WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on anons brother has some strong opinions 2 days ago:
Current building codes allow the construction of wood frame buildings up to 18 stories tall. You need to expand your knowledge of wood construction beyond what you learned reading The Three Little Pigs.
- Comment on anons brother has some strong opinions 2 days ago:
I agree. Wood is clearly the superior material.
- Comment on How would one exit a black hole? 1 week ago:
It’s not even about needing to exceed the speed of light. Once you cross the event horizon, spacetime around you is so warped that “out” doesn’t exist anymore. Point your ship in any direction and fire up your FTL engine; it doesn’t matter. No matter which way you try and fly your ship, you’ll be getting closer to the center. Once you cross the event horizon, there is literally no way out.
- Comment on Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off 3 weeks ago:
From Meriam-Webster’s entry on the word
Did the definition of n----r change?
There is a widespread belief that the original meaning of n----r, as defined in dictionaries, was “an ignorant person,” and a related belief that current dictionary definitions describing its use as a hateful, racist epithet are a recent change. We do not know the source of those beliefs, but they are not accurate. The word was first included in a Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1864, at which time it was defined as a synonym of Negro, with a note indicating that it was used “in derision or depreciation.” There has never been a definition like “an ignorant person” for this word in any subsequent dictionary published by this company. Nor do we know of such a definition in any earlier dictionary.
There’s been an attempt among white racists over the years to try and redeem the hard-r N-word. They’ll say that it originally meant just an ignorant or foolish person in general, not only black people specifically. But this is a historical fiction. It’s always been used as a slur against black people. It was originally a complete synonym for “negro.” If you asked Yarvin, and he didn’t just admit outright to being a flaming racist, he would likely justify it by making a claim like this. He would claim that he’s saying these billionaires are just corrupt and foolish. He would say that it’s OK to use the word, as he’s not referring to black people, just ignorant and lazy people in general. He would say he’s using the non-racist definition of the n-word. But again, this is a historical fiction.
Sometimes racists will cite words like “niggardly”, meaning cheap or stingy, as an example of how the n-word could be used in ways not applying just to black people. Niggardly is a word that sounds like the n-word but actually does have a non-racist history. They’ll try to link niggardly to the hard-r n-word. But what they ignore is that the word niggardly has a completely different etymological root. Niggardly shares roots with words like niggling, tracing back to the 13th century nig, meaning simply a stingy person. The n-word however, as Meriam-Webster notes, derives directly from the Spanish negro.. Racists will connect the n-word to words like niggardly, niggling, etc., citing their real history as non-racist words, and say that the n-word can also be used non-offensively because of this. But there is no common etymological root between the hard-r n-word and similar sounding words that do actually have a non-racist history.
Of course, it’s all ultimately a moot point. In polite society today, most people understandably avoid using any word that remotely sounds like the n-word. See controversies around the word niggardly. And really, there’s little reason to use words like niggardly, even if one could argue that they’re technically not racist. They just sound way too similar, and there’s plenty of other perfectly valid words to use in their place. And ultimately, someone could just as easily be hurt or offended by words that sound similar to the n-word even if they’re technically not directly related. The words are best avoided, as they just end up hurting people for no good reason, even if some etymologist might argue they’re not directly related.
- Comment on Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off 3 weeks ago:
Obviously he means naggers.
- Comment on Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content 3 weeks ago:
We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People’s Republic of North Korea.
- Comment on Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off 3 weeks ago:
This man needs to be hanged for treason.
- Comment on Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public. 3 weeks ago:
I would think the aerosol or particle based shields would be even easier to remove than something up in orbit. The stuff in orbit will need to be pretty high up if you don’t want it to immediately decay and reenter, so anything in orbit will remain that way for some time. Plus there’s Kessler to worry about. But sulfurs and other aerosols wash out of the atmosphere pretty quickly. That’s the whole reason people talk about termination shocks, and fret that we’ll have to keep the aerosol effort continuously going. To me this seems like a virtue. If at any time we decide we don’t like the effects, we can simply stop. There’s no long term commitment.
