I’m not trying to be mean when I say this, but to me your comment sounds a little bit like “I know you guys are starving but if you ever solve that issue make sure you don’t go too far in the other direction. I sometimes buy food that I don’t end up using, which is fairly pointless.”

I wish the biggest grievance I had with my country’s politics was that some of the parties are redundant. I think I’d be willing to give up a limb or two for that actually.

That’s a veritasium clickbait video.

While it’s true that no voting system is completely perfect that’s a little bit like saying that no one’s body is completely perfect, so trying to be healthy is pointless. The efficacy of voting systems can in fact be quantified and compared based on baysian regret, and some are better than others.

That’s for single winner elections. Almost any proportional system is going to be better than any single winner system, with the added benefit of eliminating gerrymandering. Presumably the best proportional system available is proportional score voting, but I don’t know if there’s been rigorous mathematical analysis of that yet.

The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.

Solar panels aren’t worth it for a normal EV, but supposedly the Aptera is so small, lightweight, and aerodynamic (with that teardrop shape) that they actually add a significant amount of range.

To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”

There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.

But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in “single family” houses.

We don’t do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.

To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.

So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although I still love a story about a character playing with forces they don’t understand if it’s executed well). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

“We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
-James Connolly

How about we look forwards, instead?

How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.

Humans need to move around to be healthy regardless, so any energy consumed to pedal a bike is immaterial.

Though I guess if the person in question just died that would be even more pollution free.

Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn’t make any sense from a sustainability perspective.

But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city’s thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.

By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.

https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409

https://www.dlsc.ca/

https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it’s another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)

Huh?

They’ve done that periodically for years.

I don’t dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

Interesting to note that although HAARP was originally a joint project between the US Air Force, US Navy, DARPA, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, since 2015 control was transferred exclusively to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.

This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.

How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That’s what their lives were worth to the factory owners.

The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering

Basically any stone structure made for any reason will vastly outlast any steel reinforced concrete structure. Although concrete might appear superficially stone-like and unchanging it is actually porous and chemically active. Within about 100 years the steel rebar inside a concrete structure will rust, expand, and crack the concrete apart. Freeze-thaw cycles and plant activity will reduce it to rubble shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile a piece of stone block was already about a billion years old before it was cut out of the ground. A stone structure might be destroyed by earthquakes or human activity, but it does not have a built-in self destruct sequence countdown timer like SRC does.

The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long.

We absolutely can and sometimes we do.

Strangely enough I feel like that crucification isn’t much associated with the Romans. Even though the Romans were the ones who carried it out Judas gets almost 100% of the ire.

Even Jews are given more blame by antisemitic Christians. Like, no one is starting up a pogrom against Italians because their great great great grandpa might’ve been the guy who stabbed Jesus in the ribs.

When people think about Rome they usually imagine the roads and the aquaducts and not so much the crucifixions and the slavery.

deleted by creator

I think you may have misread their comment.

Copyrights (rights to media content) do not lapse because of failure to enforce them.

Trademarks (the right to call your product a specific name) can lapse if members of the general public start associating it with a type of product rather than your specific brand. This happened with “zipper”, “jet ski”, and “popsicle”. But you can’t sue Grandma Smith because she mistakingly referred to an Xbox as “a Nintendo”.