I worked at a pizza place that shut down, and it never even occurred to anyone. For one thing the owner was obviously stressed out worrying about a bunch of other things, both in the restaurant and in her personal life, and you’d be surprised how much of the food you get at restaurants is really just purchased from a company like Cisco and warmed up for you. We did make the actual pizza from scratch though, and that place had the best crust of any pizza place I’ve ever been too. The problem there was that the recipe was very simple. Just flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That’s it. The trick is the exact ratio, and a proper pizza oven. The oven a recipe can’t help with, and for reasons I don’t understand scaling down recipes, especially in baking, does not produce the same result. A recipe that starts with a 50 pound bag of flour is useless to you, and if you just try to divide all the weights by 100 the end result just isn’t good. All you really know is that you can make good pizza dough with flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That is not exactly shocking news.
The issue with scaling in baking recipes is often that home bakers are measuring by volume and not mass. Any commercial baker is going to go by mass because with ingredients like flour the amount that’s in 1 cup can vary wildly based on how firmly packed into the cup it is. There are also issues with how long you need to rest 10 pounds of dough vs 1 to ensure it properly hydrolyzes and the fact that pizza dough in pro pizza shops often undergoes a sort of accidental ferment just by nature of the fact that it’s made in large batches then stored.
Oh balls if we’re gonna get into the math for how many billions of yeast cells we’re pitching and time/population curves and all that mess we’re gonna need to take this over to the homebrewing community and talk to someone smarter than me. I just let my rises go until the volume of the loaf has doubled.
Sopuli.xyz has a pretty dope homebrewing community. Not sure if they’re federated here or not, I keep a separate account there from when I didn’t understand how all this worked and thought each instance was basically its own thing
You can and actually do every measurement of a recipe expressed in metric by mass, especially when it comes to bread and pastry and even more for fine pastry.
Even for liquids it is extremely easy to convert volume into mass because 1ml = 1g (for water), which facilitates converting any volume of any liquid into mass.
Even eggs, butter or even olive oil can be easily measured by weight.
So, even if you were to get a recipe expressed in tons for each ingredient, it would be possible to convert it to a homemade recipe by just converting to grams and weigh the required ingredients.
The problem with measuring by volume isn’t that math is hard. The problem is that you can get surprisingly inconsistent amounts of things. Tiny differences in how you measure can make a huge difference in how much air you have mixed into your dry ingredients. Measuring ingredients by weight doesn’t have that problem.
You made me go and review why I had intervened in the thread.
Yes, you are correct. Volume is an extremely imprecise measure for dry ingredients and it was because of that I commented as I did, as the discussion was as commercial baking/cooking revolved around large batches, measured by weight, while family cooking/baking revolves around measurements by volume.
But you get hard pressed to have that problem in recipes expressed in metric, even if we went and tried our best to make matters as complicated as possible and measured liquids by mass.
That’s a fair point, but I think you’re overestimating how difficult it is to convert units in less rational measurement systems. People who’ve used metric their whole lives seem to have it stuck in their heads that it’s some kind of herculean task to look up a couple numbers and plug them into a calculator and then write that number down for your recipe. If it was as hard as you seem to think it is even America would have changed over by now. Metric is better, but it’s not that much better.
Biased as I am, if for nothing else, metric uses a decimal base, which facilitates converting between scale units by shifting the point. The representation by fractions used in the imperial system is not that straighforward.
But I wasn’t even considering that in my comment. The point was what you ilustrated very well in you comment: measuring dry ingredients by volume can and will cause deviation in the end result.
I can’t fathom what “one cup, hard packed” means. What if I’m stronger than the original author of the recipe and pack it harder or my dry is coarser or has a different moisture content?
But I can easily understand what half a pound, half and one quarter, etc, precisely requests, although I prefer to have it expressed in metric units as 1lb = 453g, so 1 and 1/2lb is 679,5g, out of personal preference.
