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nBodyProblem

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nBodyProblem , (edited )

Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

nBodyProblem ,

The Panama Canal, obviously

nBodyProblem , (edited )

Biden isn’t “committing genocide” and saying he is amounts to simple propaganda.

The conservatives want to take aid away from Ukraine to deliver it to Israel. If Trump wins, far more weapons will be going to Israel than they are now. Repeating propaganda like this is not helpful for the Palestinian people.

Lastly, Israel is an important ally from a strategic perspective. Not only are they our closest ally in the Middle East, but they have a number of important resources like intel semiconductor facilities. Cutting ties with Israel would be bad for America, and the role of the US government is to put America first. It’s more complex than simply supporting one side or the other and Biden is attempting to balance aid for Palestine with preserving our relationship with Israel. That’s exactly what a good president should be doing.

nBodyProblem ,

The claims of genocide are colored by propaganda and misinformation. Academic researchers are split on the issue, at best. The fact of the matter is that Israel could swiftly end all life in Gaza through overwhelming military force if that was their goal, and this has not happened.

I’d agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are unethical but there is a stark difference between acting without regard for civilian casualties and outright ethnic cleansing. The evidence doesn’t seem to support the latter.

A good president would divest and sanction Israel

A good president would prioritize what’s best for America, which means preserving the favorable relationship America has with Israel. Meanwhile, a good president would provide humanitarian aid for Palestine and help negotiate for peace.

That’s exactly what Biden is doing and refusing to vote for him harms almost every party involved, including Palestine. Really, the only groups who would benefit are the far right and Russia… makes you wonder where comments like this come from, doesn’t it?

nBodyProblem ,

The claims aren’t colored by propaganda and misinformation

They sure are. A great example would be the videos making the rounds recently about the Israeli drones supposedly making “crying baby noises” to lure people out. This is a classic propaganda technique, the videos are literally just a black screen with some background sound, the Israeli government could kill those people far more easily without such tactics, and anyone who has spent time around drones regularly knows it’s extremely implausible at best.

It’s a blatantly obvious piece of propaganda that was widely accepted because people can’t pause for five seconds to apply a bit of critical thinking to their conclusions.

Just because they’re capable of doing genocide “better” doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.

It means exactly this. “Genocide” implies a certain intent and this is a very strong argument of the absence of the requisite intent.

Also, quit implying that my comments are right wing or Russian just because they have opinions that don’t align with yours. That’s such a tired trope. I could imply the same of you, but I’m choosing to engage in good faith.

Well maybe you shouldn’t be pushing an agenda that benefits the Russians and far-right at the expense of the Palestinian people?

Honestly, you’re either a badly intentioned troll, lacking in some basic critical thinking skill, or simply willing to see far more Palestinians die for your ideals while you sit back in safety and watch it happen.

nBodyProblem ,

It’s a joke, it’s not meant to be serious philosophical commentary.

That said, I find your comment a bit funny because Socrates’ dialectical method was largely a result of his objection to sophistry. Note that he rarely makes a statement himself, merely challenges those who use oratory techniques to support their claims to know the truth

nBodyProblem ,

If you think that’s a satisfactory replacement for the average person you don’t know much about motorsports. The costs alone are outside the reach of most people.

nBodyProblem ,

Only if we value safety and convenience over freedom.

Personally, I’ll take the freedom.

nBodyProblem ,

Starship Troopers

nBodyProblem , (edited )

Seriously. Southern CA alone is 4-5x the population of all of Norway, and that region often has 3-4 taco shops per block when it’s allowed by zoning.

Edit: the USA has 75,000 Mexican restaurants. That means that there are only 73 people in Norway for every Mexican restaurant in the United States.

The average restaurant in the USA serves 100 people per day. That means that, on average, US Mexican restaurants serve more people daily than the entire population of Norway.

Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads (www.techradar.com)

Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....

nBodyProblem ,

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

nBodyProblem ,

Did you know they don’t eat garlic bread in Italy?

Ergo, “Italian Food” in America is better than food in Italy. They have to take us out as a matter of self defense

nBodyProblem ,

You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.

Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.

Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.

nBodyProblem ,

I have a parrot and she loves peppers. I have given her super hots a few times, like Carolina reaper etc, and it’s hilarious until you realize how messy she is. The entire vicinity becomes a straight up biohazard by the time she is done.

nBodyProblem ,

Really depends on the individual birds in question IMO. A red tailed hawk for example is really best optimized for prey on the ground like rabbits. On the other hand, a peregrine falcon is optimized for aerial prey and they eat everything from hummingbirds to geese

nBodyProblem ,

That’s what they’re famous for. However, they can catch prey like songbirds by simply being faster and more agile than the quarry, chasing them down in horizontal flight. Some journal articles credit it with a horizontal top speed in the 90 mph range.

nBodyProblem ,

This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.

Getting “racism” from that post is a REAL stretch. It’s not even weird, agriculture and mechanization are widely considered good things for humanity as a whole

Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.

ANY group of humans beyond the individual is purely just a social construct and classing humans into a single group is no less sensible than grouping people by culture, family, tribe, country etc.

It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.

Agriculture is certainly more efficient in terms of nutrition production for a given calorie cost. It’s also much more reliable. Arguing against agriculture as a good thing for humanity as a whole is the thing that’s weird.

nBodyProblem ,

The usual joke is that fusion is always “30 years away”, not 10. The reason is that fusion projects have historically faced an issue where funding is chronically below predictions

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/209f11cb-9cdc-4ebe-b82b-98933a9d5b29.png

However, this past decade is seeing a number of promising changes that make fusion seem much closer than it ever has. Lawrence Livermore managed to produce net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. Fusion startups are receiving historical levels of VC funding. ITER is expected to produce as much as ten times as much energy as used to start the reaction. The rise of private space infrastructure is making helium-3 mining on the moon more possible than ever before.

nBodyProblem ,

It certainly has the potential to be. Remember most of the costs related to fission are safety measures, plant decommissioning, and waste disposal. If we merely had to operate the reactor without concern for those issues, fission would be incredibly cheap. The fuel costs and basic technical requirements to operate a reactor are trivial in comparison.

Fusion produced 4x more energy per mass of fuel compared to fission, isn’t at risk of meltdown, and has the potential to produce negligible radioactive byproducts. In addition, it outputs helium which is an important and finite strategic resource.

Even if the cost of fuel goes up dramatically compared to uranium reactors, it might still outperform nuclear in a big way. However, sourcing He-3 from the moon might be a lot cheaper than you think. My day job is related to space resource utilization. Transporting resources off the surface of the moon could be quite economical once we reach a sufficient level of development.

nBodyProblem ,

The US built the XF-85 goblin parasite fighter, which was supposed to be deployed using a robotic arm from the bomb bay of a B-36. The idea came from ww2 when we had escort fighters for most major bombing missions to keep the bombers safe.

It wasn’t practical to build a fighter with enough range to escort strategic bombers into the Soviet Union so they thought, “why not carry the fighter inside the bomber?”

nBodyProblem ,

Even that is meaningless because the vehicle you put a battery in is as important or moreso than the battery.

Aptera has a claimed 1,000+ mile range with a 100 kWh lithium battery. Meanwhile, the Rivian R1S has a claimed 270 mile range when equipped with a 106 kWh battery.

The main difference is that the Aptera is a light and aerodynamic car built for maximum efficiency instead of a 6,000 lb pickup truck. Any battery can boast amazing numbers if you are flexible enough with the use case.

nBodyProblem ,

Copying weapons is a completely different thing from an ethical and technical difficulty standpoint over reselling digital art.

nBodyProblem ,

Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, read minds, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?

All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay

I dare say physics would be more popular then

nBodyProblem ,

Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing

But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world

If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best

nBodyProblem ,

There was a significant amount of manual piloting in the Apollo missions

The guidance gets more difficult in the terminal stages and they didn’t really trust computers to safely control the spacecraft near the surface, so their solution was to have the computer fly 95% of the way down and have the crew take over for the terminal phase.

