Well, there are firearms out there that use cast parts. Ruger, especially tends to use a lot of castings.

But casting is often a finicky process and can sometimes leave unexpected and invisible voids and weak spots in the metal. It’s not something you’d want to use on the pressure-bearing parts of a firearm unless A) the firearm was designed with that in mind and those parts are overbuilt to compensate for potential weaknesses, and B) you have a lot of experience with casting and you’re well able to examine the parts and determine if they have hidden weaknesses (such as with x-ray analysis to detect defects). And even then, you’d better proof test it in a very safe place, hiding behind a strong barrier.

Casting also usually leaves somewhat of a rough finish, so it usually needs finish machining done where mechanical parts need to interact with close tolerances. So casting is more of a starting point than a one-and-done manufacturing method. Casting can save you some effort when compared to starting with a solid block of metal.

Even some parts that are normally aluminum are fine to 3D print. Definitely want to think twice and maybe consult with an engineer before replacing any steel parts with 3D printing, though.

We’re already in the middle of one.

Yeah … people say ‘would create a constitutional crisis’ like we don’t already have an executive branch that routinely ignores the checks and balances put upon it by the other two branches.

and make a giant dildo soup

Sluuuuurp

Don’t mind me. I’m just tasting to see if the soup is ready yet.

Just in case somebody’s trying to compress the unredacted Epstein files. Gotcha.

Why wouldn’t they? You don’t even have to be logged in to view them.

You should never assume anything you post publicly online is at all private or hidden from any search engine/AI.

Compression doesn’t require a server; it can run entirely in your browser.

… why should it even require a browser?

Vibrator libraries!

So … what happens when they don’t pay it?

Yeah… “It’s illegal to leave the country” is a big red flag, no matter what system the country is governed by or how good it supposedly is.

I’m firmly of the opinion though that anyone that spells the word ‘tire’ with a Y is doing English wrong.

So … what do you think the “Engl” in “English” comes from?

So … should we treat Nazis with respect and dignity?

Not true. A lot of them were Latino.

I got run over by an idiot in an SUV while riding my motorcycle.

Are we even sure that CEO was ever a real person? I think the whole thing is a made up story and that guy never even existed at all!

A big, juicy lawsuit is the reason I own my house outright and don’t have rent/mortgage payments. Which in turn means I can get by on the very little money I make on my hobbies.

So … yeah. Lawsuit for the win?

Transmission doesn’t really require any new technology that’s not already in use. Just need to build more of what we already use every day. More high tension power lines, over longer distances, more interconnects between grids, more capacity in those interconnects.

If you really want to go full power on this (and especially if you want your solar power to be continuous generation 24/7) you’ll need to develop a bit of new tech. Well, not so much new tech as just scaling existing tech to be massive. A truly gargantuan transmission line across the Bering Strait could link the two hemispheres into a single worldwide grid. (Though Australia and other more isolated islands might still have to have separate grids and couldn’t take advantage of this as ‘easily’.) If you build that, then you can have a global power grid that the sun is shining on 24 hours a day, so even if solar power was your only power source and even if you had no grid storage capacity, the power grid could still operate all day every day, with that big hemisphere interconnect transmitting power from the day side to the night side, switching direction of flow twice a day.

i read articles about improved battery technology monthly

For grid-level energy storage, we don’t really need any new battery technology. Yes, it might be nice to have cheaper, greener, higher-capacity, more durable batteries, but we don’t need that to make grid-scale storage work. Even our lunky old lead-acid batteries that have been around for over 100 years would do just fine. We just need to build MORE of them. Like, a lot more. (Plus chargers and inverters to change the AC grid power to storable DC and back again.)

But lead-acid batteries have limited life cycles!

They do. But you don’t throw them away when they reach the end of their life cycle – you recycle them. Even completely worn-out and absolutely useless lead-acid batteries can be recycled, recovering 99% of the materials in them. And you can use those materials to build fresh new batteries, likely on a massive scale, running continuously, always recycling the oldest batteries on the grid and shipping out fresh newly made batteries to replace them. Aside from the energy the recycling (and transportation) processes use, it’s pretty much a closed loop system. Recycling and replacing the batteries just becomes a regular maintenance task.

I need to start using this kind of language more in my everyday life.

Boss: “How sure are you that these numbers are correct?”

Me: “Up to 100%.”