That is a problem, and also as someone else pointed out the yeast is another, but also in my experience water is as well. I don’t know if it just dries out differently because of the change the in mass to surface area ratio or what, but for whatever reason you have to change the ratio of flour to water when you change the scale of a recipe. It can even make a difference just to be at a different altitude. Baking is a weirdly complex mix of chemistry and even sometimes biology. The more I learn about it, the more surprised I am that it ever even works.
In short, they can hold a lot more heat than the stones, mimicking the effect of professional pizza ovens.
So the idea is to cook a pizza in the shortest possible time in order to thoroughly cook the dough and outer layers, whilst leaving the ingredients with a delightful freshness. With a conventional oven the process takes much longer, tending to cook everything evenly, producing a drier pizza in which you don’t get that ‘brick oven effect.’
I’ve tried the stones myself, heating them on max heat for a whole hour beforehand. They can help a bit, but it’s still not the same. All that’s my take on the situation, anyway.
I checked the FV just now and I don’t see a pizza community here that goes in to this stuff. Unfortunately for now, you’ll have to visit the evil empire for more precise info.
Yes and no. You can get amazing pizza just as good as a proper pizza oven with a pizza steel or a pizza stone if you know what you’re doing and have a good oven, but again there are subtle differences that make it so you can’t just replace one for a large pizza oven with no other adjustments and still get the exact same results.
agree on scale, I’ve never managed to make a small batch of pizza dough taste right, but used to make restaurant batches 20 odd years ago no worries. I have no idea why it works that way
Not much different. Foldable phones will be widespread, American cars will be bigger, shaving machines will have more blades, natural disasters will be more common. We will go through one or two more cycles of drought/forest fires and heavy rains/floodings. We will see one or two mass migrations from India, Pakistan and Africa resulting in first climate refuge camps on the borders of EU.
Yes. Every single day, almost every person I see driving is looking at their cell phones or holding them at their mouth talking. I mean those odds should be astronomical, but it’s more common than not. Imagine adding another dimension of travel to that…
I wish they’d just work out how many blades is the optimum number of blades, and then put that number of blades on. Why are we doing this iterative design approach.
It’s one. I’d been annoyed with razor burn, nicks & cuts, spots, etc. I switched to a simple double sided safety razor and I’m really enjoying it. As far as I’m concerned all this 8 blade turbo fusion slice and dice is all marketing.
The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
Here’s what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There’s a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
Now, let’s assume these three are the ones that made it.
They are not allowed to collude on price. That’s illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can’t have that so they passed a law.
What’s allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What’s crazy is the other companies can see this so it’s kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
Because of this, you’ll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That’s fine, but most people aren’t using that.
You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That’s even worse since they call use “price confusion” to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities there’s often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
I’ve noticed this starting to break, i.e. more actually starting to compete with each other and enter each other’s “turf”. Part of that I think is municipal fiber.
I’m lucky. For some reason after raising my rates from the introductory period they haven’t gone up in 4 years or so and they increased my service from 100mbps to 300mbps.
20 years ago I payed €65 for 4Mbps. Now I m paying €25 for 200Mbps + a landline with unlimited local calls + an android box (that I use for PLEX and retro gaming) that provides 50+ channels through an app.That was the last renewal.
I also switched my cell provider. I used to pay €42 for unlimited calls, SMS and Data. Now I pay €25 for the whole package.
I’ve somehow been stealing internet from my ISP for like 2 years.
So I moved in to my new apartment. Go down to the local ISP monopoly’s physical store and pick up a modem so I can just plug it in and not wait for a tech or anything. They tell me since it’s been over 5 years since my address was connected they have to send a tech out anyway. Fine. But they let me pay my first month’s service and give me the modem.
Well I get home and plug it in. It works perfectly. Call the ISP and tell them to cancel the tech appointment, they say no problem. An hour later my account to login to the ISP’s website is made inactive. In the next few days I get a full refund for what I paid.
