ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Trump wins the election thru fraud how can the democrats refute it and prove they won? Or will it just be like another Jan 6 and four years of whining like Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Votes are anonymous. You can tell who voted, but not what they voted for. It’s crucial for the fairness of elections that a vote cannot be definitively connected to the individual who cast it; if you could, you could coerce or retaliate.

  And all of the things you mention are the trust OP is talking about. You were a trusted person in that situation. The process increases and validates trust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Both can be true: it is too expensive, and there’s no money to be made. $840B wouldn’t put a dent in the launch costs for the tens of thousands of rockets we’d need to put into space over the next several decades in order to just get rid of the Pacific Garbage Patch, to say nothing of the rest of the trash on this planet.

  And actually, there’s a third true thing: it wouldn’t help much. Having it on Earth isn’t the problem; it’s having it in the oceans that’s the problem. Partially because of the environmental impact, partially because of the biological impact, and partially because we don’t have access to it to reuse it, so we have to keep making more. Once we had it out of the oceans, we could recycle it or even just sequester it away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. To get into the sun, we’d probably want to fuel the rockets in space using reaction material mined in space (from the moon or an asteroid). That would more or less eliminate the problem you’re talking about, which is why I kind of skipped over that in my comment. But you’re right; this is one of a million things that makes space travel hard and expensive.

  2. We can get up to any speed with enough time and fuel. The trash rockets would just need to get into a solar orbit, and then burn retrograde for a fairly long while. Or if you add a gravity assist in, this is doable today; the Parker Solar Probe got to (and indeed beyond) that speed, for instance. It’s easier and quicker when there aren’t squishy people aboard (we don’t tend to like acceleration much higher than 9.8m/s², for instance).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, also: I don’t think it’s a stupid question. It’s a fun question. It might not be a workable plan, but I love thinking about this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Just gathering all the trash would be tricky (and, rocket aside, if we could do it easily, we’d probably have done it already; and just put it in a big garbage dump or something). Think about a swimming pool with a bunch of fallen leaves in it; it’s moving around constantly, and if you swim toward one it’ll kind of move away from you or break up when you try to pull it out.

  2. Ok, let’s handwave getting the trash out of the ocean. It’s probably a solvable problem. First we need to sort it; all of the recyclables need to stay and be recycled, because we still need that material and because we need to reduce the weight. Compostable stuff can probably also just stay and be composted. Corrosive stuff probably shouldn’t go on a rocket. All of the wet trash (it came from the ocean, it’s all wet) needs to be dried out first; partially because we need the water, and partially because water is really heavy. And once we’ve done all of that…well, trying to figure out something productive to do with that big pile of dry trash is almost certainly going to be cheaper than launching it into space.

  3. Ok, let’s handwave that problem too; let’s imagine we’re just going to grab it out of the water, compress it, and get it onto a rocket. Except we’re going to need a whole lot more than one rocket; a decent guess says that we’ve launched 18,003,266 kg into space ever—over our entire history in space—but the Pacific Garbage Patch alone is estimated to be at least 45,000,000 kg, meaning we’d need to launch more than twice the number of rockets we’ve ever launched before. More than 60,000 rockets have been launched since 1957, so that’s substantial. It would take a while; even if we turned the entire space industry’s output toward the project, they’re “only” launching about 1,000 rockets a year nowadays, so it’d take at least 120 years of NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Roscosmos, the ESA, the Chinese Space Agency, etc. doing nothing but trash full-time.

  4. Ok fine. Again, we’re handwaving; let’s imagine we have everything loaded up on rockets on the launch pad. Just getting it into orbit is tough for the simple reason that we have to take not just the payload (the trash) but also the fuel we need to get it there, and to get that fuel off the ground we need fuel, and to get that fuel off the ground, we need— you get the picture. The Tsiolkovsky equations govern how much, and thankfully the number isn’t exponential. But we will still need a lot of rocket fuel. Good thing we’re devoting the entire space industry’s output toward this for the next 120 years.

  5. Now it’s all in space. Great! That was actually the easy part. We could just leave it in orbit around Earth; that would be a really really bad idea for a lot of reasons (but it’s what we’re already doing with our space junk, so…), and you said “into the sun,” so let’s talk about getting it there. Believe it or not, getting it into the sun is actually way harder than getting it out of the solar system entirely. If you were on a rocket, and you pointed it toward the sun, and you burned and burned and burned and burned until you ran out of fuel, you would counterintuitively end up somewhere out past the Earth’s orbit on the other side of the sun. This is because you have to actually cancel out your (very fast) orbital rotation, which you inherited from the Earth when you launched, before you can get pulled into the sun; otherwise you just end up going around the sun in a very elliptical orbit. It takes a lot of fuel to cancel out Earth’s substantial orbital rotation. So we have to get that up there too.

  6. The good news is, once you get it to the sun, you’re good. It won’t cause any noticeable change to the sun (the entire Earth could fall into the sun and it wouldn’t care). And while the trash would initially melt and then burn due to all the heat, smoke is entirely a product of atmosphere and gravity; so no smoke would be generated and it would not make it back to Earth. But once all the ash made it to the sun, it wouldn’t continue burning per se; the sun doesn’t produce heat by burning, but by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. The Garbage Patch is mostly plastic, so carbon polymers. But the sun isn’t big enough to fuse carbon into magnesium, which means all of those carbon atoms would just kinda…sink into the sun, hanging out under all the hydrogen and helium and lithium and beryllium and boron, but on top of the nitrogen and oxygen and such, for the next ten billion years until the sun turns into a red giant. At which point the sun will expand outward, potentially to engulf the Earth’s orbit; at which point it will reclaim all the atoms of the trash we didn’t send up there.

