nBodyProblem @ nBodyProblem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The usual joke is that fusion is always “30 years away”, not 10. The reason is that fusion projects have historically faced an issue where funding is chronically below predictions

However, this past decade is seeing a number of promising changes that make fusion seem much closer than it ever has. Lawrence Livermore managed to produce net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. Fusion startups are receiving historical levels of VC funding. ITER is expected to produce as much as ten times as much energy as used to start the reaction. The rise of private space infrastructure is making helium-3 mining on the moon more possible than ever before.

The US built the XF-85 goblin parasite fighter, which was supposed to be deployed using a robotic arm from the bomb bay of a B-36. The idea came from ww2 when we had escort fighters for most major bombing missions to keep the bombers safe.

It wasn’t practical to build a fighter with enough range to escort strategic bombers into the Soviet Union so they thought, “why not carry the fighter inside the bomber?”

Even that is meaningless because the vehicle you put a battery in is as important or moreso than the battery.

Aptera has a claimed 1,000+ mile range with a 100 kWh lithium battery. Meanwhile, the Rivian R1S has a claimed 270 mile range when equipped with a 106 kWh battery.

The main difference is that the Aptera is a light and aerodynamic car built for maximum efficiency instead of a 6,000 lb pickup truck. Any battery can boast amazing numbers if you are flexible enough with the use case.

A geas is a magically enforced taboo against something. Following the requirements brings power but violation comes with grave punishment, often resulting in a character’s death or undoing.

Copying weapons is a completely different thing from an ethical and technical difficulty standpoint over reselling digital art.

A better comparison would be today’s birds, which descended from theropods and are the only remaining members of the clade Dinosauria.

It’s worth noting that the lack of second language proficiency isn’t a result of laziness or ignorance

In Europe, most people are a short train ride from another country. There is also a lot of cultural exchange between countries within Europe.

Most Americans are multiple days of driving from the nearest non English speaking country, and that’s just to arrive in an area of Mexico where the people they will interact with overwhelmingly speak English.

In that context, there is little utility for most people in learning a second language. It’s also very difficult to achieve true proficiency when you are so rarely exposed to native speakers of a language.

Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing

But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world

If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best

Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, read minds, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?

All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay

I dare say physics would be more popular then

Smokers?! Have you ever been to France? It’s like a trip back in time to 80s America, with a smoker on every street corner and an ash tray on every cafe patio table.

Pangolins aren’t in Xanarthra though

What about the pangolin?

Yes I agree with most of this. If the original post I responded to had said this instead of misleading statistics and “now we have billionaires” like that class of people is a recent development I wouldn’t have said anything. We can make our arguments without those sort of rhetorical devices and people will take us more seriously if we do.

People like to look back with rose tinted glasses and act like things were so much better in the gold ole days. They weren’t and we are arguably better off now than in almost any other time in history. I see value in appreciating that fact.

That said, just because we have benefitted from automation and technology development doesn’t change that we could do better. I’d love to see more social safety nets, more affordable housing, reduced working hours, and so forth.

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A century ago was post Industrial Revolution and after the advent of mass production as a common means to produce goods. This was also past the time where many European countries had moved to a parliamentary system.

I’m not sure if you are just ignorant of history or what.

It's not inflammatory to argue for better systems.

It’s inflammatory when the statistics are being presented in a misleading way, which you and many others are guilty of. We can discuss how to improve the system without that sort of thing and it’s not productive to actually seeing change get made.

It's not a lie that while we've had a massive industrial revolution that increased the productivity of workers, those benefits have not been seen by the workers.

It certainly is. Our living conditions have consistently improved in many ways as a result of industrialization.

You can argue that we could see more benefit and I’d agree with you, but to act like the average person hasn’t benefitted from industrialization is disingenuous.

If you think we are materially worse off now than we were before the introduction of automation you are either pushing hardcore propaganda or absolutely delusional.

Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s. However, with automation the variety of goods available at that income level have dramatically improved. This is the benefit that the consumer sees and pretending it’s not a real benefit is disingenuous at best.

Maybe if you shill for billionaires a bit harder they'll give you one of their yachts.

You really think so? That would be amazing

You said “now we have billionaires” like it’s a new phenomena. The graph I posted tracks the total wealth share of the top 1% wealthiest people, which is a much better picture of income inequality than the “average CEO”. Notice that the total wealth share went from 30% to 35% since its low in 1970, which is a much smaller change than the 200+x difference that people like to quote.

While inequality is growing, it’s not nearly as dramatic as people make it out to be and in 2023 we are far closer to that 1970s low than we were a century ago

In a world where we've so much automation and wealth in the world that we could care for everyone why do people still have to work 40+ hours a week just to get by?

I don’t disagree with you. Most people in white collar jobs realistically don’t get more than 5 hours a day of real productive work done to begin with. Why do we need to be at the office for 8 hours?

I just think it’s important to look at the data in an objective way. Instead of posting inflammatory comments on Lemmy that exaggerate the situation, you could try lobbying your representatives for better worker protections.

Funny you should say "we" and "American History" though :) Maybe the American model is the problem here.

Well, I’m American lol. But the trends are similar in almost every developed country so I don’t think this is an American problem.

I don’t think that is the case. A stratified fluid, in the absence of continued energy exchange with the outside environment, will eventually reach a homogenous temperature distribution due to diffusion.

That said, even if you are were correct, in the context of brewing tea we would only have a few minutes of brew time in which the stratification would have an impact on the extraction.

In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.

Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.

It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.

That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.

We have had ultra-rich people and major wealth inequality for most of American history. Rockefeller (1838-1937) amassed a fortune in the 1800s in excess of $400B inflation adjusted dollars. By most measures, he was the richest American of all time.

The second richest American of all time is up for debate but contenders include Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Henry Ford (1863-1947), or Bill Gates (1955-present).

Wealth inequality has obviously grown over the past 50 years but it’s worth noting that wealth inequality in general is not a uniquely modern problem. It is also exaggerated by comparing to the 1970s, where wealth inequality was at a historical low point (see graph below)

Search the literature for thermal stratification. There are many contexts where it is used outside of lakes and other large bodies of water, many of which do not consist of three distinct layers. Hell, the paper I cited SPECIFICALLY refers to the temperature gradient in the microwaved glass as “stratification”.

If you can’t understand the use of a term outside your specific area of expertise then thats honestly a you problem and that’s all I can say on that.

If the heating methods were as similar as you say, there wouldn’t be hundreds of publications accepted to various journals across the past two decades investigating the problem where microwaves produce a strong temperature gradient between the top and bottom of a body of liquid. It’s a well known process control problem.