So I figure I’ll call them once my internet stops working and resubscribe. But it has never stopped working. I keep getting mailings from them with deals to sign up for internet. They even knocked on my door once to try to sell me it.
This is a dangerous game you’re playing (despite the Robinhood like dynamic – trust me I hate ISPs too, though I will say AT&T fiber has been quite reasonable). You can be sued for all the lost payments plus interest, and likely will be when/if they find out.
It’s the same thing as getting an unexpected raise on your paystub, if it’s in error and a reasonable person would believe it’s in error, they’re within their legal right to take the money back.
You’re not wrong. Though I’ll be leaving here soon enough, and I think the risk:reward ratio is good enough to continue until then. And if they’ve let me go this long I doubt they’ll somehow retroactively figure it out after I’m gone.
Sure, but I live in ‘socialist’ Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in ‘free market’ USA must have.
Sure, and that’s great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said “you could switch.” For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn’t quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a “dozen or so.”
While your proposal might be good for you and others in “socialist” Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don’t have that option and it probably doesn’t help resolve the parent commenter’s complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It’s a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly
Company A owns the physical fiber, they also own the point-of-presence where all the fibers end up (basically a room with lots of rack space). Company A does not sell Internet service.
Company X, Y and Z provide internet service to consumers. They rent the physical fiber from company A, they also rent rack space in the PoPs where their customers fibers terminate. Cost for electricity, air conditioning, in the PoP is shared by all companies that use that PoP, by ratio of number of customers. (e.g. if company X has 100 customers connected to one PoP and Y and Z each have 50, company X pays 50% of the utilities bill and Y and Z each 25%).
In case of company X/Y/Z, all the infrastructure is theirs with the exception of the physical fiber and the PoP room, that includes the fiber ‘modem’ (mediaconverter) or router on each side of the connection, switches, any backbone connectivity from the PoP onwards, all services, etc.
Some of these ISPs also resell their services to smaller ISPs, so company Q could simply be reselling a package from company X. Often they resell only a part of the service, e.g. they resell Internet from company X but add their own TV package.
They can of course also change this later on. My current ISP started by reselling services from one of the bigger ISPs, this basically gave them national coverage with little risk. Once they got established and had a decent number of customers they started rolling out their own network, city-by-city. They would install their own equipment into the PoPs in a city, change everyone over to their equipment (and distributed new media converters and routers) and they were no longer dependent on the big ISP. When they did this they cut the price of my internet connection by half while at the same time upgrading the speed from 200/200 to 1000/1000. Within a year or so they moved most customers to their own infrastructure.
And how do you get in such a situation? Very simple: company A wanted to install fiber and asked for a permit from the government to start digging up the streets and sidewalks. The government basically said: you can get a permit. but we don’t want a all this nuisance with digging up the streets every time someone wants to offer internet service, so you as a requirement for the permit you have to offer an open network with identical pricing to everyone who wants to use it.
You don’t login as service users, they’re just a means of taking advantage of the user separation features. They have the login shell set to /bin/false typically.
From a quick search I’ve just done, the major difference is that /bin/false can’t return any text, the only thing it can do as specified via POSIX standards is return false.
So if you set someone’s shell to /bin/nologin there can be some text that says “You’re not allowed shell access”, similar to what happens if you try to SSH into say GitHub.
Of course, for a service account that won’t be operated by a person, that doesn’t matter - so whichever one you use is just whichever the operator thought of first, most likely.
This. I love GoG for what they do and their whole ethos, but I have damn near my entire collection already on Steam and like to condense as much as I can as hard as that may be. Steam is still by and far the best launcher, but every year GoG Galaxy gets a little bit closer to being an actual contender; literally all the rest are absolutely terrible dumpster fires.
Why is that by the way? On my PC I have Amazon, Battle.net, EA, Epic, GoG Galaxy 2.0, Itchio, Rockstar, and Uplay clients (along with some individual game launchers) and not a single one comes close to being as feature rich, streamlined, and just clearly built for the customer/player as Steam is. I know Valve has a lot more experience under their belt but it feels like the others aren’t even trying. Most of them are just in your face about their store fronts and barely function as a library after the fact.
