GreyEyedGhost

I had this exact opinion when Amazon lost less money than expected in 1999. I’m sure people had similar opinions before 1929. This isn’t something new.

Exactly so.

This reminds me of a story. I knew someone who worked with an autistic person, and he’d keep answering the door in his underwear. She’d say, “Hey, you need to get dressed,” and off he’d go to get dressed, but she complained that this just kept happening. So I said to her, “Did you try telling him that he should be dressed before he answers the door?” Well, no, of course she hadn’t told him that because obviously she doesn’t want him answering the door in his underwear. So I told her, “The next time this happens, tell him, ‘It’s not appropriate to answer the door in your underwear. When I’m coming over, make sure you’re dressed before you answer the door.’” And what do you know, this autistic retiree doesn’t answer the door in his underwear any more. For her, at least, which is still an improvement, and at an age where most would have given up on him learning anything new. It just needed to be presented to him in a clear, unambiguous manner and he was happy to comply.

I had a child with ASD who couldn’t draw a bath by the time they were 10. My wife and I were separated and she just coddled them. Once I realized their siblings were doing it for them, I spent 2 weekends showing them what to do and the problem was solved. Years worth of delay because they’re “special”. Still dealing with the aftermath of that attitude where just because things will be harder for them their mom didn’t even try.

Ah, I knew I recognized the guy. Thank you!

White Christmas, released in 1954, for example.

I need movie sources!

Pretty sure the other one was Jingle All the Way, but I can’t pin this one down.

What they’re saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.

This, of course, doesn’t take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.

Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.

TLDR; they use e-bike batteries for electrical power rather than gasoline generators.

This isn’t the early 2000s, pretty much any video player can slow down without audio distortion. Play that back at 50% speed and find me that R you’re talking about. I’m not hearing it.

I should, but I don’t need to to know the horrors of war, even if I’ve been fortunate enough to not experience them personally. I’ve also read Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and have a fair idea about the horrors of living under an authoritarian regime, even if I’ve been fortunate enough to not experience them personally. One of the best ways to stop war is to resist those who would change the borders of other nations through violence, using whatever means are necessary, particularly if there are known abuses of their own citizens, let alone those they conquer, such as we have seen so many times with Russia.

He’s done little better than an index fund overall, financially. This isn’t a credit to his supposed financial genius, index funds are very conservative.

I’m okay with being at war with any country that crosses their neighbors borders and starts attacking them. Russia is on that list, as is America since they attacked Venezuela.

Also hurt the wrong people - rich people.

I’ve installed games from both Epic and GOG on my steam deck via Lutris, and after it’s installed, it just takes a few clicks to have it visible in non-desktop mode. A little tedious sure, but not terrible.

It requires more material and financial resources, but isn’t necessarily harder. Transmitting energy effectively to reduce heat, or managing the excess heat starts running into some pretty tough limits of physics. Most of the issues with spinning habitats are engineering problems within the capabilities of our current technology level and materials science. It’s just super expensive and has terrible ROI for now.

How is it a bad analogy? You seem to be treating it like a scale model, which i don’t think was the intention. Moreover, most of the effects map over fine.

There isn’t a requirement for a Dyson shell to transmit energy. You could just envelope the sun in habitats that use the energy they collect locally and that would meet the criteria of a Dyson shell (and a K2 civilization).

It needs to weigh enough that it counters the momentum/drag of the cable plus the net of whatever mass is going up. Keep in mind that cars going down add to that overall value while cars going up subtract. Also, the general opinion is for the station/anchor to be slightly above geosync so the net effect of the orbit on the station is to be pulling away from the earth (there is some wiggle room depending on how robust your earth anchor is and the mechanics of your tether with respect to tension vs. compression, but most models plan for a little net lift). In other words, you also attach to an anchor on the earth (which could just be a chunk of bedrock) to counteract that net force. Since the net force of the tether (not counting the earth tether) would be away from earth, any net loss of momentum would be regained from the earth’s spin (which happens whenever we launch a rocket right now). You could also have a spool at either end to maintain the desired tension on the tether while accounting for slight elevation changes due to net momentum loss or gain. On top of all that, the space anchor mass isn’t really dependent on the mass of the earth so much as it is on the net amount of mass being lifted or lowered to the earth and the amount of time you want to wait to return to it’s desired orbital altitude. And finally, if the tether was severed only the part whose center of gravity was below geostationary orbit would actually fall to earth - the rest would leave orbit.

I’m pretty sure the article iIread said it had more than enough speed to reach escape velocity, but would have ablated/vaporized before doing so.