Born too early to die in the crusades

Born too late to die in the crusades

Born just in time to die in the crusades

I somehow didn’t expect this to turn into a Christian Armageddon ploy. I thought we all agreed all that matters is oil

I’ve played D&D and can’t follow half the BG3 conversations either. Names of places and characters have no intrinsic meaning. I find it to be a major pain in the ass to manage my own character’s abilities, let alone ~8 in total. Yes, there’s auto/suggested builds so you don’t have to choose everything, but it’s still difficult to remember how to utilize everyone. Plus, all that freedom of choice means freedom to pigeon hole yourself into some situation - unintended consequences, missed opportunities, that sort of thing. Yes, that’s great for roleplay, depth of game, replayability, and all that, but I just don’t have the time to get into that anymore.

Still playing tho. Took me like 20 hours to get into the swing of things. That’s also about how long it took me to get comfortable with Elite Dangerous, actually. But the 1200hrs in THAT game certainly paints a different picture about enjoyment

Have you seen others to compare? I’ve seen both the Blue Angels (F/A-18s) and Thunderbird (F-16s) and both feel the same when #6 sneaks away to shock and awe you from behind at Mach 0.8 while the noob does a near-stall smile and wave routine in the main stage

F-/15/E = Female/15/Epsteins Island

I don’t agree universally, from a societal standpoint, because Dolly Parton sang about the 9-5. While standard time keeps my noon within 20 minutes of zenith, my temperate zone winter solstice sun rises at 7am (I get up at 8) and sets at 4pm (I leave work at 5pm). I drive in with plenty of light but leave in nearly full night time. Living in DST with zenith around 1pm would let me at least drive home at sunset. Would it really make winter life acceptable, though? Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure the temperature is a major factor as I can’t remember the last time summer sunset ended the day for me.

Still, I get it for when you had to manually set clocks based on the sun, but we have time zones and automatic syncs now. With rigid time zones, everybody has some inaccuracy at some point to the zenith anyway. Even if you’re dead center for the winter solstice, the true zenith location slides East for the spring equinox, returns for the summer solstice (though will be 1pm with DST), and then slides west for the fall equinox. The variation is more extreme nearer the poles. Then you have extreme cases with places like China and India, with single time zones across the countries and 70-80 minutes of zenith variation across the majority of the population (excluding China’s western half).

One of the proposed ideas in a Discord-based thread was to use OS-level age authentication to prevent you from having to provide IDs to a thousand other parties. One place, one time. So that’s one reason for an OS to need it, in a world hellbent on increasing age restrictions. I don’t know enough about that idea to argue it, though I’m certain it could be spoofed in 0.2 seconds after release.

It sounded like the EU solution is a dedicated, non-identifying birth date tag in their passports.

But what do I know. I assume all age restrictions can be circumvented, so I see no point in all this theater. And it’s theater because it never really seems to truly be about protecting children. At least, to me, I’d be more concerned about SFW manosphere bullshit than NSFW porn when it comes to protecting kids (yes, I’m well aware a great deal of porn is misogynistic, degrading, abusive, etc)

It started by realizing other users, the government, AI scrapers, and the internet have potential to be far too creepy and/or investigative to continue using any personal details, namely my name or date of birth. I definitely scrubbed my birth year from everything, haven’t quite replaced all my accounts using my m/d though since my name is far from unique. So I have a vaguely techy pun of a movie reference. Zero Cool was the young alias of the main character of Hackers (1995)

(editing to fix exponents as the carats disappeared) I’m digging into the pure math here because I’m suspicious of whoever came up with that estimate. Not in a malicious way, but in plain theoretically inaccurate way. 2 million years does not sound reasonable. If total distance wasn’t involved, it sounds reasonable just from a self-duplication standpoint. For the number of self-duplication cycles, 2(to the 37) is approx 140 billion and 2(to the 39) is approx 550 billion, which covers our galaxy’s estimated 100-400 billion stars. Add an iteration for the initial launch and you figure the range is 35-40 iterations. That allows 50,000-57,000 years average per cycle to travel to the next star. Then, you figure if we can build one self-replicating probe, we can build 4 or even 8 to start. 8 (to the 13) is 550 billion, same as 2(to the 39) right. So now, we’re talking up to 150,000 years per interstellar trip. Voyager 1’s steady interstellar speed would cover the ~4ly gap to Proxima Centauri in ~40,000 years. As it sits now, though, it still hasn’t even reached 1 light-day from Sol. While we should have better thrust tech now, it’s probably still within an order of magnitude due to Voyager’s excellent use of gravitational slingshots in a rare planetary arrangement. Smells OK so far.

