Mike Conte

Beaten paths are for beaten men. @mikeconte.bsky.social

[Mat Oxley @matoxley]

A HUGE thumbs up for Pramac having one brolly boy & one brolly girl on the grid. Any Neanderthals who come at me - why shouldn't women have something to gawp at as well? They're half the world's population! 👏😎

[Jessica Valenti @JessicaValenti]

Mike Pence's NYT op-ed is a perfect example of why I publish Abortion, Every Day: His column uses pretty much every language trick I've warned about for the last two years.

He also repeats debunked lies about abortion that I sort of can't believe made it past a fact-checker https://t.co/Cqz1XWmGyu

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@PeteSamuels5 @matoxley Love it. Teams might rather that than Saturday sprints. But it’s a pretty different bike…

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@BrentToderian Can confirm.

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@PEWilliams_ Sure but the NYC version will cost 10x as much and break down more.

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@matoxley Must be all the money they are saving not paying Marquez.

[Matthew Miles @CW1Miles]

“With every person ESPN spoke to for this story, the question of where young American riders could develop on a path toward MotoGP yielded the same answer: Spain.” —@LindbergWords @espn

https://t.co/QHSCdi8joa

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@90skid2001 *taxed

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@BryanDawsonUSA Costco rocks.

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@dieworkwear And a fantastic thread as always!

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@dieworkwear Relatively speaking, material costs are lower today, and labor costs are higher. This is also why we have stainless steel skyscrapers that bolt together but no carved gargoyles.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

Have you ever wondered why people seemingly dressed better in the past? There are many reasons, such as the wide availability of skilled tailors. But an overlooked one has to do with how fabrics have changed over time. 🧵

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

2. The Duesenberg Coupé Simone “Midnight Ghost” (1939)

[Mike Conte @MikeConte]

@cybrtrkguy Lots of vehicles do this. It’s called a CAN bus and Mercedes had it in…1991.

[Red-Green Alliance @RedGreenBC]

My least scientific, most Malcolm Gladwell style midwit take about why we live in hell is that 90% of our species’ best and brightest who even 40 years ago would’ve been designing rocketships or fertilizers or home appliances 9 to 5 are now working on Algorithmic Hypergouging

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

This is the short speech Gene Kranz NASA Flight Director delivered to the engineers and technicians of Mission Control that day came to be known as “the Kranz dictum”:

“Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.
We were too gung-ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’
I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘tough’ and ‘competent’. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.
When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “tough and competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control”

The mindset Kranz delineated in this speech—tough and competent—came to dominate the thinking of NASA mission controllers during ensuing Apollo missions.

It continues to do so to this day. The dual virtues of integrity and proficiency have broad applications for spaceflight, aviation in general, and just about every different type of profession there is.

Gene Kranz has eked out a place among the great leaders of the world for his singular accountability and the hard line he took against incompetence and irresponsibility.

[Simon Patterson @denkmit]

Man this tyre pressure bullshit leaves such a bad taste. Diggia was, based on what I’ve seen on social media, possibly the most popular rider in MotoGP today. And we end the race with his win taken away an hour after the end of the race.

[Dr. Neighborhood Publicist @nhoodpublicist]

I. AM. SCREAMING 😭😭😭😭

Everybody communities sick of men with these mics.

[j @widelybeloved]

I think about this thing amy sedaris said about etiquette all the time it changed me

[David Simon @AoDespair]

Tyranny of the moronity. This is an astonishing statistic.