WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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I mean, ultimately, that's probably inevitable. We need to decide as a species whether we actually want to have a future in space in a big way. If you actually want to see a future where humanity spreads across the solar system, we're going to need a vast infrastructure in orbit. That's true no matter who is building that infrastructure. So...is it worth giving up that future just for the sake of ground-based astronomy? I would say no. Especially because the same technology and economies that lets you launch enough birds to ruin ground based astronomy also allows you to launch absurd numbers of space based astronomical telescopes.

That seems like a fair trade really. Again, this is just a limitation of the technology. Do you want to see a future where there actually are millions of human beings living and working off Earth? Then we're going to have to give up ground based astronomy. Making low-visibility satellites can help a bit, but it's a fundamentally intractable problem. And again, this is true regardless of who is building that big space infrastructure.

This doesn't make sense to me. Don't Starlink plans offer unlimited data?

https://www.starlink.com/us/service-plans

The original goal was that Starlink would be SpaceX's cash cow. The demand for rocket launches is growing, but it can only grow so fast. If you've built the capability to launch so many satellites that you can't find enough customers for all your launches, one option is to simply find ways to launch your own revenue-generating payloads into orbit. That was the original goal of Starlink, though it seems to be failing at that goal.

It's not a perfect system!

To be fair, we could probably do a lot better if we purpose-built a machine to make gold. And Pb->Au isn't even likely the most ideal path. That was only chosen to fulfill the ancient alchemy dreams.

Personally, I don't think we should allow any men to be president. Just of think of how absurd it is. We keep electing a bunch of testosterone-addled rage junkies to be in charge of the nuclear button. Men are just too emotional to be president, or even leaders in general. They're just as likely to take off their pants and start waiving their dicks at each other as they are to come up with something that even meets the definition of "policy." Electing a man a leader is like electing a rabid inbred gorilla hopped up on PCP as a leader.

Men belong in the home. That's their rightful place. That way they don't have to spend too much time seeing other men, which only inspires rage reflexes in them. You let two men meet and they start beating their chests and trying to assert dominance over each other, usually while stripping off clothing and pulling out firearms. Men have no place in politics, business, or any field that really matters. Men should be kept in the home where they can't do too much damage.

But a man as president? Comically absurd. Literal clown world. How could such irrational, angry, emotionally fragile beings ever be elected a leader?

They should have actually engineered the spoons to be even better as drug spoons. Tell everyone they're engineering them to work poorly with PCP. But in reality, they got a lab full of drug users offering pointers on how to improve the product and people using them and filling out little ratings cards as they go. They only stumbled into this by accident. But imagine what they could have accomplished if they deliberately engineered the perfect PCP spoon!

And the US still has millions of slaves to this day, completely legally. We use slaves to fight forest fires. How fucked up is that? Hell, the modern US has managed to create the absurd phenomenon of the full-time employed homeless person. Oh, and and the peak of the USSR? The US trapped millions of people in a hellish nightmare of a legally induced racial caste system.

If you ignore the slavery, the homeless working multiple jobs, and the US's historic racial caste system, you can make the US sound utopian.

I assume that in Benelux, they're all just using squat toilets that have to be rinsed out with a bucket of water?

The genie begins to object. But before it can utter more than a few words, it screams in an echoing, otherworldly yell that rolls across the landscape. A bright flash of golden light emits from its eyes and hands. Then, like a snuffing of a candle, it ceases. The genie collapses on the floor, dead.

The three wishes rule isn't there to keep you from trying to be God. It's there simply as a cap to keep you from wishing for something so great that the genie dies trying to grant it. Genies are compulsively forced to fulfill all wishes made to them by their lamp holder. The same thing would happen if you wished for something ridiculously impactful that wouldn't violate even the spirit of the rules. Like if you wished to halve the speed of light. The genie can do quite a lot. The genie can literally make you an emperor over millions. But its powers are still of the scale of mortal men. Any wish that would alter the very foundations of reality? The genie attempts to alter the web of reality. But the required power is so great that the genie is completely burned out before it can fulfill even 0.0000000000000000001% of its assigned task. Instead, the genie burns its power out like a match thrown into the ocean. This scale of things is simply beyond it.

Anyway, congrats. You just forced an intelligent being, a poor soul already bound to endless servitude, to immolate itself in a futile attempt to ascend you to godhood.

There is now what appears to be a human corpse sitting in your living room. In fact, it looks like the corpse of a random Arabic guy, covered in blue body paint, dressed in a stereotypical slave costume. They are dead. And they are now your problem.

Good luck explaining that one to the cops. Also, the lamp is just a regular oil lamp now. You just have a random dead dude and an oil lamp. I hope the cops buy that you just accidentally killed a genie.

Depends. What kind of table saw do you have?

Disguise it as one of those police camera trailers.

There has to be a way to improve this. The problem is that you have to refill the cap gun. Could you instead do something similar with a solar-powered compressor and a small pressure chamber? Can you make a realistic gunshot sound with a pressure tank and appropriate plumbing?

