly fats which can really stink up a septic system.
When I stopped, a rusted chain tangled me up
Tying my body onto the ground
As I sink underground, I call your name
What can I do to see the daylight once more?
From Just Awake by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Was the first ending song of the Hunter x Hunter 2011 anime
Dua Lipa’s Levitation, the “You can fly away with me tonight” portion
The lyrics describes some characteristics of the Hindu god Krishna… the singer is describing her lover like that.
The lyrics is cool, but the context and the way it is sung elevates it for me.
I like it because the protagonist is imagining it and his love interest doesn’t even know of his interest. The guy is also the evil guy in the story.
Meaning of the wordsKarimukil = Rain cloud, dark cloud
Ambaram = could mean sky or lips
Madhura = A place of the god. Also madhuram means sweet
Amrith = Divine nectar, immortality juice
Mazhayode + anayuu + nee = Rain + come + you, come/arrive with the rain
Muralirava= Flute’s sound
Neela ambuja nayanan = Blue Lotus eyed
There are Malayalam leftist songs whose lyrics I like a lot, but that’d be too specific and I probably wouldn’t be able to explain them easily.
There was no way to spam X to yell “Jaaasooonnn or Ssshaaawwwnnnn.” - 0/12
In all seriousness. Great game. Definitely their best. Definitely the least cringe. Heavy rain is a meme game and a classic, but I can’t get over the fact that the main playable female character in that game is literally ONLY there to function as a sexual object that fucks the main character, takes care of him, and gets assaulted in her underwear. Luckily Detroit didn’t seem to have nearly as much of that cringe bullshit. David Cage writes video game scripts like a fucking incel, so glad Detroit was a welcome change of pace.
Hi Masto, I'm home. The day began with the wind and rain which had me wanting to listen only to The Cure during my commutes and while I was prepping for class. Can the eyeliner be far behind. I jest. My eyes are far too sensitive for eye makeup these days and all of my fancy eye makeup palettes are going to waste.
It was an okay day. Another Drama Lab with my Oral Literacy MA Students. Their big project for this semester is connected to The Lady's Not For Burning. My approach to Oral Literacy is Oral Literacy x Pop Culture x Performance Studies. I'm enjoying it! I always enjoy teaching performance as it takes me back to some of those roots (I did two years of a performance studies x literature PhD before I defected fully to lit to be a Gothic scholar)
Tens of thousands of Georgians have taken to the streets of the capital Tbilisi on Saturday evening to protest a controversial “foreign influence” bill backed by the government....
I think we are every year getting small sneak peeks of what’s to come and we still ignore the warnings nature is giving us and we are strictly focused on the short term growth.
Just look what just happened in Dubai, they had 256mm of rain in one day, while their annual rain rate is 96. That’s 2.5x more than the annual in just one day. And I am sure this caused a lot of financial damage to businesses and also the government
Hello fellow selfhosters, I tried to find a piece of software that could achieve my goal but maybe I am not searching in the correct areas. So I thought of asking here for suggestions or directions I could take....
My partner and I use a git repository on our self-hosted gitea instance for household management.
Issue tracker and kanban boards for task management, wiki for documentation, and some infrastructure components are version controlled in the repo itself. You could almost certainly get away with just the issue tracker.
Home Assistant (also self-hosted) provides the ability to easily and automatically create issues based on schedules and sensor data, like creating a git issue when when weather conditions tomorrow may necessitate checking this afternoon that nothing gets left out in the rain.
Matrix (also self-hosted) lets Gitea and Home Assistant bully us into remembering to do things we might have forgotten. (Send a second notification if the washer finished 15 minutes ago, but the dryer never started)
It’s been fantastic being able to create git issues for honey-dos as well as having the automations for creating issues for recurring tasks. “Hey we need to take X to the vet for Y sometime next week” “Oh yeah, can you go ahead and put in a ticket?” And vice versa.
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
And as I’ve understood and read about it, Wayland had been a near 10 years mess that ended up with a product as bad or perhaps worse than xorg.
Not trying to rain on either parade, but x is like the Hubble telescope if we added new upgrades to it every 2 months. Its way past its end of life, doing things it was never designed for.