The Apollo algorithms work fine for non-manned missions as well, but you have to vet the trajectory targets more fully in simulation and add some active retargeting scheme to avoid obstacles near the surface.

Combine the added complexity of a robotic lander with groups like intuitive that have never landed one before, and this sort of thing happens

nBodyProblem ,

Sure thing!

Honestly I wish we didn’t have to design manned spacecraft to be manually pilotable because you have to make design sacrifices to get there. However, that is unlikely to happen in the lunar program anytime soon

nBodyProblem ,

Yes but a moon landing is fundamentally easier in most respects, while using substantially similar technology, than landing a rocket booster on earth or a rover on mars.

Landing on the moon is, as far as it can be, trivial for a group like NASA. It’s much more challenging for a small private company like Intuitive that has never built a lander before.

nBodyProblem ,

I find it funny this comment got upvoted more than mine. I am a guidance engineer that worked at NASA on lunar lander programs, it’s literally my job to be an expert in this stuff. Modern computing has reduced propellant usage a bit and improved targeting accuracy, but we have had usable solutions to this problem since the 60s.

Atmosphere makes the problem MUCH harder because the dynamics are far more complicated and the uncertainties are higher.

nBodyProblem ,

Forcing kids to bring coats is weird to me

Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but I was born into a relatively cold+wet climate and moved to San Diego in elementary school. I didn’t bring a coat because it made me hot, I was acclimated to colder weather, and I didn’t want to carry it around.

They refused to let me go outside for recess for weeks because I didn’t bring a coat and refused to wear one from the lost and found. Finally, one day, they sent me to the principal’s office and called my mom in for a chat to discuss my misbehaving.

My mom’s response was, “You called me in from work for THIS?! If he’s not cold, he’s not cold! He has warm clothing at home. He’s capable of deciding whether or not he would be more comfortable with a jacket on. Let him go outside and leave me alone”

nBodyProblem ,

Sounds like they should let the kids choose whether they want to you outside or stay in based on whether or not they feel cold

nBodyProblem ,

Superchargers come with massive parasitic losses, in many cases 10-20%, and there’s a decent handful of cars with clutches on the supercharger pulley. The MR2 is one.

nBodyProblem , (edited )

I dunno, I am a engineer in the defense industry and pentagon wars got a lot right in terms of what it’s like

nBodyProblem ,

I agree diamonds are dumb and overpriced when you can get a better result from moissanite or lab grown.

That said, I’m curious why you assume it’s a blood diamond? Conflict diamonds only account for ~5% of all diamonds in the trade. Russia and Canada combined account for >50% of all rough diamonds in the industry.

nBodyProblem ,

Unless you have access to intelligence that you probably shouldn’t be sharing in an Internet forum, neither of us really knows what is needed to guide the missiles of our adversaries.

That said, my day job is a GNC engineer (guidance navigation and controls) for rockets and spacecraft. It’s absolutely possible to hit a carrier with no radio signals whatsoever

nBodyProblem ,

That’s because Swiss precision is meaningless when a $1 chip can keep time better than a $6k mechanical watch. The only way they can survive is by selling the luxury angle.

Amazon taps SpaceX for satellite launch even though Jeff Bezos has his own rocket company (www.cnn.com)

Amazon just inked a deal with chief competitor and Elon Musk-helmed SpaceX to launch internet-beaming satellites — a move that comes even as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pursues his own space dreams with his own rocket company, Blue Origin, and as SpaceX builds its own internet constellation....

nBodyProblem ,

Bezos owning both companies has little to no impact on where the contracts go due to shareholder obligations. The two companies are run as discrete entities. For example, Dave Limp, the new CEO replacing Bob Smith, comes from Amazon and is firewalled from any non-public information about Blue until he is fully transitioned to his new role.

nBodyProblem ,

Blue Origin has been around longer than SpaceX and still has yet to get anything to orbit, while smaller companies than either have popped up and managed to in the meantime.

You hear this a lot and it’s pretty misleading. Blue didn’t begin working on an orbital rocket in earnest until ~2019 and in the 2015-2020 era the headcount was on the order of hundreds instead of thousands. That headcount was spread across multiple big ticket space infrastructure projects.

