• 5 Posts
  • 638 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle


  • There’s a sweet spot in the corporate ladder. People at the bottom get the daily grunt work stuff that’s time consuming and repetitive. People at the top end up with competing responsibilities so they spending most of their time in meetings about other meetings and arguing about planning to make decisions. It’s right in the middle where you blend into the background and can spend half your work day in your underwear playing video games. And that’s exactly where I like to live






  • Just finished:

    All You Need is Kill - Of the 2 movies and this, this has by far the most compelling ending. I don’t really like how the time loop thing is handled but the mechanics aren’t the most important to the story

    Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash - I love this series. If you’re looking for a modern day Douglas Adams this is pretty close

    In progress:

    Diaspora by Greg Eden - Woof, this starts dense and I don’t have the impression it’s going to get easier. I’m curious how challenging it will get. Still, it’s a fun start for the story


  • Hey! I’m one of the people who commented about Troopers. I don’t fault you for stopping it, there’s a whole chapter in the middle of it where they flashback to gradeschool and all of the kids agree with the teacher that corporal punishment for adults is really the only way to ensure a society doesn’t fall apart

    Neuromancer is great though! If you ever feel like you don’t really understand what’s going on that’s pretty normal. It takes a couple of reads and even then a lot of the concepts are abstract rather than concrete



  • Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying



  • So the important thing to remember is the sheer quantity of oil that needs to be moved and where it needs to be moved to. The Strait of Hormuz in 2024 had 20 million barrels of oil passing through it daily. That’s 840,000,000 gallons or 3,160,000 cubic meters, or ~1300 Olympic swimming pools each day that need to be moved. It also mostly is going to end up getting moved across oceans to be delivered to the people who need it

    Moving that much liquid by means other than boats is very difficult. Building pipelines that can move that much liquid is difficult and prone to problems. Especially considering the very harsh climate surrounding the area and even if you do have a pipeline it’s likely still going to end up in a ship because it has to cross an ocean anyway. Moving it by truck is almost logistically impossible, and trains have more problems than pipelines

    In order to have the ships big enough to move that liquid you need ports that are deep enough AND already have the infrastructure to handle ships of that size, of which all are already in the Strait. It also made sense because a lot of oil producing countries were in this area so having lots of ships in the area built efficiency

    So a whole bunch of confounding factors led to the Strait being the optimal place to move a lot of oil by ship (which the oil needed to go into anyway), however a natural choke point makes this a strategic position for countries in the area. Oil ships are slow, easy targets, and most countries could pretty cheaply take them out. Which adds to the tension in the region

    This Wendover Productions video does a good job explaining why so much oil had to go through the Strait






  • This specific instance was when he was flying to Namek right after beating Vegeta for the first time at the beginning of DBZ. Where he needed to go outside the ship while it was in transit. He’d never been to space and had no reason to think he’d be fine without a suit

    By the beginning of Dragon Ball Super he does go into space to fight Beerus, but he’s not there for long. It seems he can go in space for a bit, but needs to come back to breathe. This also tracks because he’s had to learn to control his breathing in multiple different ways



  • I agree that he didn’t have a plan for 2 primary reasons: Saiyans as a whole are very bad at planning beyond the problem in front of them, and that Toriyama also planned very little of Dragon Ball ahead of time

    In universe the explanation I’d give is that while Namek is bigger than Earth it still took Frieza “five minutes” for his blast to actually destroy Namek. Vegeta hadn’t even gone Super Saiyan yet. Even if his blast did connect and destroy the planet (unlikely) he would have had plenty of time to get to a space ship and fuck off