ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Both can be true: it is too expensive, and there’s no money to be made. $840B wouldn’t put a dent in the launch costs for the tens of thousands of rockets we’d need to put into space over the next several decades in order to just get rid of the Pacific Garbage Patch, to say nothing of the rest of the trash on this planet.

  And actually, there’s a third true thing: it wouldn’t help much. Having it on Earth isn’t the problem; it’s having it in the oceans that’s the problem. Partially because of the environmental impact, partially because of the biological impact, and partially because we don’t have access to it to reuse it, so we have to keep making more. Once we had it out of the oceans, we could recycle it or even just sequester it away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. To get into the sun, we’d probably want to fuel the rockets in space using reaction material mined in space (from the moon or an asteroid). That would more or less eliminate the problem you’re talking about, which is why I kind of skipped over that in my comment. But you’re right; this is one of a million things that makes space travel hard and expensive.

  2. We can get up to any speed with enough time and fuel. The trash rockets would just need to get into a solar orbit, and then burn retrograde for a fairly long while. Or if you add a gravity assist in, this is doable today; the Parker Solar Probe got to (and indeed beyond) that speed, for instance. It’s easier and quicker when there aren’t squishy people aboard (we don’t tend to like acceleration much higher than 9.8m/s², for instance).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, also: I don’t think it’s a stupid question. It’s a fun question. It might not be a workable plan, but I love thinking about this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Just gathering all the trash would be tricky (and, rocket aside, if we could do it easily, we’d probably have done it already; and just put it in a big garbage dump or something). Think about a swimming pool with a bunch of fallen leaves in it; it’s moving around constantly, and if you swim toward one it’ll kind of move away from you or break up when you try to pull it out.

  2. Ok, let’s handwave getting the trash out of the ocean. It’s probably a solvable problem. First we need to sort it; all of the recyclables need to stay and be recycled, because we still need that material and because we need to reduce the weight. Compostable stuff can probably also just stay and be composted. Corrosive stuff probably shouldn’t go on a rocket. All of the wet trash (it came from the ocean, it’s all wet) needs to be dried out first; partially because we need the water, and partially because water is really heavy. And once we’ve done all of that…well, trying to figure out something productive to do with that big pile of dry trash is almost certainly going to be cheaper than launching it into space.

  3. Ok, let’s handwave that problem too; let’s imagine we’re just going to grab it out of the water, compress it, and get it onto a rocket. Except we’re going to need a whole lot more than one rocket; a decent guess says that we’ve launched 18,003,266 kg into space ever—over our entire history in space—but the Pacific Garbage Patch alone is estimated to be at least 45,000,000 kg, meaning we’d need to launch more than twice the number of rockets we’ve ever launched before. More than 60,000 rockets have been launched since 1957, so that’s substantial. It would take a while; even if we turned the entire space industry’s output toward the project, they’re “only” launching about 1,000 rockets a year nowadays, so it’d take at least 120 years of NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Roscosmos, the ESA, the Chinese Space Agency, etc. doing nothing but trash full-time.

  4. Ok fine. Again, we’re handwaving; let’s imagine we have everything loaded up on rockets on the launch pad. Just getting it into orbit is tough for the simple reason that we have to take not just the payload (the trash) but also the fuel we need to get it there, and to get that fuel off the ground we need fuel, and to get that fuel off the ground, we need— you get the picture. The Tsiolkovsky equations govern how much, and thankfully the number isn’t exponential. But we will still need a lot of rocket fuel. Good thing we’re devoting the entire space industry’s output toward this for the next 120 years.

  5. Now it’s all in space. Great! That was actually the easy part. We could just leave it in orbit around Earth; that would be a really really bad idea for a lot of reasons (but it’s what we’re already doing with our space junk, so…), and you said “into the sun,” so let’s talk about getting it there. Believe it or not, getting it into the sun is actually way harder than getting it out of the solar system entirely. If you were on a rocket, and you pointed it toward the sun, and you burned and burned and burned and burned until you ran out of fuel, you would counterintuitively end up somewhere out past the Earth’s orbit on the other side of the sun. This is because you have to actually cancel out your (very fast) orbital rotation, which you inherited from the Earth when you launched, before you can get pulled into the sun; otherwise you just end up going around the sun in a very elliptical orbit. It takes a lot of fuel to cancel out Earth’s substantial orbital rotation. So we have to get that up there too.