- Comment on Be nice 3 weeks ago:
500 cigarettes.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 23 comments
- Comment on Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public. 4 weeks ago:
The point is we don’t have time anymore to address the root causes. If we had started decades ago, maybe we wouldn’t have needed solar modification. But now we’re just still playing pretend that we can solve this via CO2 cuts alone.
Here’s the problem. It takes decades to ramp up the industry and infrastructure necessary to move everything away from fossil fuels. There are hard requirements on material extraction that just can’t be popped up overnight. This isn’t software engineering; this is real physical industry and production. We are currently in the middle of an energy transition. But it’s going to take decades. If we just shut off that tap for fossil fuels tomorrow, billions of people would die from the fallout. We’re talking about completely rebuilding an infrastructure that we’ve spent the last two centuries constructing. We need to do all of this, while also having our production and construction sectors strained from all the adaptation we need to do to deal with the fallout of the warming climate!
It’s just magical thinking. It’s letting perfect be the enemy of the good. Yes, I wish we could waive a magic wand and make oil go away overnight. But this is a 50 year project ahead of us, and we are already completely out of time. We’ve already passed +1.5C, and things are rapidly spiraling out of control.
I don’t give a shit if this is the perfect solution. I don’t care if it has downside risks. And I know full well the types of risks you’re talking about. But frankly, we just don’t have the luxury of worrying about those right now. Again, we are out of time. You’ll be smuggly patting yourself on the back, congratulating that you avoided the Futurama scenario, thankful that we never played God…as the last coral reef dies and the Amazon is a distant memory. The biosphere will be wrecked beyond repair, but at least we never got caught in that cloud seeding trap!
- Comment on VPNs top App Store charts as UK age verification kicks in 4 weeks ago:
We need to cut the UK off from all global trade and communication. A total global naval blockade. We can make it a joint exercise between the US, China, and anyone else that wants to come along. Same thing with the internet. Cut off all lines of international communication. The people of the UK are infected, and the whole island needs to be quarantined like in 28 Days Later. Worse still, the UK’s pestilence of censorship and transphobia threatens to infect many other countries. For the good of the world, we need to metaphorically, and perhaps even literally, wall off the entire UK from the rest of the world. Or possibly just England. That’s where the real pus and boils seem to be. We need to cut England off from all global communication before anyone else gets the idea to try this crap. Hell, maybe we just need to go all in and bomb English power infrastructure. The English clearly can’t be trusted with electricity. Let them go back to heating London homes via coal furnaces in every building. Maybe we just need to lower England a few rungs back down the tech tree. The English are just not responsible enough to be trusted with modern technology.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 4 weeks ago:
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.
- Comment on Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public. 4 weeks ago:
Honestly, we need to get over ourselves when it comes to sunlight modification. The fact that people are hand wringing about small trial projects that are just meant to investigate the concept is peak luddite thinking.
Do we need to be careful with the secondary effects? Yes. That’s why we start with pilot projects, see how they go, and work our way up. Is a termination shock a possibility? Yes, but who cares? The alternative is we just stew in the high temps all day every day.
I get the opposition to the technology, but ultimately it comes from a place of hubris and pride. People just don’t want to admit we’ve fucked things up so badly that now we need to resort to something as desperate as solar modification.
Well I’m sorry, but we’re out of time. We’re sitting here whining about possible side effects of this, when the consequences of not doing it are potentially biosphere-collapsing. Yes, I wish we had gone all in on renewables starting in 1980, but we don’t live on that timeline. It takes a long time to change the course of a ship the size of an industrial civilization, and there has been immense political headwinds. Hang all the oil execs if you want, that won’t change the fact that at this point, we have no reasonable path to avoiding the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and the collapse of entire biomes if we don’t do solar modification. We’re sitting here congratulating ourselves on not playing God as we watch as the Amazon rain forest burns down as a consequence of our own actions.
We need this technology. Yes, it sucks that we have to resort to it. But we are out of time. Right now, we are realistically looking at losing between 2-10% of the total human population by 2050 due to climate induced heat stroke and famine. Right now, the permafrost at the polls and the Greenland ice sheet are rapidly collapsing. Positive feedback loops are kicking in that mean that even if we cut off all emissions tomorrow, the temperature will still continue to snowball. This is a runaway train at this point. And the only hope we have of slowing it down is solar modification.
