Deme
@Deme@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Mass Destruction 2 days ago:
I mean, Oppenheimer at least seemed to regret what he did. Teller on the other hand was completely remorseless and unhinged.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 1 week ago:
Sure, but the roads the enemy is using are a vast minority of all the roads out there, constrained to certain geographical areas. If one happens to be in the middle of it, they’ll have bigger concerns than whether to invest in a bike or a horse.
If it’s the apocalypse, then everyone will be desperate.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 1 week ago:
Eh, depends on if we go out with a bang or a whimper. I’m betting it’s going to be the latter.
If not, then it’s likely that nukes put a stop to the artilleryfest before it has a chance to really get going. And my point about there being a lot of roads in the world still stands. No military would start to target roads in any meaningful scale when they’re going to save their precious shells for the enemy.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 1 week ago:
There’s a lot more roads than there are cars to fill them and the good thing about bikes is that if you can get past an obstacle on foot, you can carry your bike while doing so. Even if the major highways get blocked by the occasional massive pileup that you can’t climb over while carrying your bike, you can always take the smaller road. And where would all the craters come from? How many artillery batteries and mortar companies do you expect to see in the post-apocalypse?
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 1 week ago:
As long as there’s roads or smooth paths left, an ordinary person can do 200 km in a day on a bicycle. A quick search tells me that specifically trained horses can do 160 km in an endurance race. Sure a horse would probably be the fastest in a sprint, but a bicycle has the best travel speed.
- Comment on They're a different species, so it's cool to eat them 3 weeks ago:
A person can be rich in many ways. A coral reef is rich in biodiversity etc.
The rich refers to the group of people who are financially rich to an obscene extent.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Mostly it’s just people discussing whether flour should be measured by mass or volume. Jokes about using some mcburgers per football field -esque satirical units, some joke about using moles instead. Some comment about a funny misspelling in the meme. Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
I think you’re taking the trollface in the meme a bit too literally. It’s annoying and unnecessary, and can cause mistakes that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Ahem, the Mars Climate Orbiter is a good example of a particularly costly one.
Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage. It’s merely annoying having to accommodate the outdated quirks of one country. You having to do the opposite is quite reasonable on the other hand, because you’re not accommodating the conventions of one country, but those of the rest of the world.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Fair point. Rephrase: largest English speaking country by internet footprint, global influence or some similar measure.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Thank you for the correction kind sir. My deepest apologies sir. English isn’t my native language. Would you perhaps care to elaborate on the claim made in your previous comment, so that this here conversation may have some substance beyond mere grammar.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Oh I understand it pretty well. I just take no pride in that. If I don’t remember something I can always look it up. Doesn’t mean it’s not impractical nonsense.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Bear in mind that there are multiple countries where English is the largest language and metric is used, and that English is the modern lingua franca. It just so happens that the largest english speaking country has some weird ways to measure things. As such those weird conventions are often forced on anyone who wants to look for a recipe in English, be that their native language or not.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
I’m sorry but who are you referring to? I’m sure there’s idiots in every country, but that is quite an outlandish generalization to make if we’re still talking about entire continents.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
Oh no. I just want to be rid of the imperial system. I would have no issue with it if it wasn’t a part of my life. Unfortunately I work in a field where imperial units are used world wide (apart from China and Russia for historical reasons). Because of this, I use some of those units myself every day at work. I understand some of them but take no pride in it. The only reason that the imperial system is still used so much is purely by convention. It is inferior to the metric system in every aspect. I do not feel superior to people who use imperial units because as stated above, I am one of them. People who I feel superior to are the ones who delude themselves into thinking that this somehow isn’t purely because of convention. I dislike them because they are forced upon me by international conventions. OP appears to dislike them because recipes written in English force those units into their life.
- Comment on I just want to make cookies :( 2 months ago:
There is no pride in understanding a nonsensical system of measurements.
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot
- Iain M. Banks
- Comment on So professional looking it must be true 2 months ago:
Undeniable DPRK W
- Comment on First contact when? 2 months ago:
Climate change is just one of six planetary boundaries that we’ve crossed, out of a total of nine. The choice of rocket fuel is secondary to having the industrial capacity necessary for such endeavours, while not fucking up the planet in numerous ways.
