merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon is bored of it all 1 day ago:
I mean, steps 0-.99 are touching grass long enough to bring your brain back to equilibrium.
So, if the place you live has snow on the ground between November and May, you have to wait a few months to touch grass?
- Comment on Anon is bored of it all 1 day ago:
Or go to some small town you’ve never been before
How does that not require money?
- Comment on I have a plan 1 day ago:
The coastal part, sure. The mountain area of Washington is pretty conservative.
- Comment on Triangle 3 days ago:
Her plane may not have been off-the-shelf, but I’m sure she was heavily involved in any modification to it. She was a pilot, that was her concern.
She probably didn’t consider herself a radio operator, and didn’t realize how critical it was to fully understand the radio gear.
My guess is that at that point in time, being a radio operator would be like someone who knew something like 3d printing in great detail today. It was a niche skill that involved a lot of obscure knowledge. If someone doesn’t know something like 3d printing, someone can set it all up for them and then say “ok, when you’re ready, hit this button, when you’re done, do this” and they can use it. I assume that’s what happened with the radio setup. Someone with expertise set it up, and it might have worked, but she didn’t know enough to troubleshoot it when it went wrong.
- Comment on Triangle 4 days ago:
To put things in context, this is what they used for communication between a tank and its commanders in WWI:
A tank with a pigeon being released from a hatch.
When the Titanic sunk in 1912, they had a telegraph on board, but no voice radio.
In the 1920s radio took off as a one-way broadcaster to receiver technology, but it still was only rarely used as two-way communications. That only really started for communications between ships in WWII.
So, although she didn’t know how to use the radio in her plane, it was mostly because radio communication was a brand new thing. I’m sure what they put in her plane wasn’t some off-the-shelf radio that had standard switches, antennas and parts. It was probably cobbled together from various parts and only the truly tech-oriented people understood it.
- Comment on It hurts. 4 days ago:
To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.
You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.
- Comment on Chelyabinsk liked your Post 1 week ago:
A 12.5m crater doesn’t sound that big. Sounds like what you get from a bomb in a war zone. Bad if you happen to be right next to it, but If you’re a few blocks away you might have shattered windows, but no structural damage.
Where did you get the numbers btw? I took a quick look and couldn’t find any details on how big the asteroid was.
- Comment on Chelyabinsk liked your Post 1 week ago:
225m for a hit where there’s no atmosphere to slow it down. I wonder if something that would cause a that size of crater on the moon would even make it to the Earth’s surface, or if it would burn up before it hit.
- Comment on WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CURSOR? 1 week ago:
I remember that post, and that only makes it stranger. What is the BBC doing that requires that many monitors?
- Comment on Anon watches Lost 1 week ago:
That’s great. I hope he’s basically able to pick and choose his roles these days, and not work if there’s nothing he’s interested in.
- Comment on Anon watches Lost 1 week ago:
If he was smart about investing it, he probably earned enough to retire and live at a middle-class level for the rest of his life. But, he’s probably not loaded. He wasn’t ever one of the main stars of a show, he was always a side character. Plus, lifestyle inflation is a big problem for actors. Say he was making $400k per year on Hawaii Five-O, he probably wasn’t living a modest $80k/year lifestyle and putting away 80% of his earnings.
I would bet he’s still out looking for work so he can live in a house in LA with a pool up in the hills, not in a 1 bedroom apartment in the city.
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 weeks ago:
When you have no other options, are you going to wish you knew how to garden or not
Why would you imagine there would be a situation where you had no other options? If you had no other options, are you going to wish you knew how to unicycle?
There is no way to prepare for a food system breaking down. People will die of starvation if that happens. People who have gardens will have those gardens raided by hungry neighbours, or seized by the authorities. Ultimately, the food system breaking down would probably mostly hurt poorer countries because the richer ones would divert any available food their way.