But people would rather keep their hands clean, refuse to “play God,” and do nothing as the world burns.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
Get the audiobooks. Listen to it in the car. But yeah, one of the plot points is basically exactly this, where people can effectively have a “save point” in life. I won’t spoil it, but it’s great.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
Read Peter F Hamilton’s Void saga.
- Comment on Clean Energy Sources Are Beginning to Overtake Fossil Fuels, But Is It Too Late? 4 weeks ago:
Too late for what? We’ve already locked in WW2-level casualties by mid century from hunger and heat stroke due to climate change. The fight now is to keep the deaths merely to WW2 levels, and not those equivalent to a nuclear war. There is still much to gain by fighting for change, but we’re not getting out of this unscathed. Realistically, by 2050, we’re set to lose between 2% and 10% of the total human population to famine and heat.
- Comment on North Korea and South Korea isn't working. Let's try West Korea and East Korea instead. 5 weeks ago:
Every 10 years the Israelis have to all move to Gaza, and the Gazans get to move into Israel. They trade places every ten years.
- Comment on North Korea and South Korea isn't working. Let's try West Korea and East Korea instead. 5 weeks ago:
Let’s leave the border the same. But just to spice things up, we’ll move all the South Koreans to North Korea and all the North Koreans to South Korea. Then they’ll just swap places every ten years. It will so whimsical!
- Comment on 600-year-old amethyst 'worthy of a duke' found in medieval castle moat in Poland 5 weeks ago:
I’m more impressed that they had the technology to make synthetic amethysts in 15th century Poland.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Start a YouTube channel where you go around trying to get people to sign your petition to give you a Wikipedia page. If you got big enough, eventually you would get a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia wouldn’t even have to accept the petition; it might be a bad precedent to set that people can get a page just by submitting a petition. Instead, they could give you a page simply because you became mildly famous for trying to brute force yourself onto Wikipedia.
- Comment on In the cave 5 weeks ago:
Yeah I recommend. The chief antagonist of the series, Morning Light Mountain, is one of the best examples of a truly “alien” alien that I’ve read in sci fi. It’s about as far from the trope that aliens are just humans with crap glued to their foreheads, or stand-ins for various real-world human cultures, as you can get.
- Comment on In the cave 5 weeks ago:
I loved the concept of Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga. People invent wormhole technology. Interstellar colonization is done by opening wormholes directly to alien worlds. Except the tech isn’t cheap or easy. IIRC they described an interstellar generator as made of half a cubic kilometer of intricate machinery. They’re giant machines that can open portals to distant star systems.
Because of the immense expense, they need to make maximum use of these gateways. The generators operate on regular schedules, connecting to different worlds in the human sphere of colonization. And to make maximum use of the gateways…they run trains through them. You travel to a distant star system by buying a train ticket.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Not if they’re incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.
Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.
Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.
We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.
- Comment on I totally missed the point when PeerTube got so good 1 month ago:
Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 1 month ago:
On our forever home, I want to install solar panels and a redundant AC system, or maybe just a backup AC system in a single room. We’re in the US PNW. Here, heat waves are becoming more and more a threat to human life. Where we’re at, we can get rare heat waves that go up to 112F, and that’s in an area where historically AC wasn’t common. It’s only in the last decade or two that it’s started to be viewed as a necessity. But thankfully when we get more of a dry heat, and the highest temp days are win the Sun is shining brightly. So I would like to have a setup where our home was essentially equipped as a lethal heat wave survival shelter, where we would be fine even if the grid fails. And part of that would likely just be keeping a duplicate AC, maybe just for a single room to shelter in, in the event of a lethal heatwave.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 1 month ago:
I don’t believe you. You’re clearly lying.
- Comment on Force is the last refuge of the incompetent 1 month ago:
Oh, the CEO should also be caned…rectally.
- Comment on Force is the last refuge of the incompetent 1 month ago:
We need to start taxing companies more that put undue burden on the infrastructure and environment. Do you require your employees to come in to an office for work that could be done from home? You should have to pay a double employer payroll tax for every employee you do this to. We need to start taxing the vanity of CEOs.