thebestaquaman

@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world

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thebestaquaman,

This is a false equivalence though: In the thought experiment, you denying to split ensures that none of you get anything. In this real-world scenario, you refusing to make a choice between more or less genocide increases the chances of “more genocide” winning. By not making a choice, you aren’t punishing the person proposing the deal, you’re just allowing someone else to make the choice for you.

There are elections in which it makes sense to vote against a candidate like Biden: In every election where there is a better choice on the table. That includes primaries, it includes backing candidates opposed to him in local elections, and elections for the house and senate. That is when you make your stand.

By not voting, in any specific election, you are simply giving up your right to have an impact on the outcome. That means that if the outcome is an increase in people killed, you are responsible, because you had the option to save lives, and chose not to take it.

By voting for the lesser of two evils, you are not signalling that you accept the lesser evil, but simply that you believe it is the best possible choice of those given. You can signal that you dislike the lesser evil by voting against it when an even lesser evil is on the table (or, preferably, something actually good).

Also, it’s not like “the democrats” tactically choose a candidate that they think the voters will reluctantly accept. The candidate is specifically the person that got the most votes in the primaries. The candidates in the primaries are typically people who got enough votes to be either governor or senator or something previously. By consistently voting for the better candidate in all those elections, you can actually have an impact on the presidential nominee, and signal your beliefs to the political party, without running the risk of having a wannabe dictator become president.

thebestaquaman,

No: Every single election where a more left-leaning choice is pitted against a less left-leaning choice is the place to do that. If enough people consistently vote for the more left-leaning choice of the two, politics is pushed to the left.

By not voting, you are saying that you don’t care which candidate wins. In this case, the choice is between a literal fascist and a more or less far-right (globally speaking) candidate. Of the two, one is clearly more left-leaning (less far-right) than the other. So you vote for that one. That’s how you make a difference.

thebestaquaman,

I’m just saying you should consistently vote for the candidate you prefer. That includes voting for the “far-left” (no such thing in US politics) democratic candidates when they pop up. I would also argue that it is never the time to “protest” by not voting, as that just signals that you don’t care who wins.

It’s really quite simple: It’s always the ideal time to vote for the best (least bad) candidate. It is never the ideal time to abstain from voting because you dislike both candidates, unless you legitimately don’t care who wins.

thebestaquaman,

Drake is fucked, because Kendrick has already dropped the Mr. Morale album, where he raps about his own shortcomings and relationship issues and how he’s worked to fix them. Whatever Drake says about him, it’s something he’s already been open about working to fix.

Drake on the other hand is just dumbly denying that he’s done stuff everyone can see that he’s done, or just not addressing what Kendrick is saying at all.

thebestaquaman,

To be fair: Europe spent 20 years and massive resources trying to improve the situation in Afghanistan, failed spectacularly, and were told very clearly by the Afghans that they should leave. I wouldn’t judge them for taking that message to heart and finally leaving Afghanistan alone.

thebestaquaman,

In addition to cost (which I don’t have numbers for) there’s a question of efficiency: Geothermal heat it typically relatively “low temperature” heat, which makes for very inefficient power plants, especially in southern places like Italy and Greece, where there is little or no easy access to cold reservoirs (like the sea around Iceland).

Geothermal energy is the perfect source for heating cold places in winter, or otherwise heating places you want warm, but you need quite specific geological conditions for it to be an efficient means of producing electricity.

thebestaquaman,

Well, yes. That’s the thing: If you give up, you drown, if you keep going parallel, you never know when the tide might turn. If you’re 24 (that’s how I interpret your previous comment), you’ve only had the option of voting in one presidential election so far. In that election, progressives completed the monumental task of voting out an incumbent proto-facist. And for all of Bidens flaws, there can’t be much doubt that a lot has been heading in the right direction. Of course, there’s still a huge task ahead, but the previous election shows that Trump can be kept out of office, and the past three years show that things can get better.

Step 1: Forgiving student loans, Step 2: Working to reform the system.

Step 1: Pardon certain drug-related crimes, Step 2: Work to reform drug laws.

Step 1: Massive infrastructure investments, Step 2: More investment in public goods

Step 1: EO’s to protect reproductive rights, Step 2: Legislation to do the same.

My point is this: Biden has shown that he is working to make progress, and that he can actually get stuff done. The problem is that there’s a whole lot that needs doing, much more than anyone can do in two terms. We need to keep getting the best option into office, and we need to spend the next four years to ensure that the best option next time is better than Biden is now. If Trump gets four years, I fear that we’ll have a near impossible job.

thebestaquaman,

Saying they were always more trouble than they were worth is a bit of a miss though: They completely dominated for a period, to the point where entire columns would be redirected or kept in port if intelligence arrived saying that a certain battleship had left port and was on the hunt.