  6. The good news is, once you get it to the sun, you’re good. It won’t cause any noticeable change to the sun (the entire Earth could fall into the sun and it wouldn’t care). And while the trash would initially melt and then burn due to all the heat, smoke is entirely a product of atmosphere and gravity; so no smoke would be generated and it would not make it back to Earth. But once all the ash made it to the sun, it wouldn’t continue burning per se; the sun doesn’t produce heat by burning, but by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. The Garbage Patch is mostly plastic, so carbon polymers. But the sun isn’t big enough to fuse carbon into magnesium, which means all of those carbon atoms would just kinda…sink into the sun, hanging out under all the hydrogen and helium and lithium and beryllium and boron, but on top of the nitrogen and oxygen and such, for the next ten billion years until the sun turns into a red giant. At which point the sun will expand outward, potentially to engulf the Earth’s orbit; at which point it will reclaim all the atoms of the trash we didn’t send up there.

  7. Eventually, after a bunch of different cycles and drama, the constituent atoms of our trash and everything else would become part of the white dwarf that our sun will become; a small, slowly-cooling stellar remnant. After that…we don’t know! The time it takes for a white dwarf to cool completely is longer than the life of the universe so far, so we have to speculate. It’s possible that the remnants of our sun and our trash and everything else might end up becoming a black dwarf, which might look like a shiny spherical mirror the size of the Earth.

  All of that seems like a lot of work. I think we should try something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fairly common expression in English, too, with much the same meaning. I don’t know what sort of rock these people are living under.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this emoji mean? Is this a British thumbs up?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember using the second definition in elementary school in the early 90s, before cell phones were on common use, long before they flipped open, and even before they had extendable antennas. I suppose they might have been a cordless landline, but I always assumed it was a corded phone. The “call me” message, then, wasn’t about being able to see someone but not hear them except in very specific circumstances; instead, it was implied to mean “call me later.” It could be used as a way of flirting, or it could be more platonic. I suppose it could also be used in a business setting, though I wasn’t really old enough to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

  Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why does every zoology museum look the aame

  My guess is that it’s because there are only so many ways to arrange cases of bones and reproductions of skeletons in a way that’s visually interesting, compelling, and informational.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You Should Know About Radio Free Fedi!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: that was the original idea behind VLC! You could connect to video (and audio) streams. Hence, “VideoLAN.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨smart engineering⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The smart engineer then buys a stock amp for $1000, 3D prints a dial that goes to 12, installs it, delivers it to Spïnäl Täp (I can never remember where the umlaut goes), and pockets his well-earned profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?

  In my experience, it’s not a choice they’ve made. Some people are bad with money, to be sure. I’m related to a few. But they don’t typically just decide they’re going to blow August’s grocery budget on a new wardrobe; they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills. Some bad choices, some unavoidable occurrences, some terrible luck, but nothing that crosses the line to them being frivolous.

  Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.

  I don’t live a whole lot different than my parents did then. We have more kids than they did, but I’m in a higher earning potential career than he was. Plus, my wife and I are both employed. Yet if either of us were laid off, we would not last long on savings.

  One thing I’ve learned as I get older: yeah, people are irresponsible. But the generations are pretty much the same, and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way to get clicks on your article but a bad way to actually get any meaningful insight about people. So if our generation is having more widespread problems than our parents’ generation did at this age, it’s probably not because we aren’t as responsible as they are. Something systemic probably changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc).

  It’s easy to say “stabilize your finances!” but on a practical level it’s almost impossible to do when there’s no wiggle room. You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month. It’s not like there’s any money to be put into savings if you’re making $2,000 a month but putting $1,000 toward rent, since most people rather like to eat.