Game is good, came out at the right time, had a lot of hype and lived up to the hype
Longer details:
The game is just really well made. It’s extremely fun, very polished (except for a few weird bugs), and complete
It has a massive IP tied to it. This game had impossible levels of hype and it met those expectations somehow
The recent D&D movie was a large success, and D&D in general has been the most popular it has ever been lately
Divinity OS 2 Definitive Edition was very well received, people trust Larian to deliver a good product
People are sharing this game with their friends. They had a strong marketing push as well as really strong word of mouth
Final Fantasy 16 left a lot of us wanting a more traditional RPG after FF16 was anything but traditional
We currently live in an era of games like Diablo 4 which ask for a $70 price tag, and then also have a paid battle pass and paid cosmetics. This game came out at $60 content complete with no additional microtransactions. Ultimately that makes this game much easier to reccomend to people.
All this talk of foreign investors. But the reality is they represent a small proportion of single family homes[1]. It’s easy to blame foreigners, but the real problem is domestic. It’s corporations. Corporations are being all the housing[2]. And they don’t mind sitting on their invest, even vacant, for years. So yeah, y’all keep the bigotery going and blame foreing investors, you’re playing right into capitalism’s hand.
Foreign owners only account for a small share of the Canadian real estate market. According to Statistics Canada, a government website, non-residents owned 2.2 percent of residential properties in Ontario and 3.1 percent in British Columbia in 2020. The percentages were 2.7 and 4.2 in the Toronto and Vancouver metropolitan areas, respectively.
According to data reported by the PEW Trust and originally gathered by CoreLogic, as of 2022, investment companies take up about **a quarter [25%]**of the single-family home market.
Whether the investors are foreign or domestic, doesn’t matter, as long as governments allow living space to be gambled with, people like OP (I assume OP is working class) are very unlikely to ever own their house/apartment.
Another take is that it’s the developers who is to blame for the high prices. What would happen if they stopped buying land? Short term? Disaster, no new houses, prices sky rocket. Long term? With no new supply investors and foreign buyers will just leave the market since it’s not making money. As they leave, more supply will be available for the normal people.
I feel like this article didn’t do a great job of answering the question. They didn’t really determine whether big corporations are buying homes, they determined that investors are buying homes. The actual text:
According to data reported by the PEW Trust and originally gathered by CoreLogic, as of 2022, investment companies take up about a quarter of the single-family home market. Specifically,investor purchases accounted for 22% of all American homes in 2022.
Those two statements are not equivalent. “Investor” could be a single individual buying a home with the intent of offering it as a vacation rental when not in use. It could be somebody who bought a duplex and rents the other unit out until their parents retire. It could be a house flipper who does 1 house at a time – each time registering an “investor purchase”.
Even “corporation” doesn’t really mean anything; a “corporation” could be an LLC with one employee, the owner.
And even when big corporations buy single-family homes, it’s not clear to me that this has a lasting economic impact. It sounds like a lot of these investment companies are renting the the homes or flipping them. Ultimately, demand is still demand. Somebody has to be there to buy or rent the home for these investments to make sense, so the any price increase resulting from this investment activity is not an external, artificial pressure. It’s a real representation of economic value, it is a price that the next occupants are willing to pay.
I have a very specific viewpoint on this issue, as I live in a vacation destination. Various investors are buying up every property that comes up for sale in my community (large corporations, small companies, wealthy individuals looking for vacation homes, etc.)
Every single property that gets bought, gets renovated or otherwise improved to the point that there’s no chance in hell anyone living and working in the community full-time can afford to buy, unless they bought their first property before 2016. Since then, home ownership among my colleagues has become a pipe dream (and without giving away too many personal details, let me just say my colleagues and I are well-educated professionals making way above the median income for jobs in the area).
