masterspace
@masterspace@lemmy.ca
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 5 days ago:
The fact that there are billionaires is the sign that they’re not being taxed enough.
Massive infrastructure / R&D projects like a space race is actually one of the more productive ways that billionaires could use their money.
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 5 days 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. Sadly the american government is not an effective redistributor of wealth, and any NASA budget comes with a million (dumb) strings attached, like spending it on certain projects that benefit the state senator who voted for it.
In this situation, the state LITERALLY spent more money developing the SLS rocket, and it is going to be a colossal failure and waste of money compared to the rockets that can be reused.
Three companies trying to produce the same thing is not a waste, it’s literally the defining feature of capitalism and why every government, including the Chinese Communist government, still uses capitalist systems. Multiple entities competing to do the same thing gives you more variety and diversity, and hedges your bets in case one of them is wrong or corrupted by flawed people in it.
Also, I don’t know where you get that 50x number, SpaceX lowered the launch cost maybe by about 3-4x compared to contemporary chinese rockets.
Compared to SLS, the literal state funded alternative.
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 5 days ago:
Lol, you do realize that Starlink is literally the first time that most rural Americans have had reliable high speed internet right?
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 5 days ago:
You do realize that NASA has a fixed budget for the science missions they can run right? A d you do realize that when the launch costs for their satellites are 50x lower, that means they can run more missions more often?
We all hate Musk, but it’s fucking insane to look at the equivalent of the first airplane company that could land a plane and didn’t just destroy it after every flight, and say ‘thats just a dick measuring contest, how could that be useful?’
- Comment on The existence of billionaires is a policy failure 5 days ago:
Public contracts are not the same things as grants and subsidies. They are contracts for services to be rendered, and SpaceX quite frankly won them handily by being fundamentally better and cheaper then the competition.
And most of their funding has come from private investment, and by building and running the Falcon 9 which is by far the cheapest and most reliable way for anyone to get stuff into space at the moment.
Like Jesus Christ, you can hate Musk without being blind to the fact that SpaceX is legitimately doing things no one has ever done before with rocketry. The SLS is a traditional rocket that was designed by NASA and built by contractors and it literally costs orders of magnitude more to fly, has never actually flown yet, and at most could fly twice a year.
- Comment on Homebrew, de facto standard package manager for macOS, now forces Apple's $99/yr notarization bullshit for all casks. 1 week ago:
Code signing should be done though.
You can disagree with Apple’s approach that maintains them as the only signing authority, but, at a fundamental level, code signing is the only way to distribute an executable and have the user be able to trust who authored it and what’s in it.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
Nope, night owl who likes to sleep in.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
I mean, I broke my hand and it never healed properly, I have pretty bad tendon damage in one ankle, I got shin splints like crazy when I started running, and I have previously herniated a disk, though not that major.
I’m not saying every single major injury is recoverable from, but look at the history of most athletes and you’ll see a lot of major injuries that they were able to recover from.
Again, not saying this is the case necessarily for your back, but I know people who have gotten relatively minor injuries, gotten terrified of them and/or used that as an excuse not to do any more exercise on that body part ever, and then got severely injured again because now the muscles and muscle control for that body part is severely undeveloped, putting more strain back on the tendons / ligaments.
The general recommended approach for most injuries is physio, i.e. reducing your exercises back down to zero weight, but still doing them, and continuously adding weight to re-build and strengthen those muscles and joints, not to avoid using them forever.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
Burnout isnt a thing, it’s just situational depression.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
Honestly cannot fathom this. Are you pushing yourself at the gym? Are you eating healthy and enough protein? Resting enough?
There’s literally never been a period of my life where going to the gym regularly hasn’t made me feel better. I havent gone for like 6 months because I’ve been brutally busy, but I honestly cannot fathom how you could be going and not getting something positive out of it.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
If you force yourself to run a little bit one day, then a little bit more each day after that, then eventually 4 miles will feel like a short run.
- Comment on How do you beat post-work floppiness? 1 week ago:
By forcing yourself to do stuff.
It sucks at first, and you feel exhausted and like you’re not that effective and your brain will keep coming up with excuses and rationalizations as to why you should just rest, but you ignore them and force yourself to do the stuff you don’t feel like doing.
Do that for a while and you’ll suddenly have a higher energy level and it won’t seem like a big deal.
You’re basically at the point where you just took up a new exercise every day, and that’s just tapping you out. If you keep doing just that exercise and nothing else, your fitness / energy will eventually rise to the point of being able to handle it and nothing else. If you force yourself to do more, then eventually your fitness / energy level will rise to working + after work stuff being the baseline.
Give yourself time and give yourself rest days, but most people online will advocate for too much self care and don’t realize that the only way to actually change and improve is to continually push yourself a little past your comfort zone.
- Comment on Edible Wood 2 weeks ago:
Edible, Non-Toxic, and Food form a Venn diagram.
- Comment on Retina e-paper promises screens 'visually indistinguishable from reality' 4 weeks ago:
Again, no, because that’s not a resolution, that’s a pixel density at a set distance.