I have a dumb question: why heat up the vinegar? Does it help with some kind of chemical reaction in the mixing or does heat just help to make the mixture to be more effective so it needs to be used before it cools down?
My apartment has incredibly hard water, so sinks, toilets, and showers always look rough. It just now occurred to me that maybe rain x on the glass after cleaning could be a decent preventative measure unless somebody can tell me why that’s a bad idea?
I would do above and after squeegee get any bits on edges with microfiber cloth that hangs in shower just for this purpose alone. So Rain-X at times, squeegee and micro fiber last after each shower. Cheers!
My partner and I use a git repository on our self-hosted gitea instance for household management.
Issue tracker and kanban boards for task management, wiki for documentation, and some infrastructure components are version controlled in the repo itself.
Home Assistant (also self-hosted) provides the ability to easily and automatically create issues based on schedules and sensor data, like creating a git issue when when weather conditions tomorrow may necessitate checking this afternoon that nothing gets left out in the rain.
Matrix (also self-hosted) lets Gitea and Home Assistant bully us into remembering to do things we might have forgotten. (Send a second notification if the washer finished 15 minutes ago, but the dryer never started)
It’s been fantsstic being able to create git issues for honey-dos as well as having the automations for creating issues for recurring tasks. “Hey we need to take X to the vet for Y sometime next week” “Oh yeah, can you go ahead and put in a ticket?” And vice versa.
I got hit by the updated pictures and product problem you described recently. Used the “buy again” for a silicone set of wipers for my car (those last for years instead of the 2 seasons you get out of the rubber garbage the companies push). Rain x had updated the product to the latter one to make more money with the reviews of the older long lasting one on the inferior product. Had to return and buy from elsewhere. I can’t trust the “order again” functionality and at this point, Amazon and the companies there any longer (since they used the process to mislead customers).
Hmm why? Scrubber tech is getting better, the ppm requirements are stricter, and low grade fuel coal and diesel with sulfur in it is become less available. Which makes sense since do you want to move x amount of money to move y amount of weight or do you want to make more than x to move y amount of weight. Shit fuel that causes acid rain weights and takes up the same volume as the same as the stuff that doesn’t cause acid rain.
Been lurking Lemmy for a while, I finally decided to post something. This is a game I’ve been working on with my wife. We’re working towards game play like Rampage X Risk of Rain 2. Game will be coming out in 2025....
CNN reporting on some interesting survey results from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. Seven hundred and fifty adults were interviewed face to face in the West Bank, and 481 were interviewed in Gaza, also in person. The Gaza data collection was done during the recent truce, when it was safer for...
So that’s a definitive “no” on sacrificing yourself, huh?
It’s easy to expect others to sacrifice themselves “peacefully” if you know the blood won’t be soiling your porch isn’t it, liberal?
Do tell… why do you think MLK (who was no less hated by the powers that be than Malcolm X) was packaged and sold to you after his death as some paragon of “nonviolence?” Does it perhaps have something to do with the fact that liberals love the idea of “nonviolence” because it poses no threat to the status quo?
Do tell… how could the colonialist slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis and their European helpers in the Soviet Union have ended “nonviolently?”
How could the indiscriminate mass-murder that the US rained down on SE Asia have ended “nonviolently?”
We both know the answer to that - the difference between us is that you appease the mass-murderers with your “nonviolence” because you are perfectly fine with sacrificing people to the colonialist death machine as long as it doesn’t affect you.
And stats really should be a mainline math class in high school. It comes up in so many places, and is far too often simplified away into a binary black & white choice.
Any time something happens that was predicted to be less than 50% likely, people lose their shit. For instance, when it unexpectedly rains or the wrong person wins an election.
But it’s not even being able to run the numbers or understanding statistical significance. It’s much more basic, just understanding that probabilities and uncertainty exist and are everywhere. My favorite example is when going to the doctor. They explain that whatever you have is probably X or Y, with a small chance of Z, but Y has been going around a lot and is easy to treat, so let’s try medication A for it. Then when that gets reported to friends and family afterwards, it’s “she said I have Y and I need A to fix it.”
A lot can happen in a year when you’re the worlds largest search engine. Here’s my Google Wrapped 2023 video showing you everything toxic they did in the last 12 months.
