balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Holy Fu*k 1 hour ago:
F**k. You added two, so I have to censor one to keep the world balanced.
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 2 weeks ago:
Capitalism can create innovation, but capitalism is not necessary for it. The very same innovation could have happened if the state spent a fraction of this money on R&D, without all the insane Terraform Mars T-shirts and 3 companies wasting resources to do pretty much exactly the same thing three times.
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 2 weeks ago:
Leftists are the first to laud innovation when it benefits regular people. This is just a dick measuring contest by some asshats, financed by stealing billions of dollars from their workers.
- Comment on Aeroplane 3 weeks ago:
if the autopilot is engaged, you can’t physically move the wheels, because it is moving them for you.
I’m pretty sure on newer 737s the autopilot disconnects when it detects a sufficient physical force on the yoke. But yeah the button is easier and safer.
- Comment on Aeroplane 3 weeks ago:
It’s more as a reminder to NOT engage reverse thrust while in the air.
- Comment on Aeroplane 3 weeks ago:
Chill, it’s just a shitpost.
BTW, a regular person can likely fly and land a 737 with some basic ATC instructions, there have been multiple experiments demonstrating this (in a simulator). A guide like this would be immensely helpful in that situation.
- Comment on Aeroplane 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, the foot pedals and IAS indicator are glaring omissions. I guess they really just want you to fly with autopilot and autothrust, but good fucking luck setting up autoland without prior experience.
- Comment on Aeroplane 3 weeks ago:
Few additions:
- “reverse thrust” → “slow down (after you land)”
- “go fast” → “go fast (keep levers together)”
- “keep it above the ground” → “keep it above the ground, but not too high”
- (at IAS indiciator) “how fast you’re going”, “keep between 170 and 400, lower to 140 when landing”
- “make wings bigger” → “make wings bigger, required when taking off or landing”
- Comment on Billionaire opinion is not news 4 weeks ago:
This aint a shitpost, this is just a fact
- Comment on NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England 5 weeks ago:
Good. That said: check the side-effects and compatibility first!
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Carrot 1 month ago:
The approximation is because it’s technically not exactly proportional due to curvature.
- Comment on Carrot 1 month ago:
- Comment on Carrot 1 month ago:
By “ratio of carrot to carrot skin” I mean “volume of carrot / volume of carrot skin”. Volume of carrot is ~ length³, while volume of carrot skin is approximately ~ length², assuming a similar shape of carrot, because the skin is a constant thickness (determined by your vegetable peeler). This basically means the bigger the carrot the less money you waste on carrot skin.
- Comment on Carrot 1 month ago:
I don’t think there’s a comma needed there. And in any case, both of those mean the same thing.
- Comment on Carrot 1 month ago:
Sounds like you got a deal. Geometrically speaking, you got a way higher ratio of carrot to carrot skin.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
I mean, this is the premise of the original comment here. That there still are backwards-ass places where people have to own a car and drive, when much better forms of transportation exist.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
This is precisely how the real world works unless you live in under a dictatorship of capital so brazen they have even stolen the concept of a livable city away from you.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
Like, I moved to a place that is aiming to be an entirely walkable town, but it’s not there yet. The pandemic put a lot of the development on hold and things are finally getting back up to speed now. My closest grocery store was going to be two blocks away, but that was scrapped. There’s one being built that will be 3 miles away, so bike-able when it’s finally fucking opened.
That sounds like it’s not a walkable town then, not even close. Even my shithole city has multiple grocery stores and cafes on every block, and a lot of people still drive.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
Your partner can just ride on a second bike. What a concept, I know!
If your kids are younger than 6 yo, they can probably fit in a cart behind your bike. If they are older, they can ride a bike themselves. This is the norm in many places in europe now.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
The closest grocery store is literally in the same building I currently live in. It takes me ~30 seconds from my apartment door to grocery store door… This is the norm in a lot of places.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 month ago:
You know that your family can ride too?
Also, if you build your cities correctly, your grocery store will be a <3 minute walk. Your spouse or kids can just walk there themselves.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 month ago:
Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.
Ultimately if we want for 8 billion people to survive on this planet, we have to be somewhat efficient. If you spread out all current human population to a typical rural density (100/km^2) you get 80E6 km^2, or about all habitable land mass on earth. This leaves no areas for anything but human settlement. What you are advocating for is an infinite sprawling suburbia with not even a national park in between, which just sounds like a hellscape.
