@minimalparts And it's wreaking socio-economic havoc throughout the #globalSouth and among the most vulnerable in the #globalNorth. I'm not an engineer or even a linguist. I'm just a sociology-trained autistic citizen, surviving like she can on social aid. But I will worry about AI, because this things are being implemanted a bit everywhere as a way to increase #mass-surveillance manifolds through automated monitoring according to completely prejudiced criteria, leading to horror situation.

@dedicto @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

I didn't know about #COINTELPRO until I was an adult. I did know the gummint was being super nasty to natives.

This is, indirectly, how I learned that the #church didn't really believe in #Jesus. I spent much of my childhood in #SouthDakota. You probably are aware of the scaremongering about #immigrants. How they break into houses and crime on the people who live there... The same kind of scaremongering was going on about "Indians." The particular town I lived in was not near any of the reservations, but people were talking scared.

I was attending the local #Catholic gradeschool, where most of my teachers were #nuns. The school principal was also a nun. My mother would sometimes take a few nuns out to the local pizzeria, and on one of these occasions, the topic of "Indians" came up, and the principal asked me, "<name>, what would you do if Indians came to your house while your mom was at work?" I answered that I would ask them if they were hungry, and cook them macaroni and cheese (the only thing I knew how to cook, other than heating up a can of soup).

And I *knew* that my answer was somehow wrong by the way the adults were acting. But I didn't know *why* and I absolutely did *not* want to ask in front of my two little sisters.

I did figure it out. If they were there to hurt me, or kidnap me, mac and cheese wouldn't stop them. And I thought the adults were being stupid about that. I mean, when *I* wanted to hurt someone, it was because of something they did. And I knew that I hadn't done anything to any Indian, ever.

I didn't even laugh when Sister T. bopped the Indian boy who read in class with the clown hammer. Normally, she'd grab the library book he was reading, slam it shut, and bop him on the head with the book, and then put it back on his desk. That day, she went into the cloak room and brought out the beepy clown hammer. She bopped him, and his desk. The other kids laughed. I wanted to cry. She made a point of bopping *my* desk, to show how it beeped and didn't actually hurt.

I was single-digit years old. But Catholic school means #Mass every school day, and *lots* of reading from the #Bible. First a reading from the Old Testament, then a bit of Psalm, then a non-gospel New Testament, and then the gospel.

If they broke into Jesus' house, he would bless them. Kids can't bless anybody unless they sneeze. And I had just learned how to make macaroni and cheese.

@Brad_Rosenheim

Except ... when this claim (not about the satellites re-entering, just the amount of damage they cause to the atmosphere) started circulating some months back, I read an article (somewhere...) that analyzed the amount and type of matter it would distribute, and it pales in comparison to the amount the earth receives in "space dust" and micrometeroids every day.

Best figure I know of for the mass of "normal" space matter hitting our planet is 5,200 tonnes / year:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-shows-how-much-space-dust-hits-earth-every-year/

The current Starlink satellites are "gen2 mini", and are 740 kg. So you would need to de-orbit more than 7,000 of them every year - not 4 per day - to even match the natural space dust falling on earth. Except it's even worse (for the argument) than that, because 740kg is their launch mass, including all their maneuvering fuel/gasses, which by definition are gone before the satellites are deorbited. I don't have an exact figure for how much mass the fuel accounts for, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was more than 25% of the mass of the spacecraft at launch.

The residue left in the atmosphere doesn't seem to be a very big deal.

#science #mass #satellite #deorbit #RunTheNumbers #calculation

edit: typo