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- Comment on The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ 2 days ago:
leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill
The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.
Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.
Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.
There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.
There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.
I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.
- Comment on Singapore Approves 2,600-Mile Undersea Cable to Import Solar Energy from Australia 2 weeks ago:
High voltage DC lines lose about 3% per 1000km, so this project with 4300km of lines could theoretically be set up to lose 12% in losses. There’s also some experimentation with ultra high voltages that would be more efficient, but probably more complex to engineer.
- Comment on Energy-Generating Floors to Power Tokyo Subways 4 weeks ago:
So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn’t enough.
Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.
There’s an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.
A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you’d need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.
- Comment on Energy-Generating Floors to Power Tokyo Subways 4 weeks ago:
The numbers don’t make any sense.
A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.
A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That’s not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.
And of course it wouldn’t come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people’s biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.
- Comment on U.S. approves mega geothermal energy project in Utah 4 weeks ago:
So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.
They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.
In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.
Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.
Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.
So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.
- Comment on What a musical genius 1 month ago:
Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?
- Comment on Dress Codes 1 month ago:
Dammit for the last time you can’t wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor’s office.
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 1 month ago:
Unions are legal in all occupations.
One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.
There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.
But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).
- Comment on reDUcTIon iS gAIn 1 month ago:
What in the name of waluigi is this
- Comment on Empires fall 1 month ago:
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.
Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).
- Comment on In honor of the start spooky season (yay!), I have a question about an apparently beloved spooky meme/skit. What about "David S. Pumpkins" is so funny? 1 month ago:
It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.
This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.
The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.
In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.
- Comment on Elon Musk destroys astronomy 1 month ago:
It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Yeah. The mass and altitude are too low.
The thing with Kessler Syndrome is that collisions create debris, which cascades with more collisions, until there’s too much debris. But each collision actually results in the loss of kinetic energy or gravitational potential energy overall, so that the subsequent pieces are less energetic and/or less massive. Start with enough mass and enough altitude, and you’ve got a real problem where it can cascade many, many times. But with smaller objects at low altitude, and there’s just not enough energy to cause a runaway reaction.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 month ago:
The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 month ago:
So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.
In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.
The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.
- Comment on The US federal loophole that allows food companies to decide what's safe for you to eat 2 months ago:
The NOVA system is bad science, in my opinion.
When asked to classify centuries-old staples like cheese or jam or bread or pickles, the experts struggle to find a consensus on which category any given food is. And so the classification system itself is so imprecisely defined that studies based on the system will rest on a shaky foundation.
It’s better to identify what specific foods and what specific cooking techniques are bad and how they might be bad, rather than trying to say that the act of chopping, blending, mixing, cooking, or fermentation automatically makes a food less healthy.
If certain additives are bad, say that those are bad. Don’t try to lump in the other processing techniques into one basket.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
Typing of the dead
Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.
- Comment on If lemmy.world became the biggest in the fediverse with a user base that could rival Reddit. Would it become monetized? 2 months ago:
I think you’re right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.
And it’s not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.
It’s just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.
- Comment on JPEG is Dying - And that's a bad thing | 2kliksphilip 3 months ago:
I still think it’s bullshit that 20-year-old photos now look the same as 20-second-old photos. Young people out there with baby pictures that look like they were taken yesterday.
- Comment on Oh jeez 3 months ago:
The first Rambo was definitely about PTSD and how the act of killing fucks up American soldiers.
- Comment on Somehow USB disks are still the easiest and most reliable way 3 months ago:
Yes, that’s in the picture.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
Actually, I disagree that DD/MM/YYYY even qualifies as being small to big.
If you actually treat it as a counter from 01/01/2024 onward, note that the first digit that moves is actually the second digit in the 8-digit representation. In terms of significance, the most significant digit is the 5th one in the string, then counting down the significance it’s 6th, then 7th, then 8th, then jumps back to the 3rd, then the 4th, then the 1st, then the 2nd.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
Well the convention was to store it as a 32 bit signed integer, so that is any number from -2^31 to (2^31 - 1). Prime numbers are formally defined as a subset of whole numbers, so let’s ignore the negative numbers and the number zero.
Fun fact: the largest signed 32-bit integer is itself a prime. And the wikipedia page lists it as the 105,097,565th prime.
By the time we hit the 2038 problem, there will have been about 105 million seconds since 1970 where the Unix time was a prime number. And it’s a 10-digit number in base 10, where prime frequency is something about 4% of the numbers.
Does that answer your question about prime frequency today? Eh, I’m sure someone else can figure that out. If not, I’ll probably have to wait until I’m in front of a computer.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
No, I’m taking back the word “prime” from a company that shouldn’t have exclusive rights to define the term. I’m not going to cede that territory just because I don’t like the company.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
If you’re looking for a proof:
Our base 10 system represents numbers by having little multipliers in front of each power of 10. So a number like 1234 is 1 x 10^3 + 2 x 10^2 + 3 x 10^1 + 4 x 10^0 .
Note that 10 is just (3 x 3) + 1. So for any 2 digit number, you’re looking at the first digit times (9 + 1), plus the second digit. Or:
(9 times the first digit) + (the first digit) + (the second digit).
Well we know that 9 times the first digit is definitely divisible by both 3 and 9. And we know that adding two divisible-by-n numbers is also divisible by n.
So we can ignore that first term (9 x first digit), and just look to whether first digit plus second digit is divisible. If it is, then you know that the original big number is divisible.
And when you extend this concept out to 3, 4, or more digit numbers, you see that it holds for every power of 10, and thus, every possible length of number. For both 9 and 3.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
It works for 9, too.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
ISO 8601 is the only normal date system.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 3 months ago:
Yes, and recurring dates naturally drop the year, so MM/DD better fits that general rule.
- Submitted 3 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 42 comments
- Comment on Life, huh 3 months ago:
I’ve seen some discussion hypothesizing an explanation that Millennials actually use more sunscreen, use less nicotine, and exercise more than Gen Z. I can buy it.