As I type this out, I’m listening to a million-dollar house being built in the lot behind me (which will almost certainly sit vacant >80% of the time), a shit rental being turned over next door (which charges $3k/mo for a 3/1.5), and two short-term vacation rentals partying across the street (which usually charge at least $300-$400/night).
Regardless of who it is, investors buying up housing is a huge problem for people that are trying to own their own home, especially first-time buyers.
Sellers don’t determine price. Buyers do. “Investors” (big, small, whatever) are selling homes at those prices (or renting, or VRBOing) because there are customers ready to buy the next available unit. If customers aren’t willing to buy at that price, then the seller will lower the price. Or never build the big house in the first place. Or never renovate. Who would spend money on an investment when nobody will buy it?
They can only sell for those prices because buyers are ready to buy.
Economists have a concept of “economic value”. Regardless of price, “economic value” it what the next buyer is willing to pay for an item RIGHT NOW. People have a lot of weird ideas about what the “value” of something is, and they’ll include all sorts of non-monetary factors because they think value is a feeling or concept of utility that particularly applies to them. They value “walkability” or “views” or “quaint antique design”, or whatever.
But inasmuch as “value” has any objective meaning, the best one economists have managed to come up with is economic value – the price that a unit of something will sell for at this very moment. And I humbly suggest that the economic value of housing in your area something is determined entirely by the buyer: the person or entity that is willing to buy the next available unit of housing.
investors buying up housing is a huge problem for people that are trying to own their own home, especially first-time buyers
If those buyers can’t outbid all the other buyers, then they weren’t going to get a home anyway. This has nothing to do with the seller.
You and the other guy are talking about two different things. You're trying to explain supply and demand in a very factual way, the other guy is explaining to you how this is hurting actual people who need somewhere to live.
They haven't missed the point at all but are talking about the human element here.
So quit your job and pay hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars to move somewhere different where you no longer have a source of income and don’t know anyone?
I’m not saying I like it, that’s just how it is. As a consumer of housing, like anything else, when you can’t afford what you want you have to get something less.
No, this is not how it is. In order to rent an apartment you have to show proof of income, and people who can’t afford a studio apartment where they live also cannot afford to move. What you are suggesting is literally not possible. You might as well tell someone to grow wings and make a nest in the clouds.
You can’t afford steak, you eat chicken, you can’t afford that, you eat beans. You can’t afford that, you’re in trouble.
I didn’t create the system, man. I get it, it’s hell to be poor. But corporations buying and flipping homes doesn’t have much to do with the plight of people who can’t afford studio apartments. If somebody else is ready to pay a higher rent than you are for the same apartment, they’re gonna get it. Doesn’t matter whether the landlord is a friendly grandma or a faceless megacorp, nobody is gonna willingly sell something for less.
“Investors” (big, small, whatever) are selling homes at those prices (or renting, or VRBOing) because there are customers ready to buy the next available unit.
The "investors" are the buyers/customers, and they aren't reselling these houses--they're renting them out. It's mostly corporations increasingly doing over the last 15 years or so (I think it started around the 2008 financial crisis). They have the capital to do it and so regular people are being priced out more and more as this practice keeps driving up prices.
It didn't used to be this way. Even in my "cheap" area, when I bought my house back in 2005 all but one house on my block were owner-occupied. Now, more than half the houses are rentals because whenever one came up for sale it was bought by a rental company. This is a serious crisis that needs to be addressed.
The “investors” are the buyers/customers, and they aren’t reselling these houses–they’re renting them out.
Renting them out is still selling them, just another kind of selling. The company can only charge rent if there is a renter willing to pay. Again, the buyer determines price – if rent is too high, there will be no renters.
Renting them out is not selling, it's an ongoing income source for the owner. The renter does not determine the price when the alternative is to move elsewhere or live out of your car. There's simply not enough housing--supply is limited. It's not a simple equation like a factory adjusting the output and price of its widgets. If things were as simple as you say, there wouldn't be such a severe housing crisis in the US. Just search for US housing crisis, there are thousands of articles explaining what's going on.
