megopie
@megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 5 days ago:
Tax unrealized gains
“Oh, but that’s not real money, they’d have to sell their assets to get the cash to pay those taxes, thus diminishing the value of the assets.”
Oh, so the value of the assets is over valued then? So them taking out loans with those assets as the collateral is fundamentally allowing them to take out more money from the financial system than they are realistically due? Damn, tax their fucking loans against their assets as well.
“NOOO! That’s not fair! Then they’re paying a higher tax rate than specified by the law!”
Crazy how that works, crazy how tax rates actually payed can be different from those specified in the laws. Hey did you know that Warren Buffet pays effectively a lower tax rate than his laundry lady, being stated as unjust by himself. Crazy how right now people working for wages get taxed way more than people working for asset evaluations.
- Comment on Accepting Cookies 1 week ago:
“ NOOO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BRO! OUT BUSINESS MODEL DOESN’T WORK IF WE CAN’T DO MASS SURVELIANCE BRO!”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Gondwana, Laurasia.
- Comment on 🐙 Octopus is Octopus 🐙 5 weeks ago:
Octopodes, pronounced oc-top-o-dees, not oc-to-po-des. Like Hercules.
- Comment on dinosauria 1 month ago:
Technically, mammals did not evolve from reptiles, being synapsids, while reptiles are Sauropsids, having split basically immediately after the evolution of amniotes.
- Comment on It's already running 1 month ago:
And you learned an important lesson that day.
- Comment on It's already running 1 month ago:
You can run what ever you want, it doesn’t stop you outright, it just asks you a bunch of times and makes you jump through some hoops if the program isn’t from a verified source. It’s annoying for someone who knows what they’re doing, but arguably a good backstop to keep someone clueless from running something hostile.
- Comment on 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 1 month ago:
“It’ll make costs go up! It’ll cause inflation! It’ll cause a wage price spiral!”
NEWS FLASH! minimum wage hasn’t risen for over a decade and yet prices have risen faster than they did when we did raise minimum wage. Almost like, cheap minimum wages allows for more capital consolidation, and that in turn makes it easier for cartels, oligopolies and monopolies to form to enforce larger margins on low elasticity goods.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive to use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Buying a new copy of the games I play regaurly (say 2-10 hours every 6 months) would be nearly a months rent for me.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
When you “add a game” to the steam library, you’re just creating a link to another file on your system, not really shifting the management of it over to steam (so no updates or the like), and if you logged in on another machine you wouldn’t be able to download the game through steam.
more importantly you can’t take a steam game and move over your license to use it, or ability to install/update it to some other platform. If you decided you never wanted to use steam again, that you liked some other platform better, you would still have to use steam to access those games.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
They don’t mandate price parity on other platforms. They mandate that people selling steam keys on different storefronts match price with the steam store. Which is to say, they allow people to distribute through steam’s infrastructure, without paying steam’s vendor fee, but not for a lower price.
Publishers can absolutely choose to sell for cheaper on EGS(or any other distribution platform for that matter), that they generally don’t is not due to some valve policy.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 month ago:
molten salt systems can be fail safe by having the coolant drain from parts of the system that can’t operate with solidified salt in them, even if they do, you can sends someone with a heating element to remelt the system at critical points before turning it on. It’s not like water where the coolant will physically expand and burst things when it freezes, water’s actually pretty weird in that regard, most things take up less volume when they freeze.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the same for an alpha class, but I suspect it’s because running the reactor without coolant in it would have caused a melt down, and if any coolant was left inside it when turned off, the control rods would have been frozen in place preventing it from being restarted. Perhaps in such a tightly sealed system, the shrinkage caused by cooling could have caused things to break as well.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 month ago:
Various common steels with a bunch of insulation around it usually, sometimes with a thin coating. The potassium/sodium/calcium nitrate mixes that are used with concentrated solar systems operating in range between 200 C and 600 C. So like, yah you don’t want to touch it, but it’s not gonna do much to steel. It can be somewhat corrosive, but, this is fairly easily mitigated by design.
Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.
- Comment on Turbine go brrrr 1 month ago:
They’re actually quite similar to thermoelectric generators. But the potential difference between two semi conductors is created by a heat differential rather than by photon excitation.
Thermoelectric generators have been used on various rovers and deep space probes as well as in remote lighthouses.
- Comment on Turbine go brrrr 1 month ago:
You can use molten salt to move and store heat but you don’t put it through a turbine. Molten salt systems run it through a heat exchanger that heats steam or CO2.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 month ago:
I really like the concentrated solar systems that use molten salt, where rather than heating water directly, molten salt is heated and stored In large insulated tanks and tapped off to a heat exchanger to run the turbines, thus allowing power generation to match demand and continue at a constant rate even when light level very (such as at night).
One interesting idea is to use a concentrated solar system to run an Einstein–Szilard refrigerator, or some other absorption refrigerator cycle.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 month ago:
Solar thermal has some distinct advantages when you start talking about really big instillations. Especially when considering power storage, molten salt systems can store heat and allow the generators to keep working even at night. Much cheaper than batteries at very large scales.