The video’s summary is an actual summary, so clearly they took this into account.
Chapters -
📺 0:00 - Intro - Toxic Google Wrapped 2023
📺 0:06 - Jan - Google fired 12,000 staff including their head of health and wellbeing
📺 0:56 - Feb - Google said employees must come back to the office and share desks. Bard (Chat GPT competitor) launches.
📺 2:48 - March - Google gave data to the police to help prosecute abortion seekers after Roe vs Wade was overturned. And they fired multiple staff after giving birth.
📺 5:18 - April - Google announces cost-cutting measures including cutting back on staplers. Google, Meta and X propose an alliance to combat misinformation.
📺 7:54 - May - South Korea fined Google for anti-competitive practices and Google continued to sell climate disinformation ads (after promising to stop).
📺 9:35 - June - Google replaces it’s fired workers with “low-paid foreign workers” and donated to an anti-abortion Republican Committee
📺 10:29 - July - Google uses our data to train Bard and increases the cost of YouTube Premium.
📺 10:52 - Aug - Google offers staff an on-campus hotel room for $99 a night. And YouTube ads may have led to the online tracking of children.
📺 11:31 - Sept - Google Pixel Watches have no parts or repair program and Google Maps led a dad to his death over a collapsed bridge.
The bridge one is a little unfair. The directions were bad and the route hadn’t been updated for 9 years since the bridge collapsed, and that’s just Google’s shitty map algorithm not respecting corrections unless a bunch of people make them, but that man’s death was on local authorities for leaving a collapsed bridge completely accessable from the road without any barriers and warnings for 9 straight years. It was raining, it was dark, there was poor visibility, but Maps was never meant to be a substitute for your eyes.
📺 12:17 - Oct - Google’s AI consumes as much electricity as Ireland and Alphabet hired an underqualified man (who didn’t even apply for the job) over a woman.
📺 13:15 - Nov - Google backs out of building affordable housing in the Bay Area and spent $26 billion to be your default search engine.
📺 13:59 - Dec - Google caught putting ads on adult websites 🌽 and McDonalds is using Google AI to test if your fries are fresh.
📺 15:07 - Outro - thanks for watching!
I’d argue there’s not enough here, frankly. This is mostly corporate stuff, but there’s a lot of other toxic shit they’ve been doing on the technical end.
Trying to slip web integrity checking into Chrome, for one. Only to get pushed back and instead opt to shove it into Android for now.
Their all-out war on ad blockers as it deliberately degrades the experience of YouTube for everyone except Premium subscribers. (Remembering that increasing the ads degrades the experience for everyone even before you start arguing about how they target ad-blockers)
Manifest V3
It’s not getting a lot of attention but Play Integrity on Android has been getting vicious in the last few months as Google continues the push to punish users for wanting to use their hardware on their own terms.
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
I’ve just started another playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda! Took ages to get the mod manager and EA’s app thing and Linux/Wine/??? all cooperating (or at least not fighting me effectively enough that I can’t play the game :P ) but off I’ve gone!
Hmmmm, what else lately. Battlefield V, apparently. Bit of PlanetSide 2. Started SIC-1 (the single instruction set computer programming game) but haven’t really been in a mood for it. Tried Stellaris again to see if Swayland changed the microstutters. It did not. Game looks horrifically complex now too, so meh. Tried again to find a new build that interested me in Path of Exile but no :-\ Uhhhhmmmm, touched Endless Space 2 a little, played some Helium Rain (which is free now! Very neat little space freelancer-to-empire kinda thing, like an itty bitty baby version of an X game). Almost went back to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous which I love but an out-of-game sad and increasing memory-distance from my playthrough are making it harder to go back.
Oh, also logging into STO for the winter event and complaining about the Winter Wonderland. You’d think that being an ice princess I’d love the winter event but it’s awful. You know a winter event is bad when I strongly prefer the summer event! Totally backward, makes no sense! Rar rar rar, et cetera!