This is not taking into account that this will require everyone to use transportation to get anywhere (rather than a well-planned city where all daily destinations are a 5-10 minute walk), and transportation at those scales won’t be efficient either - if we go with cars we get a network constantly jammed, insanely polluting highways, if we go with rail it would either take an insane amount of rail or the “last mile” would actually be 10 km with little to no infrastructure. In any case it would take an insane amount of time when you need to go somewhere specialized, like a rare medical professional or a DnD hangout, whatever.
Other essential services will also be very inefficient like electricity (imagine just how much wiring we would need), or water supply and sewage (which requires piping and dedicated sewage treatment facilities), or emergency response (imagine the amount of deaths because we can’t staff enough emergency stations to cover all the sprawl).
I’m not just talking about efficiency in the capitalist sense of profit, I’m talking about the basic sense of the amount of resources required to keep humans alive. We simply will not be able to sustain everyone living in a rural-like setting with a modern quality of life (like access to modern medicine, electricity, running water and internet). There is not enough land and resources on this planet to live like that. The fact that you and other people can do that is because they are (indirectly) subsidized by the city folk, mostly so that there is someone to work all those out-of-town agriculture jobs.
Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you.
If you grow your own vegetables, you’re using more land for your vegetables than if you bought them from someone else, because economies of scale make agriculture much more efficient. And in any case I grow some tomatoes and celery on my balcony, you can do that in a city too with proper planning.
Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.
Have you ever been to a well-planned car-free (or at least less-car-infested) city? It can be a quiet cozy place with lots of communities forming, lots of green spaces, and access to nature within 10-15 minutes by train. The thing you hate about cities is probably not cities, it’s cars and car-centric planning with suburban sprawl (which is ironically what you seem to be advocating for)
I’ve also lived a big chunk of my life in the forest, and I wanna do that again because I like forests. But I won’t pretend it’s sustainable for all humans to live like that. This must be the last refuge for those who truly love nature and/or want to work agriculture, which is a very low percentage of the overall population.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 month ago:
No, obviously it is just the most profitable, which is the only thing that matters under capitalism. With better planning we could totally use sustainable farming techniques, and have comparable yields.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I think the sun will set over the empire for the first time some time in late 2025 or early 2026, when BIOT is transferred over to Mauritian sovereignty.
- Comment on Mary E. Brunkow, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, has only 34 published papers and an H-index of 21. 1 month ago:
Yes, and if you fall down far enough you won’t get any grants to do any research, and “forced” to go back to teaching/mentoring. Both of those things tell a lot about the state of high-level education and academia in the west.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 2 months ago:
I don’t think “safety friends” are typical in lesbian circles, because of the implication
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 4 months ago:
Ok, so infinite Yuan is a hyperbole, but for something so relatively cheap and so massively beneficial as rail, profitability really doesn’t matter. China has more than enough resources and influence to eat the cost now and reap the benefits for the next century.
- Comment on US education 4 months ago:
I’d argue we didn’t fully understand the theory of electricity until we understood the atomic structures of metals and semiconductors, and that was properly developed in the early 20th century.
- Comment on US education 4 months ago:
When was this written?
Given it has a color photo attached to it, it was definitely published when we already understood the theory of electricity really well, so it doesn’t get a pass.
We don’t know what any of the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) really are
I’d argue that for fundamental forces, “what they are” and “what they do” is the same, by definition.
And in any case, mains supply in your home is not just electromagnetic waves vibing around, it’s electrons engineered to move through wires in very specific ways, transferring power from a moving magnet or (increasingly) a photon falling on a semiconductor junction, to move another magnet, heat up some metal, or (increasingly) bounce around some electrons between some semiconductor junctions and then emit photons from other semiconductors junctions.
Finally, most of the text is bullshit even if you don’t think we know what fundamental forces “are”:
No one has ever felt it
You can easily feel electric discharge. Just rub your hair on some wool.
No one has ever heard it
Just be around a thunderstorm. Thunder is the sound of an electric discharge.
We cannot even say where electricity comes from
You can see where the energy that moved the electrons in your wires came from: app.electricitymaps.com
It was written by a complete and utter buffoon, and it can’t be redeemed with any amount of handwaving or philosophizing over what it means to “know” or what things “are”.