merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works

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10

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2,956

Joined

2 yr. ago

This is how I found out that Chelsea won. This is how I knew the whole event was over. I didn't watch any of it, I don't think I even saw any highlights.

I just hope that the whole thing dies. It's an abomination. The players need a time to rest between seasons. But, FIFA is using it as a way to generate more money and maybe even a sneaky way to create the long-dreaded superleague.

Canada and Mexico can try, but geographically it just doesn't make any sense. They can (and should) try to reduce their reliance on the US, and try to be in a stronger position for any future negotiations. But, it simply doesn't make any economic sense to cut out the biggest trading partner, across 2 of the biggest borders in the world.

For Canada in particular, there's really no alternative. Canada's entire population is near the US border, and there's no other country that Canada can trade with without international shipping.

and let them be their self governing island to themselves.

Doesn't really work for Canada or Mexico.

See, that's the thing. If you take a charitable interpretation of what he's attempting to say, it still doesn't make sense.

You paste a full file from a project into Grok and it "will fix it for you!"

If you gave me, a human, a file and asked me to fix it, before I did anything else, I'd ask you "ok, what's wrong with it?" Any human who didn't and just dove right into trying to fix it would often just give you a "working" program that still didn't do what you actually wanted. Sure, sometimes the answer is obvious, it doesn't compile, or it generates unexpected errors. But, often when you hear the answer, the response is "ah, well, I think you've overlooked something when thinking about the problem, have you considered X and Y?"

Yeah, they even show a periodic table. On that row, Uranium is just about the safest "rock".

It's even mostly lickable.

Funding a foreign assassination attempt will only unite all of the right-of-center and take away some of support of "centrist"/"conservative" democrats.

If it's done in full seriousness, sure. But, the left can play the same game the right does. "Haha, it's a joke, I just donated $10 to the kill Trump GoFundMe, isn't that hilarious! What's wrong, MAGA? Triggered? What snowflakes! Relax, it isn't real, it's just a joke. OR IS IT!? Haha, only joking, you thought I was serious. You MAGAs just can't take a joke!"

Yeah man, they're completely nuts!

From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn't seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.

Also, Hitler didn't invent racism or antisemitism. His agenda didn't die with him not because he was such a powerful figure, but because he was harnessing prejudices that have existed before apes even started to walk upright.

You can get thrown in a concentration camp because your skin's too dark and you weren't carrying your ID, even if you're a US citizen.

That's one of the side effects about tossing out the rule of law. If merely protesting or having a certain meme on your phone is dangerous, then might as well go all in.

Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I'm using calendars wrong, but mine aren't filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I'm willing to learn. What date should I put "Don't Buy Subnautica 2" on?

Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.

Yeah, saying "it's the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me" is like saying "I don't contribute to climate change because I don't cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It's the restaurant that's destroying the environment!"

The top speed of Columbus' ships was about 8 knots, and the average speed was about 4 knots, or 7.5 km/h to 15 km/h. Typical jogging speed is about 6 km/h to 10 km/h. So, they were a bit faster than typical running speed. But, those were the cargo ships.

Ships designed for speed were much faster. In 1852 the fastest ship was the Sovereign of the Seas which topped out at 41 km/h.

Probably for a long time the fastest transportation would have been a horse. Or, if you want a "vehicle" or some kind, a chariot. But, for at least a century a fast sailboat was probably the fastest thing around.

I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours

Challenge accepted.

Travel is much, much cheaper than it used to be.

The bigger issue is that there isn't much point to having humans in space.

After the Wright Brothers flight, aviation took off because aviation is genuinely useful. First it was mostly for delivering mail, but that was an incredible change. Instead of a letter taking weeks to get somewhere it would take days. Places that used to be completely isolated from communication now had an easy way to keep in touch. Then with passengers aviation you had something that changes the world in a positive and measurable way.

Humans in space is extremely expensive and there really isn't much worthwhile to do up there. Sure, you can do some science experiments about how zero gravity affects something, and learning things is useful, but there's no obvious immediate payoff. If going into space made your bones stronger and not weaker, space travel would have developed massively because there would be a reason for millions of people to go to space for the health benefits. Or, if ballistic travel made sense economically, there might be rockets that cut the travel time from New York to Melbourne down to a couple of hours. But, having to get all that mass above the atmosphere means that it's far too costly to make economic sense.

People talk about mining asteroids or the moon, but there really isn't much that's valuable up there. The moon is mostly made of cheese [wait, my sources need updating] lunar regolith, which is composed of elements that are just as common on earth: silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron, etc. But, on earth you don't have to deal with the difficulty of processing it on another celestial body, nor do you have to deal with the spiky, unweathered nature of regolith that means it destroys space suits and machines.

The only reason the US landed on the moon with humans in the first place is that it was in a dick measuring contest with the USSR. Now that the cold war is over, nobody's willing to pay for something that useless.