If such a thing could work, you wouldn't even need to install it in an easily accessible place. This thing here needs to be a little library because the cap gun needs reloading. And a free little library is one of the few acceptable reasons for a random person to install a big box in a public place.

But...if this were a system that just compressed atmospheric air to be released periodically as "gunshots?" Then you could put them anywhere; they wouldn't need reloading. You could install it on a power pole or up in a tree. Anywhere that can hide a small box and a little solar panel. Hide it somewhere that's difficult to find. Hell, you could sneak them onto people's rooftops via drones at night! You might be able to make some sort of methane fuel cell and hide the damn things in the sewer.

Oh, and be sure your gunshot simulators have some RNG built into them. You don't want gunshot sounds coming from the same fixed set of locations every time there's an open house. Better to have 20 gunshot generators scattered across a neighborhood, hidden in all sorts of creative locations. Tune the RNG so that every third house showing experiences at least one simulated gunshot. And don't have them coordinated. Make each individual box roll its own dice to determine whether it will respond to an open house. And if mechanically possible, allow for variable numbers of shots! Feel free to also add loudspeaker that will make the gunshot sound be accompanied occasionally with the angry yells of men of non-white ethnicity. Or possibly the sound of an angry man shouting in Spanish or Arabic.

Ooooh... if you could mount the system high enough, and build the appropriate automated gimbling system...you could use a highly directional speaker to direct a cone/beam of sound just in the direction of whatever houses had open houses that day. It would be like an automatic gun turret, except instead of bullets, it broadcasts gunshot sounds and the shouts of angry men at open houses.

Oh man, this is fun to think about. The possibilities are endless!

It's the Satanic pursuit of endless profit growth that has driven these companies to Hell. For decades, they focused on expanding the number of stores. But eventually you hit a wall. Eventually the country is saturated, and marketing can only convince people to eat so many burgers.

In a sane world, this is when companies would be content with their current size. Congrats. You won capitalism. Good job. Now just maintain your current size and pay out handsome dividends forever. No need to keep trying to grow.

Well, that's not good enough for Satanic capitalism; the growth needs to come from somewhere. So they have to start slashing quality and raising prices. It's enshittification/late-stage capitalism. When you max out growth, all that's left is to raise prices and cut quality. Ultimately this does destroy a business, but Satanic capitalists only care about short-term concerns.

It's not fast food though. In-N-Out takes much longer than most sit down restaurants.

Look, reflexively saying "both sides aren't the same" is ignorant and actively doing harm when you use it to broadly. Are both parties the same? No. But on many issues, both parties are the same. And this is one of those issues. What you are saying is demonstrably, patently false.

The South Carolina bill passed with near-universal bipartisan support.

Same thing with the Texas bill.

On this issue, both sides are just as bad. Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

The problem Democrats have is that they don't actually believe in anything. They follow polls and consultants, and they lack any backbone. They have no fight in them.

Look at trans rights. Democrats have completely ceded the issue to Republicans. Trans people make the walking corpses that are the Democratic leadership feel icky, so they offer only symbolic support to the trans community. Kamala, in the face of tens of millions of dollars of right wing demonization of trans people, couldn't even offer the most basic defense of trans rights and the worth of trans lives. All she could say was, "I'll follow the law."

It's really, really easy to make Democrats completely cave on the rights of any group. All you have to do is make the case to the public that it's for the good of children. Want to ban porn? Bill it as for the kids, and the Dems will be too chicken shit to say a word against it. Want to send trans people to gas chambers? Say it's for the kids, and Dems will vote for it. Demonize immigrants? The Democrats will try to outflank you on the right, competing with Republicans to see who can be crueler to immigrants and asylum seekers. Name the bill after a white woman that happened to be killed by an illegal immigrant, make defending it require effort, and Democrats will be falling over themselves to vote to send migrants to death camps.

Are the two parties the same? No. But on many issues, they are virtually identical. As long as you can make a flimsy case that some stripping of rights is for the good of the children, Democrats will ALWAYS be too cowardly to stand up against the propaganda. It's been this way since at least Tipper Gore in the 90s.

The plan is to classify trans people as being pornographic by their very existence.

1. This plan was initially discussed during the Biden administration, and Biden didn't provide any pushback against it.
2. Democrats in the House and Senate continue to overwhelmingly support and vote for Israel, even when it is openly committing genocide.

Democratic leaders haven't decreased their support of Israel one bit since the election. In fact, they've doubled down. What evidence do you have that Kamala would have been any better of this than Trump. Both parties are united in giving 100% total support to Israel. You can't support something more than 100%. Both parties max that stat out.

In a democracy, not voting means that you are saying, "I'm fine with whoever the rest of you choose. I'm good with either."

The Trump regime is rightfully infamous for their major crimes. But like any villain, they commit crimes both major and minor.

Among the minor crimes of the Trump regime is that I as an American can no longer tease Germans about the Nazis.