  I’m thankful to not be in that situation, personally, but it’s not something you can just wish your way out of. Even your examples require a certain level of financial breathing room that people don’t tend to have when every dollar is spoken for. You can’t finance a truck if your DTI is already high. You can’t take CDL training or night school if you have to work two jobs just to keep food on the table.

  I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.

  But if you get into that scenario, you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever. That’s not really an option for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

  So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is,

  I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.

  At the end of the day, irresponsibility with money is still a problem for sure. And keeping-up-with-the-joneses is probably a problem for some people. I’m not one of them, and none of the people I know are either, but I suppose some people have that issue. In my experience, though, most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations. They’re just trying to keep their heads above water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree strongly that $1k is enough for any one emergency. My healthcare deductible is higher than that. The last two times I’ve needed car repairs, the bill was $2-3k to get the thing back on the road. If one of our appliances breaks down, we might be able to replace it for $1,000 if it’s the dryer or the dishwasher, but if it’s the fridge, that’s not close to enough.

  $1,000 was plenty when I was in college back in the mid-00s, but I was single with no kids. That’s just not a realistic emergency fund in 2024, and even less so if you have a family.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, what you see isn’t familiar to me at all. The people I know are very good at being frugal and wringing the last out of every dime, not being extravagant or frivolous, etc. We have no car payment on our ten-year-old minivan, own our home, and haven’t been clothes shopping in years except to replace things that wear out, that sort of thing.

  The problem isn’t budgeting; we have a budget, and we stick to it pretty well. There are very few things we could cut, and doing so might save us a hundred or so dollars per month. The problem is that inflation has eaten up every dollar from my paycheck we used to have in surplus. The problem is that my salary hasn’t kept up with inflation and nobody else around here is hiring.

  Yes, you can budget yourself from the top of one financial class into the bottom of another one; and you can manage money poorly enough to drop from anywhere to the bottom of the heap. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant financial crunch happening for most people in the world right now.

  Seems like everyone has their own preferred explanation as to why that’s happening (corporate greed vs. government overreach), but the fact that it’s happening seems pretty clear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For sure, but like…I’m a middle-aged software engineer in a low cost-of-living area. My parents always had enough on one income, but we’re struggling on two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re very much NOT upper class.

  I kinda think that not being strapped for cash is being upper-class.

  Upper-class: Always having enough

  Middle-class: Always having almost enough

  Lower-class: Never having enough

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash.

  Whoa. What group do you run in? Literally everyone I talk to on a daily basis is.

  I actually just thought through an average day, and the people I talk to regularly. I’ve had conversations with each and every one of them over the past few months about how we’ve had to make major changes to our lifestyles in one way or another because the money is going out faster than it’s coming in. We’re all solidly middle-class, for whatever that means anymore.

  So what circles are you in where not everyone is looking for every possible discount they can get? Saving $5 on groceries means I can afford another gallon and a half of gas. I can’t afford to be principled about privacy when those are the stakes. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, though it’s not something that anyone is likely to switch OSes for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll have to use pto time to drown, but make sure it's approved first⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If “a state of emergency” doesn’t protect workers who are fleeing said emergency in the same way that jury duty and voting rights do, then they are broken and need to be fixed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit Logging in with Google Accounts Automatically⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. The “always open in container tab” gets a little fidgety because Reddit uses a whole bunch of different domains (some of which it only flips to for an instant while redirecting elsewhere), so it takes a bit of work, but I’ve been able to successfully silo off Reddit, Xwitter, Meta, etc. into their own distinct containers that are independent of everything else I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).

  I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don’t lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.

  And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and software subscriptions are a scourge.

  But I think they’re just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don’t think it’s possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore. It’s like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward “devastatingly bad.” They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry’s sake and for their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I’m not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).

  If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn’t super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe that’s all become web-based.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I still use it too, almost weekly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think so. He just said that he had evaluated it and it wasn’t a good fit for the application. I remembered it was in our Popular Feature Requests thread, and I looked back and (crazy enough) […getpaint.net/…/2940-popular-feature-requests/](it’s still there.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get “the new ribbon UI!”

  The answer was never, incidentally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.