- Comment on First contact when? 2 months ago:
#1: I doubt there would ever be a situation where those same resources wouldn’t be better used to make things slightly less unbearable on the home world. In our case, even if we covered the world in poison and had an endless nuclear winter, Mars would still look like the worse planet to live on. It’s doubtful whether or not a better one exists within any “practical” distance. If the aliens happened to have a lucky spawn in a star system with multiple habitable planets, good for them. They have another chance to figure things out. But interstellar flight (not to mention colonization) is still vastly more difficult.
#2: Exploiting the resources of the solar system is orders and orders of magnitude simpler than establishing self-sufficient colonies in uninhabitable space or planets. The show For All Mankind threw out most of any believability it had a while ago, but even there the entire fourth season revolved around the subject of how even a single asteroid full of rare earth metals would sate our hunger for such a long time as to effectively kill any initiatives to expand in space.
- Comment on First contact when? 2 months ago:
Space exploration necessitates a technological industrial civilization. So they/we would somehow have to figure out how to first do #2 (so as to not die), while still maintaining the industrial capacity to spread out into space. That sounds like an even more improbable subset of the already improbable scenario #2.
- Comment on First contact when? 2 months ago:
That distance exists not only in space, but most likely time as well. Extrapolating from our singular data point, it would seem that the lifespan of a technological civilization is quite short. The odds of two of those being around at the right times for even one of them to detect the passing emission shell of the other is diminishingly small.
- Comment on First contact when? 2 months ago:
My thinking is that a technological species either goes into ecological overshoot so badly that it kills itself (or at least its capacity to conquer space) ((this is what we’re doing currently)), or then it learns to live harmoniously as a functioning part of the wider planetary system, and thus has no need to spread into space.
- Comment on Guess I should type faster 3 months ago:
I agree with your first paragraph, but not your edit. People just get attached to their comments. Nobody wants to see their (at least in their opinion) meticulously thought out debunk slamdunk of a comment ending up hidden or deleted. Even more so if making said comment took time and research for sources etc.
- Comment on Anon is an anthropologist 3 months ago:
What appeal to authority do you mean?
- Comment on Anon is an anthropologist 3 months ago:
- first powered flight. The first humans flew in 1783 on a hot air balloon.
- Comment on Big booty meteorologists are best meteorologists 6 months ago:
Private weather station?
It’s pretty much impossible to make reliable forecasts based on the data of a singular weather station. The initial data comes in from a variety of sources including satellites, radars, surface observation stations (weather stations) and upper air soundings around the globe. All of the above are maintained by public sector organizations who collaborate and share the data because the weather is an inescapably global thing. During WW2 the Germans actually set foot in Canada to set up a weather station in an attempt to spread the coverage of their observation network.
Nowadays all that data is used as inputs for numerical weather prediction models, running on supercomputers in the basements of meteorological institutes and agencies. Big global ones like ECMWF and GFS are used pretty much by all meteorologists around the world, who look at those and other smaller, more local models. They compare the different forecasts and critically evaluate the probabilities of different outcomes. They apply their own judgement selecting the most credible raw forecast and then edit that if needed. All in all, it’s a very global effort.
At least where myself and @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee are from, meteorologists at the public broadcasting company (where that title is a requirement for getting the job) collaborate closely with their colleagues at the national meteorological institute. Their job is to comprehend the situation, decide which bits of it are important, and then boil that down into a smooth and easy to understand presentation.
If a weather reporter isn’t an actual meteorologist, then there is an actual meteorologist behind the scenes who made the presentation for the reporter to present.
- Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much 6 months ago:
Nah anarchists also fall within the “capitalism is working as intended and must be destroyed” camp. They just have different ways of doing it.
- Comment on when you realize 💀💀💀 6 months ago:
It’s nukes. An environmental catastrophe doesn’t happen at those timescales :D
- Comment on I wouldn't ever run into this situation because I would never leave my basement 7 months ago:
Our societies aren’t the only things dying.
- Comment on So cool! 7 months ago:
This was me on friday except that instead of moss there were fantastic snowbanks sculpted into exquisite shapes by wind.
- Comment on That was a close one 8 months ago:
Usually when there’s a headline, yes. But 545 million miles equals over 5.6 AU, which is a very large distance even in this context.