  7. Eventually, after a bunch of different cycles and drama, the constituent atoms of our trash and everything else would become part of the white dwarf that our sun will become; a small, slowly-cooling stellar remnant. After that…we don’t know! The time it takes for a white dwarf to cool completely is longer than the life of the universe so far, so we have to speculate. It’s possible that the remnants of our sun and our trash and everything else might end up becoming a black dwarf, which might look like a shiny spherical mirror the size of the Earth.

  All of that seems like a lot of work. I think we should try something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fairly common expression in English, too, with much the same meaning. I don’t know what sort of rock these people are living under.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this emoji mean? Is this a British thumbs up?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember using the second definition in elementary school in the early 90s, before cell phones were on common use, long before they flipped open, and even before they had extendable antennas. I suppose they might have been a cordless landline, but I always assumed it was a corded phone. The “call me” message, then, wasn’t about being able to see someone but not hear them except in very specific circumstances; instead, it was implied to mean “call me later.” It could be used as a way of flirting, or it could be more platonic. I suppose it could also be used in a business setting, though I wasn’t really old enough to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

  Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why does every zoology museum look the aame

  My guess is that it’s because there are only so many ways to arrange cases of bones and reproductions of skeletons in a way that’s visually interesting, compelling, and informational.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨smart engineering⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The smart engineer then buys a stock amp for $1000, 3D prints a dial that goes to 12, installs it, delivers it to Spïnäl Täp (I can never remember where the umlaut goes), and pockets his well-earned profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a passkey, in practice? Is it a file? A token? Can I keep it in an USB drive? How can I save it in case of device loss?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not the op, but afaik they’re just a new implementation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So now I have to PAY you to NOT store files on my device that I don't want?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Cookie autodelete would be great, though then you potentially have to deal with the cookie popup every time you visit. Not a terrible thing, but worth noting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So now I have to PAY you to NOT store files on my device that I don't want?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re on Firefox, you can also have certain sites automatically open in containers. “Sure, put cookies on my machine if you want. You can see me only browsing your website ever.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why am I seeing "plan your voting day strategy" so often?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  (Hey, non-Americans: “pubs” means “Republicans.” Bars and pubs don’t care whether we vote or not.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, orbital mechanics gets a little bit mind-bendy sometimes. If you’re in a stable circular orbit, accelerating in the direction you’re traveling will actually result in you traveling more slowly because you have moved to a higher orbit, and firing engines to slow down will actually speed you up because you move in closer to the host body and take up a faster orbit.

  This is actually a problem spacecraft deal with regularly. If a Dragon capsule is behind the ISS and wants to dock, using its thrusters to accelerate toward the ISS will actually result in it falling further behind. Decelerating will get it closer, though it will then be in a lower orbit. Orbital rendezvous is tough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t doubt that someone might be thinking that, but I do doubt that any lawyer thinks it’s necessary. As far as I know nobody has ever brought suit against a TV show for a suicide case.

  But I’m not an attorney.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good question, but if you cancel out only a little bit of orbital velocity, you just orbit in a little bit closer. Without any appreciable drag acting on you, there’s nothing that will keep your orbit decaying. You’ll just be in a smaller, perhaps slightly more eccentric orbit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It hurts.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s obviously a head shot of a person holding their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the Earth is really cookin’, and anything anyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a stable yet highly-eccentric elliptical orbit.

  “Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.

  By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.

  So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  John Riccitello should find it very hard to get a job as an executive after a blunder that massive, but alas he’s doing just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’ll take many, many years for them to even be on the radar for most developers now.

  Probably longer than the company has, to be honest. The engine’s best bet is to get purchased by another company that partially open-sources it or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a simple man. You go into ad hominem territory, I leave the conversation. See ya.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How would you have written this comic to get the idea across, then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I realize that. The person above seemed to think that everything in this clearly allegorical comic is somehow intended to be taken literally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's true, I really do have concepts of a plan. Beyond that..?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And the biggest clue to the truth of this is that the ACA is basically just RomneyCare with a few more individual protections bolted on. It was literally Mitt Romney’s plan to fix health care, and the Obama team used it because they knew that it could get support in the GOP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨old.lemmy.world 503⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same. The other skins appear to work, but I’ve never really vibed with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No. What is actually happening in the comic is that a character is having a discussion with another person (not a racist conversation, because sea lions are not sentient beings despite what is about to happen). Treating it as anything more than that is reading something into the story not intended by the original comic. Not everything is so literal, particularly with Malki comics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not gonna cry over what the victims of racism do to racists.

  Eh…I dunno. I’m not going to tone police anyone, and consequences for bad actions are definitely good, but do two very-wrongs make a kinda-right? I’m not sold.

  [the rest]

  Look…if you don’t vibe with the comic, that’s fine. It’s just obviously not about all the stuff that you seem to think it’s about.