The renter does not determine the price when the alternative is to move elsewhere or live out of your car.
The renter is the person who pays the rent, not the person who can’t afford it. If someone gets evicted because they can’t pay rent, they are replaced with someone who will.
You’re on the right track, though. Over-regulation, opposition to new construction, and opposition to multi-family construction are the reason buyers are willing to pay more and more in HCOL areas.
Part of the problem is it’s still more profitable to build an expensive property and wait a couple years to find a buyer who can afford it than to build an affordable property which will sell right away.
True, there is a “frictional” effect on occupancy rate, that causes property to be idle for some time. I’m about to buy a house that was built by somebody else, but they decided they couldn’t afford it, and backed out, so it’s been sitting there new & idle for a couple of months.
When there is a lot of economic dislocation, or major demographic changes, that frictional rate of idle property may spike up (e.g. in the wake of the 2008 recession/real estate bubble, when some owners decided they would rather wait for recovery than find a buyer at a huge discount), but it’s a transient effect.
Buying as an investment, whether by foreigners, corporations or whatever, is a symptom not a cause of the housing shortage. The cause of the housing shortage is that we’re not building enough houses. That’s it. Supply and demand, same as it’s always been. The solution is to reduce demand or increase supply.
That doesn’t mean “is a symptom, not a cause.” If it’s actually supply and demand, then the investors buying the housing is part of the problem, not just a symptom. The investors are decreasing supply and increasing demand, so it’s really two sides of the same coin.
Personally, I think that just building more houses isn’t the answer, because the corporations can just keep buying them up. This will continue to artificially decrease supply and increase demand, which keeps them making a profit. And as long as corporations can make a profit with this model, they will (and people will continue to suffer).
Yes let me buy a house on someone else’s land I’m sure they won’t mind. And if there’s not enough land left in America, we just need to increase the supply of land.
the free market won’t fix this because it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Actually, I’ve never thought about it, but the concept of “owning” land is pretty absurd tbh. There are people born everyday, beholden to imaginary lines drawn by dead fuckers hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Abolishing land ownership sounds like an attractive idea, the problem is that it doesn’t work well in practice. Ownership of land, and a legal system to protect it, brings remarkable economic benefits. It allows owners to raise capital using the land as collateral and then to develop the land. A free market ensures that land is correctly valued. When values are as by government they tend to be incorrect or, worse, deliberately distorted by corruption. A quick look around the world shows that the richest countries all allow private ownership of land. China is the notable exception. It’s true that productivity in China has increased dramatically over the past few decades but this has been driven by urban centers and manufacturing… rural areas, where land remains under state control remain poor and impoverished.
That’s short sighted. Developers collude with each other and investors. There is serious conflict of interest since everyone on the supply side has lots to gain in ever rising house prices.
Ironically getting rid or severely limiting these developers to reduce supply is what’s needed to reduce prices. Not short term, but the long hard way until you take away the “investment “ side of real estate. Lower supply until it’s not profitable for these developers and investors.
I love to have a window seat and just can’t take my eyes off the landscape below. It’s so amazing to see the plan of farms and cities, the aquaducts and rivers, the crinkled mountains deserts and coastline. Sometimes you can see the shadow of your own plane trace along the ground. Try to guess which lake this is. I guess a night flight is boring.
Ever since I took an atmospheric science class I’ve come to love the view even when we’re above the clouds. I try to identify cloud formations and guess whether it might be raining/snowing below. Seeing a big ol’ cumulonimbus from that vantage point is cool as hell.
Me on my flight from Seoul to Stockholm: “oh look, grassy plains. I must be over Russia!”
13 hours later: “oh would you look at that, more grassy plains, still over Russia 😒” Flying over Russia is like flying over the ocean except it’s grass.
I really enjoy watching the features of the desert when I fly to Vegas. You can almost see the geographic history of how the grand canyon came about. I love the dried up river beds that look like ancient crooked highways.