As for the “modern” aircraft carrier: I think it will remain viable until we see a fundamental paradigm shift in how naval warfare is conducted. A carrier is at the centre of a carrier strike group, and is probably one of the most well protected places on the planet at any time, and can move at over 40 knots. I have a hard time imagining what could locate and take out an alert carrier in reasonable distance from shore, other than another carrier group.

thebestaquaman,

I specified “a reasonable distance from shore” because an important part of the point of a carrier is exactly that it can stay easily 100 km from shore and still strike far inland. If a carrier is in range of shore-based torpedoes, they’ve likely messed up long ago.

As for bombers: They’re historically the major threat to carriers, but I don’t see any modern developments that make modern bombers any more of a threat to modern carriers than WW2 era bombers were to WW2 era carriers.

thebestaquaman,

Long range artillery has pretty hard limits, and once you approach the 100km range, time to target becomes a real issue, even for missiles that can be shot down.

Modern anti-air hat a range of several hundred km, and has been combat tested. More short-range systems (< 50 km) are in use (with huge success) every day in Ukraine. Of course bombers have also improved, but I wouldn’t put money on the bombers having improved relative to the AA.

Ps. I’m not the person downvoting you, I think you make a decent point, I just disagree :)

thebestaquaman,

I really struggle to comprehend how you can debug hardware that is several light-hours away, let alone how you would proceed to split an OS (or whatever Voyager is running) into separate parts and then upload those parts to separate hunks of memory to make a functioning machine…

Also: What would they do if the code they uploaded was corrupted “in transmission”?

thebestaquaman,

I have no idea about the differences in tolerances and reliability between “army grade” and “consumer grade” weapons, but I know that the MG3 is renowned for being extremely reliable in military context.

I’ve never even thought about trying a bump stock, but the idea that some of the energy that “should” be going into properly chambering the round instead goes to simulating automating fire, and that it therefore increases the risk of a misfeed or jam makes a lot of sense.

thebestaquaman,

I am now sitting on the wing of a plane that is about to take off. Gonna try to Tom Cruise it. Will post updates soon.

thebestaquaman, (edited )

Assuming

  • cylindrical human, 2m tall, 25 cm diameter.
  • air displaced from the point you teleport to is instantly moved to form a monolayer (1 molecule thick) on your surface.
  • The displacement of air is adiabatic (no heat is transferred, which will be true if the displacement is instantaneous)

Volume of displaced air: ≈ 100L = 0.1m^3 At atmospheric conditions: ≈ 4 mol

Surface area of cylindrical human: ≈ 1.58 m^2 Diameter of nitrogen molecule (which is roughly the same as for an oxygen molecule) : ≈ 3 Å Volume of monolayer: ≈ 4.7e-10 m^3

Treating the air as an ideal gas (terrible approximation for this process) gives us a post-compression pressure of ≈ 45 PPa (you read that right: Peta-pascal) or 450 Gbar, and a temperature of roughly 650 000 K.

These conditions are definitely in the range where fusion might be possible (see: solar conditions). So to the people saying you are only “trying to science”, I would say I agree with your initial assessment.

I’m on my phone now, but I can run the numbers using something more accurate than ideal gas when I get my computer. However, this is so extreme that I don’t really think it will change anything.

Edit: We’ll just look at how densely packed the monolayer is. Our cylindrical person has an area of 1.58 m^2, which, assuming an optimally packed monolayer gives us about 48 micro Å^2 per particle, or an average inter-particle distance of about 3.9 milli Å. For reference, that means the average distance between molecules is about 0.1 % of the diameter of the molecules (roughly 3 Å) I think we can safely say that fusion is a possible or even likely outcome of this procedure.

thebestaquaman,

The math actually says that we might quite possibly get nuclear stuff. I checked because at first I intuitively thought the same thing as you.

thebestaquaman,

To be fair, the result of this calculation only depends on the area/volume ratio of the human. I used the specific cylinder, because humans are roughly cylindrical, and have a volume of roughly 100 L. The surface area of a regular human is probably a bit larger than that of a cylindrical one though.

thebestaquaman,

To be fair: If you live in the south, it doesn’t make much sense, but if you live a bit further north it’s the difference between getting up when the sun is a a reasonable place, or getting up in the middle of the night (winter) or the middle of the day (summer). I want it to be light out when I’m awake, not when it’s sleeping time.