Thermal solar systems are generally very efficient when the goal is heating something, not just generating power. So say, you want to run an ammonia plant without burning natural gas, or if you want to melt down metals for recycling. There are so many industrial applications where it’s a better way of doing it than using an electric heating element.
- Comment on Turbines are our friends 1 month ago:
Yes, super critical CO2 turbines can work in such a system. As can sterling engines. Or thermoelectric solid state couples.
Any system that uses a temperature differential to generate power can be used. It’s just a matter of what you care about in a given situation. Upfront cost, mechanical reliability, noise/vibration, and availability of needed components play in to what makes the most sense.
- Comment on How to I prove to someone that the U.S. moon landing wasn't staged? 2 months ago:
The reason we can’t build the same thing as before is because the tooling is all gone, the set up of tools used to make those parts no longer exists. Half of designing a large complex thing is setting up all the machinery to actually produce what you want, testing and checking and dialing everything in, verifying that what you’re getting out is with in tolerances and will fit together properly. Building test segments and measuring how the behave and then going back and readjusting all the tools to account for differences and altering the design to match what you can actually make. Also all the people who knew the ins and outs of the old designs and manufacturing processes to make them are retired (and probably have forgotten some stuff) or dead. Recreating those production lines, manufacturing methods, retesting and dialing it all in, it would be expensive and time consuming, more so than just building something new based on modern manufacturing techniques and using already produced parts.
And we have been doing that… but it’s not getting nearly the same level of funding the Apollo program had, nor the same level of political commitment. Between 1963 and 1971, nasa’s budget was on average double what it is today (accounting for inflation) and they were allowed to focus most of that on a single project for that whole 8 year period. Compare that to today where nasa has hundreds of different projects ( ISS, near earth science satellites, mars rovers, probes to asteroids and outer planets, Artemis) and their goals and plans get whiplashed about every 4 years each time the administration changes. Not to mention Boeing routinely running over budget and over time and forcing nasa to foot the bill for their fuck ups. Blue origin and space X are also behind schedule on their lander projects as well.
So why were we able to do it back then and can’t now? NASA got the funding they needed, got to focus most of it on a single project and got to make a long term plan and stick with it, and private companies were much less willing to screw them over for a quick buck.
- Comment on Taste the flavor 3 months ago:
Not always. Black pepper contains Piperine which also effects the TRPV1 sensing protein like capsaicin, if a bit weaker. Horseradish, mustard and wasabi have Allyl isothiocyanate which affects TRPV1 but also TRPA1 which triggers pain cold and itching response, leading to coughing and tearing.
There are a fair amount of other compounds that effect the TRPV1 and plenty of other similar receptors.
- Comment on Taste the flavor 3 months ago:
Yes, this is why pepper spray sucks even if it doesn’t get in your mouth.
- Comment on Taste the flavor 3 months ago:
Spicy isn’t a taste or a smell, it is a sensation caused by the compounds lowering the threshold to activate of heat detecting nerves too below the ambient temperature of the human body.
Lots of other “flavors” are also like this, lowering the threshold of firing for certain sensory nerves. Sichuan pepper for instance, it lowers the threshold for movement sensing, causing the bizarre tingle waving sensation.
Those heat sensing compounds exist all over your body, not just in your mouth.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 5 months ago:
The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.
That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.
If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 8 months ago:
There’s also this level of like, still identifying as being primarily of the country they’re from, like a rejection of assimilation into the place they’ve moved to. I’m not saying that’s inherently good or bad, but, it’s an interesting dynamic, and an option that a lot of immigrants don’t have.
- Comment on AI is already impacting the labor market, starting with young tech workers, Goldman economist says 9 months ago:
I mean, a lot of people have lost their jobs at these companies due to gen AI, but it’s not because it’s replaced them. It’s because these companies are burning cash like crazy on gen AI even as it looses them billions upon billions every quarter. They’re letting people go to cover some of that cost and then spinning a positive narrative to shareholders about increased efficiency and productivity.
There is also a lot of still born projects and initiatives that are getting dropped because the executives now have an excuse to wash their hands of them without admitting to shareholders they made a bad call. Like Microsoft and their failed attempt to roll up the games industry.
- Comment on The White House Rose Garden was replaced by pavement 9 months ago:
Lawns are bad, yes, replacing lawn with hard impermeable surface, worse.
It’s as if someone turned their whole front yard in to a parking lot.
- Comment on Anon likes a thing 10 months ago:
played a lot of those.
I remember VtMB particularly fondly.
- Comment on Does people doing things that upset others also upset you? 10 months ago:
Generally yes, For me it depends on how significant the discomfort is and how broadly it impacts people, but also, how much doing the thing really matters a lot to someone.
Like, there’s a point at which “ok someone else’s discomfort about this thing is marginal compared to how much it matters to a large number of people” at which point I get annoyed at someone trying to force other people to stop doing something that matters to them, even if I’m not doing the thing.