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 weeks ago:
prepping properly is actually things like learning to garden well
A garden is never going to be a primary source of calories. I know someone who has a massive backyard garden with at least 10 pool-table sized raised beds and a bunch of other smaller areas with berries, etc. He loves gardening but he can’t keep up on his own and hires help for it. And, even then, it’s mostly just extra things for salads. Sometimes he dedicates a full weekend to preserving things, but even then, what he has is just a supplement to his grocery shopping.
- Comment on Today is the day 2 weeks ago:
If Jesus was truly the son of god / some aspect of a god and hell exists, that’s where Chuck Norris is.
- Comment on Coffee ☕ 2 weeks ago:
The Trojan Room coffee pot camera existed before the web existed. Before the web it was a client/server protocol on a local network. They only made it into a webcam after the web was invented and started supporting images.
What I remember is that when the first web browsers capable of displaying images were launched, people found a way to sample a single frame from a camera and load it into an image tag to get an extremely slow frame rate camera. People had been trying to make video calling a thing since the 1960s, and I think the first “webcams” were new attempts to demonstrate that. They basically came out at the same time as XCoffee being available on the Internet, but they had more publicity behind them. IMO, what made the coffee pot special was that it was so clearly useless to everybody except a few people in a lab in Cambridge. It was revolutionary that bandwidth and camera hardware was so cheap that someone could allow anybody on the planet to just check out the level of their coffee machine on demand at any time.
- Comment on Coffee ☕ 2 weeks ago:
whenever I leave the hoose
Canadian, eh?
- Comment on Reporting an absence 3 weeks ago:
I hope whoever this was recorded these snipers for as long as possible.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 3 weeks ago:
We don’t really know. Maybe they stopped completely and honoured the deal. Maybe they didn’t even slow down and just hid what they were doing.
We know that they allowed international inspectors in while the deal was active though, so at the very least they had to work harder to hide things if they were continuing to work.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 3 weeks ago:
That would be nice. But, one common theme with religious people is that they always believe that they are going to heaven, but everyone else isn’t.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 3 weeks ago:
Interesting, I didn’t realize that. I thought all of the groups Iran supported were Shia.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 3 weeks ago:
It would be funny if they weren’t actually trying to bring about the biblical end-times. Also, they don’t care at all about the future because they don’t believe that the future will exist, since we’re in endtimes.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 3 weeks ago:
What’s going on:
Israel and Iran:
- Israel has terrible relations with virtually every country in the world, and even worse relations with the countries nearby, one of those countries is Iran
- Iran is the only Shia Muslim country in the world (one where the majority of the population is Shia and the people in power are Shia)
- There are Shia minorities in many countries, and in some countries the Shia are a majority of the population, but don’t have power (Iraq used to be like this, not sure how it is now)
- Iran supports armed Shia groups outside Iran (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, etc.)
- Sometimes these Iran-backed Shia groups act a bit like governments, sometimes like terrorist groups, often a combination of both.
- Israel shares borders with many countries with Iran-backed militias, so is constantly dealing with low-level conflict with groups linked to (financed by) Iran
- Iran (quite reasonably) thinks that the only way it will be safe from attack is if it has nuclear weapons, so it has been trying to develop them for years
- Israel (quite reasonably) doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, so has been trying to stop them for years, using spying, sabotage, and more recently, direct airstrikes
- Under Obama, a deal was reached where Iran agreed to stop work on nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief
- Obama violated the terms of this treaty (as he has violated many other treaties) mainly because Obama signed it, and Trump has personal hatred for anything having to do with Obama
- With no deal in place, Iran went back to working (at least more openly) on nuclear weapons
Trump, Racists, and Evangelicals:
- The war against so-called “DEI” has meant any non-white person in an elevated position in the US government and military has been demoted or fired, and incompetent white person have replaced them
- DOGE meant eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”, but mostly they eliminated anything they didn’t understand, which included soft power, Iran analysts, etc.