- Comment on Retina e-paper promises screens 'visually indistinguishable from reality' 4 weeks ago:
While I get your point, this is an article, not a whitepaper.
If someone says something that is obviously not a thing, like ‘the perfect resolution of an analog painting’, then it means the author probably didn’t actually understand what they read and so you shouldn’t trust their interpretation of the underlying news.
- Comment on Retina e-paper promises screens 'visually indistinguishable from reality' 4 weeks ago:
That’s not a resolution, that’s a pixel density at a set distance. It’s also arbitrary on Apple’s end, not actually a meaningful universal measurement.
- Comment on Retina e-paper promises screens 'visually indistinguishable from reality' 4 weeks ago:
The image was shown in perfect resolution on the screen, which at approximately 1.4 x 1.9 mm was 1/4000th that of a standard smartphone.
This makes me doubt the author of the article’s credibility. What exactly is the “perfect resolution” of a hand painted piece of art?
The underlying paper is published in Nature which adds more credibility to its significance but an article that presents none of the limitations, drawbacks, or broader industry context that might hold something like this back isn’t adding much.
- Comment on Metal on the inside, business on the outside 5 weeks ago:
We’re all just different parts of the universe looking back at itself in different ways.
- Comment on Metal on the inside, business on the outside 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 1 month ago:
You realize that by asking to use your specific definition of a word, you’re the one getting lost in pedantic semantics, right?
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 1 month ago:
Because once it has a name, it makes it easier to describe and reference in research literature, and thus makes it easier to draw conclusions on.
Everything has some super specific name that professionals in some field use for it because they regularly need to distinguish it from other similar things.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 months ago:
Why?
-
Lack of Feature Parity
-
Stickiness of library transfer
-
Stickiness of social network effects
-
It’s still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively
1: I’ve tried out Quobuz, it’s pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify’s recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes.
2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs.
3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there’s also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there’s no cross platform linking service that would make that easy.
4: supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting a trillion dollar anti-competitive corporation.
-
- Comment on Has Charlie Kirk ever changed his views on a subject during a debate? 2 months ago:
Why are you even on here if it hasn’t?
- Comment on Nintendo now has a US patent on summoning characters and making them battle for you | VGC 2 months ago:
I misread the comment hierarchy, I thought this was a part of a different chain.
- Comment on Nintendo now has a US patent on summoning characters and making them battle for you | VGC 2 months ago:
No one should be able to do it is the right reaction, but ‘Nintendo deserves no blame or shame for choosing to do it’ is the wrong reaction. Nintendo could have used all the money it spends on IP lawyers to instead lobby the government to change the patent system, but instead they spend it all on lawyers so that they can sell you the same game on a new system.
- Comment on Nintendo now has a US patent on summoning characters and making them battle for you | VGC 2 months ago:
Classic American response: “companies aren’t responsible for the shitty choices they make, they can make as many shitty choices that harm people for profit as possible at all times and it’s just business”.
- Comment on Nintendo now has a US patent on summoning characters and making them battle for you | VGC 2 months ago:
Once again, showing why Nintendo is a POS company.
Compete by making better games and stories, not by patenting basic role playing game mechanics and suing your competition.
- Comment on E-Paper Display Reaches the Realm of LCD Screens 2 months ago:
I’m very curious about the actual latency.
The refresh rate certainly impacts latency, but there are other factors that can effect Time To First Update, been if it can play quickly after that.
Exciting though, even a relatively low res e ink screens that’s fully viewable in daylight would make an amazing portable monitor.
- Comment on oh&shit 2 months ago:
Ohh, what’s really going to bake your noodle later on, is why do forklift driver’s need to be recertified every 3 years but driver’s only need to be recertified every … never … when they’re 70 or something depending where you are?
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 2 months ago:
I think it depends a lot on the specifics of the situation.
Did you buy a single family home / house that you’re living in, and renting out part of to help pay your mortgage? Then it depends on the rent you charge.
If you charge market rates and you can afford to charge less than market rates, or if you hire contractors and maintenance people for the unit that are cheaper / worse than the ones you use for your own unit, then yes, you are being exploitative and hypocritical.
If, however, you treat the unit like your own and charge below market rates then no, you’re not.
If you build an addition on your house, or build a laneway house or something, then it’s more reasonable to charge market rates for rent because you’ve actually added new housing to the area, an act that in itself should help to slightly drop rents. Same thing if you buy vacant property and build rental units on it. However, if you continue charging the most you possibly can long after you’ve made your money back then you’re back into the territory of being an exploitative hypocrite.
And if you’re just in a hot market and buying up houses / condos, and renting them back to people as is, or just doing the cheapest and shittiest job you can turning them into apartments, then yes you are being a hypocrite. At that point you’re just using your capital to buy up a limited quantity item and sell it back to people at exploitative rates. It would be like being stranded in the desert and buying up the remaining water and then selling it back to people for a profit. You’re providing no value to society, just using past success to force people into a corner where they have to pay you for a necessity that’s in limited supply.