frezik
@frezik@midwest.social
- Comment on THE EARTH IS SPHERICAL, DIPSHITS 5 days ago:
Unfortunately, what’s more likely is that while some will fall away, the remainder will be more extreme. That’s what happens when religious prophecies fail, such as The Great Disappointment among Adventists.
- Comment on THE EARTH IS SPHERICAL, DIPSHITS 5 days ago:
This past December, The Final Experiment went down to Antarctica to take a video of the 24 hour sun. It’s causing much consternation among flat earthers.
- Comment on Emma 1 week ago:
It’s an AI, and no, it doesn’t.
- Comment on At this rate, why not. 1 week ago:
And states the main problem, with a deep ocean detonation, would be fallout.
I’m not sure that’s right. The shockwave of a bomb that insane could easily have seismic and tsunami effects. Probably be the biggest mass of dead fish floating at the surface, too.
Should probably talk to some geologists first.
- Comment on At this rate, why not. 1 week ago:
IIRC, all that coal comes from plant material from before there were microbes that can break down cellulose. Meaning that while it’s possible to regenerate oil over millions of years, coal cannot.
So yes, there may be more of it now, but when we burn it, it’s gone forever.
- Comment on At this rate, why not. 1 week ago:
There’s an abiotic pathway that creates new oil geologically. It’s a very small amount.
The theory is popular in Russia, where it’s claimed to be the main way oil is produced. That’s complete bullshit. It turned out there is some, but not enough to matter.
- Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror 2 weeks ago:
Phrase I picked up from Well There’s Your Problem: centrally unplanned economy.
One company, Baxter, makes 95% of the saline IV solution for the US. Most of it comes from one factory in Marion, N.C. It has been hit by natural disasters before and caused shortages. One happened just this past few months.
- Comment on Patch this Bish! 2 weeks ago:
If teeth regenerate, do we have to constantly chew on things like rodents?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
The majority of “We the people” voted for something else. Don’t let Trump have the narrative that this is what the American people asked for.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Right; what do people expect, here? A “general strike” that someone calls at random won’t do much more than a few extra people calling in sick. It takes time to build solidarity to agree that we’re all going to do this. If we had that kind of solidarity, I don’t think we’d be in this position in the first place.
- Comment on To whomever invented LED bus advertisements: I despise you. 2 weeks ago:
At the very least, can they not be blue? It’s the worst color at night.
Red would be best–it fucks with your eyes the least–but there’s often legal limits on red lights (besides brake/turn signals) on non-emergency vehicles. Something in orange or yellow would be less harsh.
- Comment on It looks like someone at Activision is leaking Slack screenshots to right-wing X users 2 weeks ago:
Slack or the OS would need to support it directly, and I don’t think either of those have it.
- Comment on Algae Rock! 2 weeks ago:
Fun fact, depending on your definition of “fun”. Deniers sometimes argue that plants will just grow to absorb the extra co2. This doesn’t work in general, because most plants aren’t limited by co2 availability. There are some exceptions, and the algae that causes red tide is one of them. So we have that to look forward to.
- Comment on It looks like someone at Activision is leaking Slack screenshots to right-wing X users 2 weeks ago:
The techniques you’re thinking of are for documents sent by email or some such. You add innocuous whitespace or typos that are unique to each one, and send them individually. If one leaks, you can match it to the employee who received it. That doesn’t work for screenshots of Slack.
- Comment on spidey senses 2 weeks ago:
It’ll be a giant spider invasion of savings at Menards!
- Comment on I liked Star Trek before it got woke. /s 3 weeks ago:
I’d also drag out Angel One from TNG. It’s the laziest way to write a matriarchy: everything is the same, except women are in charge instead of men.
- Comment on I liked Star Trek before it got woke. /s 3 weeks ago:
How come the Picard real estates remained in the family though all those generations, I can’t fully explain.
Doyalist answer: the writers laid out shipboard EPS conduits more thoughtfully than the Federation economy.
- Comment on Anon watches The Terminator 3 weeks ago:
I can find several people walking around with an AR15 strapped on their back with a sign that says “For sale, $1200”. That’s the actual private sales loophole.
- Comment on I liked Star Trek before it got woke. /s 3 weeks ago:
What? No. Marxism notes that scarcity wouldn’t be a thing with increasing industrialization. Indeed, it isn’t; we have plenty of resources to put a roof over everyone’s head and food in their belly. The base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can be completely covered, and the rest are not necessarily best fulfilled by mere material possessions. We could have the whole thing done in a year if society simply made the choice.
Now, I don’t think the Federation is Marxist, because we actually know very little about how the economy works at all. There’s contradictory information, it might depend on what time period or planet you’re talking about, and the writers have generally been uninterested in exploring the economy beyond superficial mentions.
- Comment on How did a simple phone call become so problematic? 3 weeks ago:
In addition to everything else, there’s also a feedback loop of spam calls predominating. The more legit conversation moves to other methods, the more spam calls stick out. That, in turn, means even more people prefer something other than phone calls. It eventually gets to the point where 99% of calls are spam, and that whole method of communication becomes useless.
- Comment on It's a good group! 3 weeks ago:
Sorta, not really.
The book is notable for its almost complete lack of sex on any level. The protagonist goes on a date with a woman at one point. That’s about it. A shower scene where everyone is naked but nobody is horny would fit right in.
Stranger in a Strange Land, OTOH, goes completely the other way. I was reading that book on vacation, and a friend picked it up and peeked at a page about halfway through. The last half of that book is basically pornography, so . . .
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 4 weeks ago:
Hitler didn’t take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.
America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.
So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don’t expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.
I do know for sure that we can’t go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.
- Comment on Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit - Announcement Trailer 4 weeks ago:
Is there a Nintendo Power article I have to read to get past this one part? It’s not an authentic experience otherwise.
- Comment on ADL defends Nazi salute 4 weeks ago:
Did it ever occur to you to watch the video? Even the first time was a very deliberate movement, and the second time should remove any doubt.
- Comment on GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100 4 weeks ago:
Hell, I got GTA V for free (legally, yes). It was the first GTA game I played, and I think its launch reviews were massively overrated.
I doubt I’ll find a free deal for GTA VI, but I ain’t buying it new.
- Comment on GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100 4 weeks ago:
For $100, it better have a strip club achievement that comes with a coupon for an actual lap dance.
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 4 weeks ago:
Zelda 64 on the Switch was a mess at release, but the emulator has improved greatly since then.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I think I’m anarchist in terms of personality, but I’m not quite there politically. Like you, I’m not quite sure how to get there from here. If we do things like mutual aid and support unions, I don’t think we’ll go wrong, and that could end up leading to anarchism at some point in the future.
Where I’m anarchist in personality is that I fundamentally don’t understand why you would want to be an authoritarian. When I first read 1984 and there’s the bit from O’Brien about how the system is there for power as an end to itself, I didn’t understand why anybody would want that. I can kinda see power as a way of gaining a comfortable life for yourself–usually at the expense of others–but not as its own end. I still don’t understand it, but have come to accept that there are people like that.
Some of those people are draped in thin blue line flags, and some of those people are draped in a hammer and sickle.
- Comment on Are there any games like Starfield? 5 weeks ago:
Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
- Comment on Photons 5 weeks ago:
The science on this is relatively recent, but it turns out there is a photomolecular effect on evaporating water that can’t be explained with heat.
news.mit.edu/…/how-light-can-vaporize-water-witho….
Not quite sure how this would affect melting ice cream. It does fill in some missing pieces to climate models. There are more clouds around than the models predict, which raises the planet’s albedo.