Anyway, this has been my latelish-gamesy ramble. I hope somecritter has enjoyed or at least I won’t get downvoted into Oblivion. Though at least if I do I can maybe meet some cool Daedra :3 (This post is being written directly after “waking up” (assuming I have, in fact, done so) and as such the thoughts represented within may or may not be my own, rational, intelligible, or representative of any official royal policy or belief)
My wife and I are increasingly convinced that we, humanity, peaked in the 90s. We had conquered acid rain. We were removing CFCs. The internet was coming in, so were mobile phones (but only to call and text, so you could stay in touch but escaped the trap of a million cameras around us), the music was so incredibly broad (Brit pop, grunge, spice girls, dance … it was like the world’s biggest buffet), the high street was still doing fine, TV had great shows (Seinfeld, X-files etc) and everyone just seemed a damn sight happier than today since misery-communities hadn’t formed on the internet to celebrate and refine their misery.
It was a simpler time. And all powered by a healthy western economy and the declaration of a (naive) victory in the Cold War.
An investigation has been launched after nine people died when torrential rain caused a highway tunnel wall to collapse in the capital Santo Domingo.
The Emergency Operations Center (COE) said rain caused flooded homes, power cuts and damaged bridges and roads.
Dominican President Luis Abinader called it the “largest rainfall event ever” in the country’s history, following torrential storms over the past 48 hours.
The Caribbean nation has been battered by torrential rainfall with footage on social media showing torrents of water flowing through streets and washing away vehicles.
President Abinader said classes have been suspended until Wednesday “in order to evaluate the schools that may have been affected” and “guarantee the safety of our young people”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “deeply shocked by the loss of life due to the heavy rains” and offered “unconditional support to all those affected by this emergency”.
The original article contains 276 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
SpaceX accused of dumping mercury into Texas waters for years (www.popsci.com)
SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been contaminating local bodies of water with mercury for years. The news arrives in an exclusive https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-waters-in-texas-tceq-epa-found.html on August 12, which cites...
deleted_by_author
How do I know when it's time to call the "honey wagon"?
This might fit better in the DIY group but here goes....
What's you favorite song lyric of all time?
Here’s some of mine....
Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans (www.nytimes.com)
Archived version...
Detroit: Become Human
This game was for some time in my watch list, but I have never pulled the plug, and oh boy, was I in for a treat....
Protesters march again in Georgia over foreign influence bill, holding Georgian and EU flags, chanting “no to the Russian law” (www.bbc.com)
Tens of thousands of Georgians have taken to the streets of the capital Tbilisi on Saturday evening to protest a controversial “foreign influence” bill backed by the government....
Climate damages by 2050 will be 6 times the cost of limiting warming to 2° (arstechnica.com)
In search of software for managing my life (like a helpdesk but in a lite format)
Hello fellow selfhosters, I tried to find a piece of software that could achieve my goal but maybe I am not searching in the correct areas. So I thought of asking here for suggestions or directions I could take....
Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
Magnitude 4.8 Earthquake Strikes New York Metro Area and East Coast (www.nbcnews.com)
Raw data from the USGS: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/…/executive
deleted_by_author
Household management - what are you using if anything?
Hello there!...
Amazon hides cheaper items with faster delivery, lawsuit alleges (arstechnica.com)
And how's there a car in a mall? Life's important questions (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Making a game about monsters (youtu.be)
Been lurking Lemmy for a while, I finally decided to post something. This is a game I’ve been working on with my wife. We’re working towards game play like Rampage X Risk of Rain 2. Game will be coming out in 2025....
Palestinians support Hamas decision to go to war with Israel, survey suggests, with no political solution on horizon (www.cnn.com)
CNN reporting on some interesting survey results from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. Seven hundred and fifty adults were interviewed face to face in the West Bank, and 481 were interviewed in Gaza, also in person. The Gaza data collection was done during the recent truce, when it was safer for...
Trig (lemmy.world)
Google Wrapped 2023 | Everything Toxic Google Did in the last 12 months. (tilvids.com)
A lot can happen in a year when you’re the worlds largest search engine. Here’s my Google Wrapped 2023 video showing you everything toxic they did in the last 12 months.
The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion (lemmy.world)
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
What do you miss the most from the 90s?
For me it’s holding a VHS in the store and looking at the cover.
What are some common everyday examples of this phenomenon? (see body)
Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over....
Dominican Republic: At least 21 dead after storm brings torrential rain (www.bbc.co.uk)
Archived version: archive.ph/93k2f...