I fly from Indianapolis to Los Angeles once a year and love this as well. See the topography change over plains states…sometimes the Rocky Mountains if there is a layover in Denver or something. The Grand Canyon and cool landscapes in Utah. Maybe over Vegas/desert…Death Valley. The Sierra Nevada mountain range and “high desert” in California. Then the Pacific Ocean. Kind of amazing and people take it for granted.
On night flights there’s mysterious patterns of lights on the ground. What town is this, is that a stadium? Why is there one solitary light in the middle of nowhere? Why are the streetlights yellowish over there and pinkish over there?
Took a transatlantic flight that had this functionality… it wasnt in the call button, but on the infotainment system. Instead of playing movies, you could set the screen to display one of those 2 options.
I find it insane that the same people who are anti-fossil fuel and want only green energy is also anti-nuclear power. I also want fossil fuels gone, but nuclear is the only way we are able to get to where we need to.
My only quibble with nuclear power is how irresponsible people are long term. The critical safety failure is always someone incompetent or cutting costs/corners.
Well and that I think distributed generation is more robust. Natural disaster can’t take out power to half a state if there’s energy being generated and stored all over. The means of production in the hands of the consumers.
Statistically nuclear is by far the safest form of power generation. Of course, it would be good to locate it in areas that are not disaster prone. As far as I understand it though, the issue with nuclear is the cost. But in a perfect world we would need something to smooth out the inconsistency of renewables, either battery tech or something like nuclear that you can turn on and off as needed.
And yeah it is safe, but if it becomes unsafe for whichever reason, it becomes really unsafe. I just don’t trust humans to not eventually something stupid.
Well the problem with the Texas power grid is that it exists in the first place. Still, when it comes to safety, you have to multiply how bad it is by the number of people it will affect, and divide by the amount of power generated to get the right picture. There is a media bias towards rare, intense events which causes people to think they are more common than they really are. This explains people’s views on nuclear power, school shootings, terrorism, shark attacks etc.
And what happens in the unlikely event of system collapse? If some major cataclysmic event wiped out the world economy and half the worlds population, what happens when suddenly thousands of nuclear plants are abandoned and melt down world wide? Nuclear is safer in a vacuum, but we don’t exist in a vacuum. Anything that can happen, will eventually happen. Even if those power plants are able to be shut down safely, in a post stable world, the storage of the spent waste would be incredibly problematic as we would no longer have the capacity or knowledge to bury it 4 miles down. I would say that nuclear power is far more risky long term than people give it credit for. We are evaluating it’s risk only based on the present stability and regulations of our current systems. Modern technological stability is really a tiny blip in earths history, we really can’t guarantee a future that will know what to do with spent nuclear waste. Nuclear power is really an all-in bet on our own technological dominance of the future.
I say this as someone that is not against nuclear power, but I think people view it as some sort of quick fix when it just presents it’s own problems. The truth is, you don’t get something for nothing. All energy costs something and that cost should be distributed between several systems and our consumption should be reduced.
Nuclear isn’t just benefits. There are major costs and risks. It’s sad how both sides are so ignorant to the arguments of the other side. And no one is an idiot to came to different conclusions.
The risks of nuclear energy are well managed already. Out of all nuclear power plants built to an even remotely modern design, exactly zero have suffered a meltdown, and I don’t see any reason to expect that to change.
*it is one of the pieces of the puzzle. It is not renewable and generates trash that lasts thousands of years. It is another tool, and dismissing it is dumb, but it is not a silver bullet, and also isn’t that desirable for the long run.
I’d go with “Hey, it’s God. I actually AM real, but I’m heading out. You guys are on your own from now on, no more afterlife or anything. So be good to each other! Alright, I’m out. (oh, and just some advice? you might want to get ahead of this climate change thing)”
Yeah, I was hoping the wording of my message would make people give up religious malarkey, but you’re probably right. Even being told “don’t use religion to be a jerk” wouldn’t stop people from doing it.
kbin.life
Top