Zonetrooper
@Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
- Comment on Time travel and the economy 1 day ago:
This entire “glitch” is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.
And you’re right - that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it’s one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn’t really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It’s not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can’t end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).
But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.
- Comment on Time travel and the economy 2 days ago:
Assuming the following conditions:
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Energy is not conserved - that is, you expend less energy traveling to the past than the net energy value of something you send to or bring from the past.
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It takes approximately 1 minute for the time machine to recharge and target a new time and location after use.
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The time machine can transport any object that can be contained in a space, but the space is fairly easy to expand. Think, “setting up a tent”.
All of this, I should emphasize, horribly breaks physics. But it’s not a stupid question. The answer is, essentially, “the economy, as we know it, collapses.”
A lot of people are going to point out that you can duplicate energy sources, items, etc… by bringing them from the past. Yes, that’s true. But what people are missing is that this enables exponential growth as well:
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I buy a gold coin. I put it in a large space.
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2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
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2 minutes later, I do this again - collecting the 2 gold coins and bringing them to the (new) present. Now I have 4 gold coins.
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An hour later of doing this, I have over 536 million gold coins.
This works for any reasonably sized object, by the way. A hamburger. A tank of oil. That sweet RTX 5090 for your new gaming rig. A nuclear warhead.
Society, as we know it, isn’t to survive this. The Earth probably isn’t going to survive this. The universe may very well not, although we’ve already broken so many laws of physics getting to this point that it’s a wash anyway.
tl;dr - time machines as popular culture imagines them are a cheat code.
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- Comment on Why do games like Minecraft require a launcher? 1 week ago:
I’m honestly surprised you can even connect to an MMO with an out-of-date client. On the few I’ve played, at least, a version mismatch is an automatic refusal to connect.
- Comment on Why do games like Minecraft require a launcher? 2 weeks ago:
Technically you don’t need it, but it makes it a little easier for the developers and the users.
For that matter, if you poke around in some games’ files, you can find the actual game.exe and launch it directly from there, bypassing the launcher. You just bypass the authentication and compatibility checking as well.
- Comment on If someone rubs their pennies on you, is it considered a centual massage? 2 weeks ago:
This is /c/nostupidquestions, not /c/jokessobadthey’rewarcrimes.
- Comment on Why does .World have so many benign and EMPTY communities with no posts? 2 weeks ago:
If I had to guess, at least a good fraction of them are communities people duplicated after the initial Reddit exodus. At that point there was a lot of people trying to establish communities directly carried over, but if they failed to launch then they’ve probably been left to rot.
- Comment on If a leftist ran for president, would liberals support him? 1 month ago:
I mean, at least for me, the question is “Who?”
In more ways than one. It’s quite evident to me now that a candidate needs to be charismatic, not just have some good ideas, to motivate voters to take their side. But “leftism” and “leftist” are still pretty vague labels. Just personally, some of the left-wing figures in the US today would earn my vote and some would not. More broadly, and I think there’d be a big difference between voters-at-large’s willingness to accept Bernie-esque proposals and some of the more out-there stuff I’ve seen.
- Comment on Are the inside parts of toilets universal? 1 month ago:
While the kits may use standardized plumbing connector, they are not all guaranteed to use the same standard sizes.
- Comment on Is "Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy considered a good book? 1 month ago:
It’s not a great classical literature, for sure. The characters are almost entirely flat and forgettable, and even the handful that do grow (the young Soviet commander, the US destroyer captain) barely do so. Their experiences never almost never inform their later actions.
But among the techno-thriller/war-simulator genre, I found it more compelling than several more recent attempts (Ghost Fleet, Nuclear War: A Scenario, etc). Many of those seem to go out of their way to bend the plot to produce the author’s intended point, and while RSR wasn’t exactly innocent in that regard, I found it far less guilty than others - largely because Clancy was holding to the known or theorized-near-future capabilities.
Where I actually find it fascinating is how, in retrospect, we can see the biases of the era influencing how Clancy makes certain predictions:
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The Soviets place immense importance on taking Iceland to permit a “second Battle of the Atlantic” against US carrier groups. In retrospect, we know the Soviet Navy had no interest in this and intended to act as a cordon around northern Europe; specifically the Soviet SSBN bastions.
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While Clancy did loosely predict the nature, role, and value of Stealth aircraft, the design and air-to-air role he describes them in is actually too advanced for the 1980s setting. Essentially, Clancy bought the rumors, which were wrong.
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Land attack helicopters with ATGMs play relatively little role in the ground fighting. This was because the current generation (namely the AH-64) had just been introduced; their full capabilities and impact were not yet publicly available.
These mistakes, although understandable, provide an interesting insight into what the American defense establishment was thinking about in the early 80s.
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- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 2 months ago:
I have, thank you! Unfortunately, I don’t see the niches I’m looking for, and even when they do, they’re basically dead. I can only scream into the void so long…
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 2 months ago:
Like:
- It has that small-community feel still. I don’t see (perhaps because I stay out of a lot of the more tech-ey communities?) the kind of farming, low-effort, generally mediocre content I saw on Reddit.
- Lack of the sense of a hyper-corporatized, “You’re only allowed to do things that make us money” sense that’s enshittified much of the internet lately. I’m not even sure if Lemmy can be monetized.
Dislike:
- Not yet large enough either. I don’t want millions of users, but I still miss a lot of the more niche hobby/discussion communities I used to be able to participate in. Even communities for fairly large hobbies or interests can be dead on Lemmy.
- The awful political takes. Everything from typical dumbness up to advocating violence (but it’s okay because it’s my point). And it’s everywhere.
- Comment on How is anime and manga more popular than comics and western cartoons? 2 months ago:
Vox Machina, Scavengers’ Reign, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal.
But yeah, one of the last gasps of the streaming bubble was a surge of adult-oriented cartoons which were far and above anything of the type before them. I’m a little worried that that bubble has started to deflate, we’ll see this go away.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
These are all really good reasons to purchase digital media, but the comment above still has a great point that this is super subjective and we can’t answer for you. In the end, I echo their sentiment that “if you think the song is worth the price then go for it”.
- Comment on What the fuck happened to YouTube!? 4 months ago:
Another revanced lover here. You’re not alone. It takes away nothing and adds so much.
- Comment on Suggestion: Remove bias rating from media bias bot 5 months ago:
We are investigating in sort of “Community organized Bias / Fact check” but this commes with their own issues
To say the least. That actually sounds mildly terrifying; it either opens you up to individuals’ biases being presented as the community’s views, or would makes the decision subject to whoever organizes a “louder” group to dominate the decision making. Both are rather alarming for a community like this.
- Comment on Is it generally safe to walk through a field of cows? 6 months ago:
Small horses, like small dogs, are herd animals, are utterly convinced they are ten times their actual size, and will show this off at any opportunity.
- Comment on When did breasts become a thing that needed to be concealed in public and why? 8 months ago:
“Blame England” is basically the “Blame Canada!” of history discussions.