- Successfully kidnapping Maduro from Venezuela gave the Trump admin a false sense of confidence
- Israel has a powerful lobby in the US,
- Many evangelicals believe that we’re in the biblical endtimes, and that the rapture will happen soon. They want the jews to go back to Israel so Jesus can come back and kill them, then they get to go to heaven. Jews being in control of biblical places is a key element of their theory, so they support Israel because they want the world to end.
Israel’s latest attacks:
- Israel attacked Iran last year, and the US joined in, and they claimed this “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program
- Despite this, the message is always that Iran is days or weeks away from a nuclear weapon, so both things are true: the Israeli/US strikes against Iran were a massive success and Iran’s program was obliterated, but Iran is still days or weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon
- The Trump admin was trying to negotiate a new treaty with Iran, but wasn’t making much progress because the negotiators were unqualified idiots: a real estate developer (Steve Witkoff) and Trump’s son in law (Jared Kushner)
- Israel saw another opportunity to take out targets in Iran recently, so they attacked, and the US felt the need to join in, despite being in the middle of negotiations
Hormuz
- Many countries in the middle east only have major ports inside the Persian Gulf
- Getting into the gulf means getting past the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran can easily control, it’s only 50km coast-to-coast in some places
- Iran, at best, has non-hostile relationships with the rest of the Persian Gulf countries, so it doesn’t risk much by sinking any ship passing by in the Gulf
What’s Next:
- Who knows
- The US went into the conflict without a goal
- Israel went into it with goals (destroy the ability for Iran to finance militias on Israel’s border, force them to focus on issues back home), but achieving its goals might make things even worse for the US
- Iran is facing an existential threat, so it’s unlikely to back down, and it’s not really like the US can escalate without actually invading
- In any invasion, the US would be badly hurt, Iran has a population of almost 100 million, 660 thousand active military, and 350 thousand reserves
- Any invasion would also serve to have Iranians rally around their country
- Many Iranians (especially urban ones) hate the theocratic regime, but they’ve seen how after US “interventions” nearby countries have collapsed into chaos. Stability under a hated theocratic leader is much preferable to chaos, so they’re unlikely to rise up
- There are groups inside Iran who might fight (the Kurds for example), but they’ve been repeatedly burned by the US, over and over, going back decades, so they’re not going to take promises from the US seriously
- Comment on funny number 3 weeks ago:
Putting young-person slang in a movie has been a bad idea since before Gen Z existed.
- Comment on funny number 3 weeks ago:
Nature is healing.
- Comment on funny number 3 weeks ago:
To adults? Or teens? Or 6-year-olds?
- Comment on funny number 3 weeks ago:
The number 69 has staying power. It was hardly new when it was used in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and that was in 1989, 37 years ago.
How long will 6-7 last? I’m guessing not more than a year. I bet even now it’s being included as part of a script for a kids’ movie, and by the time the movie comes out the kids will all think it’s “cringe” (or whatever term replaces cringe).
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 4 weeks ago:
I still don’t think that would be enough for me to remember it. It would mean I’d have to give it out to people. But, I didn’t do that so often that I’d have memorized the number and remembered it for 30 years.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 4 weeks ago:
My steam account dates from the release of the Orange Box. That was a few years after launch, because back at the beginning Steam was only for Valve games and those weren’t really my jam. But, the Orange Box was a great deal. So, I bought it (retail version) and then I had to register a Steam account.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 4 weeks ago:
I can remember mine too, 4170129. I just can’t remember why I remember it. The numbers I tend to remember are the ones that I actually had to use often. For example, I remember some phone numbers because to call someone I actually had to punch in (or dial) their phone number. But, did we have to type in our IDs from memory when logging in or something? That seems like it would be a terrible UI, and surely by the mid 90s nobody was still doing that.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 4 weeks ago:
I remember my ICQ number, 4170129, but I don’t remember why I know it.
Surely I didn’t have to type it in every time I logged in, did I? That would be a really stupid UI.