In addition, New Glenn has been held back by the unexpectedly difficult qualification process to deliver engines to ULA, who is contractually entitled to the first flight articles. I’m of the opinion that bidding to be the Vulcan engine provider was a mistake, but the point remains that it’s not at all a fair comparison between SpaceX, the various smallsat launch companies, and Blue. The landscape is very different.

I don’t think I’d try to contract them for launching a satellite either if I had one, one would be stuck waiting for development on an unproven launcher when ones with a reliable track record are already available.

To be clear, something like half of the planned Kuiper launches are already contracted to go on New Glenn. The only real competitor on price/kg and turnaround time is SpaceX, whose products are a direct competitor to Kuiper. It’s not a mystery as to why they’d prefer alternate launch providers in that context.

nBodyProblem ,

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.

nBodyProblem ,

It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:

  • We are not well equipped for space situational awareness in cislunar space
  • There are many orders of magnitude more volume to observe in cislunar space than in the space below the GEO belt
  • The previous two bullets mean it’s difficult to find a non cooperative target once you lose it and the precision of any observations is poor. The sheer volume of space that need to be observed makes this issue nearly impossible to fix.
  • Trajectories in cislunar space are highly chaotic due to multi-body effects. Combine this with poor estimates of position and velocity, and our predictions of the future diverge rapidly from truth when propagating cislunar orbits.

The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.

nBodyProblem ,

Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.

nBodyProblem , (edited )

LGBT isn’t a choice and covering their eyes won’t change their sexual orientation.

But, besides that point, how the fuck is it okay to insulate your kid from other cultures? That’s not healthy at all. Eating ramen wasn’t part of my family’s culture growing up, either, but I don’t go around trying to prevent children from learning about Japanese food.

nBodyProblem ,

Ohh, so gay people hide their homosexuality when same sex relationships are shunned by their friends and family? What a shocker.

nBodyProblem ,

That’s why I dig up my lawn every year and bury it underground inside sealed plastic bags

I’m doing my part!

nBodyProblem ,

The reason fusion is always 30 years away is because that statement is always accompanied with the subtext of 30 years at the current funding rate. Funding consistently decreased for decades as optimism in the tech fades.

However, this decade will be marked with a number of breakthroughs. Last year we achieved the first net energy gain from fusion ever, there are a number of fairly well funded startups with very promising tech, and ITER will be the closest we have ever gotten to a real working fusion plant with (hopefully) large scale net energy

Now is precisely the right the time to increase funding to fusion to push us over the hump into usable power production

nBodyProblem , (edited )

… what do you think the green energy sector is doing?

There is orders of magnitude more funding being sunk into rolling out existing green energy tech than in researching fusion. This money isn’t going towards fission reactors because they aren’t economically viable when compared to other forms of green energy like wind and solar.

nBodyProblem ,

Energy storage of solar is promising to be cheaper than nuclear

Nuclear powerplants are very, very expensive when you amortize the commissioning and decommissioning costs into the lifetime expenses. There have been repeated attempts to encourage fission adoption over the last 20 years and almost no new plants are being made because the economics just don’t work.

nBodyProblem ,

The onion did a bit about ten years ago on the Palestine-Israel conflict, reporting:

“Israeli and Palestine leaders have shown they see eye to eye in nearly every facet of the proposed solution, including such provisions as: seizing all territory, watching the opposition burn in righteous fire, and building a unified nation on the corpses of their enemy. Yet, they still haven’t come any closer to putting a stop to the conflict”

Kind of sums it up.

U.S. cities consider banning "right on red" laws amid rise in pedestrian deaths (www.cbsnews.com)

Sophee Langerman was on her way to a bicycle safety rally in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood in June when a car turning right rolled through a red light and slammed into her bike, which she was walking off the curb and into the crosswalk....

nBodyProblem , (edited )

They take your license just for running a red light? In many parts of America that would leave you unable to satisfy basic necessities like getting to work and buying groceries. It’s frankly ridiculous.

Guess I’m glad I live in the good ole USA

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