megopie
@megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Which is it Lemmy? 4 days ago:
And if the blue portal is at a different angle than the orange portal, then… well, how fast is the milky way traveling through the galaxy relative to the universe?
- Comment on Which is it Lemmy? 4 days ago:
The cube does have a non zero speed, it just depends what frame of reference you are measuring it by.
- Comment on Which is it Lemmy? 4 days ago:
The question is, Is it the velocity of the object relative to the portal that matters or the absolute velocity of the object?
In the later case, we must ask how the portals at different angles don’t send objects flying off at the speed of the milkyway’s travel through the universe.
The answer that requires the least assumptions and justifications is B.
- Comment on I'll take it to all 2 place it goes! 1 week ago:
It really depends on the part of the US. Amtrak is very reliable in the north east. Lot of the commuter train services are quite good as well. Subways and metros are pretty good in most of the north east as well.
Amtrak is much more limited in its coverage on the west coast, but still ok from what I’ve heard. BART in the SF area has good ridership although it needs some more investment, LA is doing some big expansions right now as well.
Chicago has a good but a bit old transit system as well. The Amtrak from NYC/DC to Chicago is a long but pleasant ride, about 18 hours; but this is to be expected given that the distance is 1146 Km (714 miles) which is about the same as Brussels to Warsaw, and most of the routes for that appear to be about 18 hours as well.
I’ve heard some rumblings about projects in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s not really something to write home about as it stands. Needs more investment and not to have the projects price gouged by contractors.
Some mid sized cities and towns all over the country will have decent bus services, some even a light rail or two, but it’s a coin toss.
The South West, Mountain west, South East and Midwest (outside of Chicago and the twin citiest) absolutely atrocious, like, you are basically screwed if you don’t own a car. Like there are a few example of decent local transit systems in particularly big cities but their ridership is just not even a drop in the bucket of trips taken by car, and there aren’t any plans for serious expansions on the scale that needs to be happening. Regional rail is just… hope you like a 2 week train ride where you’re spending half the time waiting for 40 mile long trains full of gravel to pass.
- Comment on We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America 4 weeks ago:
I’d add one more possible solution, some sort of government support for non-profit grocery stores, ether co-ops or municipality run. Similar things in the supply chain would be essential as well.
For profit grocery stores and their suppliers have very little reason to compete on price or value, often they’re some form of monopoly or have niche partitioned a market and don’t compete. We can introduce a bunch of regulations against specific practices, but there will be loop holes or new practices will develop. It is a moving target that will require constant updates that we won’t be able to rely upon once the public attention shifts.
Better to create a counterbalance that gets at the root of the problem, some set of actors in the market that have different incentives, and thus don’t trend towards the same behaviors as everyone else overtime. The capital markets are reluctant to invest in Co-ops due to the lack of control they have over them, and municipal government rarely have the kind of available capital to build such things, thus state and federal governments need to step in and provide the needed capital where the markets have failed.
- Comment on Wait bro, what if?????? 1 month ago:
I mean. I’d argue that the group that more frequently questions its positions and beliefs based on new evidence is a more reliable source for interpreting the world than the group that killed 40% of Germany when one assumption, regarding the authority of the bishop of Rome, was in dispute.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Backrooms is based on a loose collecting of internet fiction, which was inspired by a lot of things because the concepts behind it were built up by a lot of people. House of Leaves probably had an influence because it’s decently well known but there is no direct relation.
- Comment on Title 1 month ago:
Ok, but… what if the bank asks where you got the gold? If you have proof you came by it legally, and then the IRS notices you have a bunch of outstanding loans collateralized with an asset they have no record of you obtaining or paying taxes on the income used to obtain it.
Like… with the cash, you just… spend it on stuff. If you need to pay for something not in cash, then just open a cash based business and overstate your sales.
- Comment on He's an arborist 1 month ago:
It must remain unharmed
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 2 months 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 2 months ago:
“ NOOO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BRO! OUT BUSINESS MODEL DOESN’T WORK IF WE CAN’T DO MASS SURVELIANCE BRO!”
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Gondwana, Laurasia.
- Comment on 🐙 Octopus is Octopus 🐙 3 months ago:
Octopodes, pronounced oc-top-o-dees, not oc-to-po-des. Like Hercules.
- Comment on dinosauria 3 months 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 3 months ago:
And you learned an important lesson that day.
- Comment on It's already running 3 months 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 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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? 4 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.