Turns out it’s easier to adjust the clock than to say “work starts at 9 in the winter and at 8 in the summer”

thebestaquaman,

Any idea on the range that hit at? The flight time was crazy!

thebestaquaman,

It might have to do with the fact that by far most of the population has some degree of immunity now due to infection or vaccination, making the disease much less lethal than it was, and now completely comparable to other flu viruses. I don’t want everyone to freak out every time some mild disease is in season. Yes, it sucks to get a cold, and it sucks to get the flu, but if nobody ever catches them we will have very low levels of immunity in the population, making it far worse when people do eventually catch them.

After covid I was bedridden a couple weeks because of common colds. Thats never happened before. The amount of people hospitalised due to other diseases than covid also spiked (we have statistics for this). The reason was that very few people had gotten sick for two years, so nobody had any immunity agains anything they weren’t vaccinated against (which is most cold- or flu viruses).

thebestaquaman,

I’m not pretending coronavirus is literally a type of flu virus. It just happens to be a novel flu virus that we don’t have as much exposure and immunity to yet. There are plenty of historical examples of what happens when a population is hit by a virus that it has little or no immunity against, even though that virus is relatively harmless to those with immunity.

That is not an argument against vaccines, and it is not an argument against all the precautions that were taken when Covid-19 first hit. Those were both necessary for the population to build as much immunity as possible, with as few as possible deaths and as little as possible sickness.

It is an argument for the fact that Covid-19 must be treated differently now and in the future vs. how it was initially treated. It is now a virus that most of the population as some degree of immunity against (due to both infections and vaccines). If you doubt that that’s the case, just look at the reproduction numbers for Covid-19 outbreaks, which are still ongoing. In the initial waves, just a handfull of infections were capable of spreading to entire countries, killing thousands, within just weeks. If a handfull of people get Covid-19 now, that is no longer the case, even though we aren’t quarantining people. This is a direct result of herd immunity. Just like we have flu season, where different flu viruses spread in local epidemics, Covid-19 will continue to spread in local, seasonal epidemics in the foreseeable future (likely “forever”), but it is no longer the same threat as it was when nobody had any immunity to it.

thebestaquaman,

So your standpoint is that you want people to walk around making each other sick regardless of the consequences?

I never said that. I said that if nobody ever gets sick, the consequences are much larger when disease does spread. Just check the statistics for any country post-covid lockdowns, and you will se a spike in non-covid related respiratory disease. Plenty of doctors and researchers have pointed out that the reason was very little respiratory disease during lockdowns/quarantining periods leading to low immunity in the population. I want to minimise the consequences long-term, and I’m saying that I prefer to get mildly sick once or twice a year over getting extremely sick every other year.

And your reason for this is that you spent two weeks in bed?

It seems like you didn’t even read the whole paragraph. As I said, what I experienced wasn’t unique, but something we could also see in statistics over hospitalisations. I’m lucky enough to only have been in bed, but for people with preexisting conditions, the same infections could have been much worse. Again: If most people get mildly sick every now and then (as we always have) we prevent outbreaks from wreaking havoc and hospitalising a bunch of people when the do happen.

thebestaquaman,

Yes, Covid-19 is still considered novel, but saying that we are dependent on evolutionary-scale changes to develop immunity is just wrong. The immune system learns to recognise infections relatively quickly, which is literally why vaccines work. It’s also why people typically only get infected by seasonal epidemics once in a season, because we quickly build a short-lasting “immunity” to the virus that is in season. Source: Masters degree in chemistry/biotechnology.

thebestaquaman,

Some languages - specifically Norwegian that I know of, don’t have separate words for “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. In Norwegian we have the word “kjæreste” which can be directly translated to “dearest”. To me it always feels a little weird to use “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, i guess the same could be true for other non-native english speakers.

thebestaquaman,

It just really rubs me the wrong way when people want to “rewrite history” either by modifying books, art or anything else, to fit their modern world view.

First of all: I think it’s naive to believe that we somehow now have “the answer” to what is “correct”. Secondly: I really don’t like setting a precedent that we can just erase uncomfortable things at any time. Imagine the how much has been lost throughout history by different cultures erasing things they didn’t like.

Most of all, it’s the concept of judging acts or words from other times and cultures based on our idea of right and wrong that just gives me the impression that people lack perspective, and the ability to put things into context.

thebestaquaman,

Doomscrolling has now become an Olympic sport

And if I have that page, I’ll be a viable competitor

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