But hold on. The galaxy is not linear, it’s circular (for the most part), which means we have to consider 2D area, not a 1D line. Even though we’re squaring the probes, the area covered is going up by a square as well. As far as distance goes, the squares cancel each other proportionately. So we do have to look at one linear consideration: distance to the other side. At about 105,000ly across and Earth sitting approve 26kly from both the nearest edge and the galactic center, it’s about 87,000ly to the other side. Covering that distance in 2 million years would take a speed of 0.0435c - 29,000,000mph, or 700x that of Voyager. But I guess no thing’s wrong with 20 million years of exploration or 200 million years, in the grand scheme of the universe, dropping the required interstellar speed to just 7x that of voyage. Make it 2 billion years and ti’s attainable with current technology, with 0.7x Voyager being about 28,000mph.

Regardless, I still have major doubts about this theoretical probe’s ability to slow at the next star, find suitable solid resources, stop to mine them, distribute its payload, manufacture 2 new probes (or 1 new and prepare itself), and be able to launch 2 probes with enough speed to escape the current system. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have escaped the heliosphere as of 2012 and 2018, respectively.That is all we’ve sent so far. That’s all we have in motion so far. Escaping our planet is such a major hurdle that of the ~200 probes sent beyond Earth’s gravitational dominance, only 2 have left the solar system. And while 28kmph sure sounds a lot like escape velocity from Earth, the peak speed was achieved at the time it left - over 90,000mph. That is a substantially greater amount of thrust to leave. That’s not the velocity needed to leave Earth, that’s the velocity needed to make sure it leaves the sun. After that is where the probes used slingshots to gain meaningful speed to reach the heliopause within our lifetimes instead of stalling in some Plutonian orbit.

So, as to why we’re not flush with probes, I think it comes down to the basic concept that such a trip far exceeds not only a life time, but all human concepts of time. The oldest known hominin tool is about 3 million years old. The oldest wooden structure, about 500,000 years. Jewelry, 150k years, cave paintings, 65k, and written history is just 5,000 years old. To complete this expedition in 2 million years means it’d exceed the the existence of our species in its entirety. At 2 billion years, it’d exceed the time that Earth has had multicellular life.

Even with all that said, it’s be a one-way trip, a one-way message. The first few iterations of replication would likely exceed any type of life as we know it on Earth. It may not even remain in any kind of historical record. Humans may be gone. Surviving life likely will not be sentient/intelligent enough to receive any kind of return message, if they even had the technology and the knowledge to know what to listen for. Just a message from the core would take 26,000 years to reach Earth - and we’re back to the law of squares where the message beam will be expanding, and weakening, with a squared ratio to distance traveled. We’re struggling to communicate with Voyager as it is.

So, the question is: why bother? Conceptually easy task with no tangible payback. It’d only satisfy some manifest destiny, likely of religious or nationalist origin. That doesn’t exactly resonate with the general science community and it’d be extraordinarily difficult to get governmental funding to support a life-spreading probe with their little, universally-meaningless flag attached.

Yeah. It’s a fun little mystery to reveal at cleanings, especially when there’s an x-ray.

Oh, so you have my 4th?

Is that lighter or heavier than “slammed”

Feels like they’re asking for a decapitation strike to catalyze the next phase

I don’t recall special EV fear at that time. I recall insanely cheap gas prices in the summer of 2020 and a drastic reduction in commute demand. Once the excess oil was depleted and production hadn’t come back up to speed by like summer of 2021, gas prices shot up. I’m deep in a sub/urban mix, so that affects my experience, I’m sure. While all cars had their market value increase at that point, used EVs and Hybrids had an additional 50%+ markup, comparatively. I was shopping for them and ended up passing on the idea due to excess price. I vaguely remember prices being about $12k for ~2010 Priuses and $5k for 1st gen Leafs with deteoriated 50-mile batteries. I don’t recall Volt/Bolt prices and was already disinterested in Teslas.

I would have assumed you’d be searched and stripped of any potential weapons.

Edit: I buried the lede. I’m not a fan of throwing inexperienced celebrities/personalities into presidency, but there’s merit to having entertainers step into political positions. Good entertainers feel the pulse of their audience, determine what they want, and adapt to provide that. In politics, that sounds like being a spineless flip flop, but I doubt anyone would say that was the characteristic of Robin Williams’ performances or Jon Stewart’s work. They both chose to provide a benefit to the audience with deep laughter. Stewart took the benefit a step further with his 9/11 work.

Re: “ignoring that one president”. Look at the artistic works of these entertainers-turned-politicians. I theorize you can determine their political leanings from the diversity of their performances. Do they have a wide range of characters, where they can observe other people, take feedback, and present something that feels natural each time? I bet that diversity is rooted in a significant amount of empathy to understand other groups. Our do they play the same tough guy over and over, rigidly, as they project their ideal image? Probably gonna be someone that expects conformity and conservation of the status quo.

It’s obviously not a strict rule. De Niro, Eastwood, Pesci, and Wayne all played tough guys, but the second two only play tough guys. Reagan focused on westerns, which always carry a certain tough guy trope. Similarly, Trump played a vicious business mastermind. That’s it. People latched onto his TV personality all the same. Obviously, what we see is he continues to prove he was never as successful as he projects. I’ll never understand why anyone thought a country, a society should be run like a business. Businesses want profit. The profit is always loaded towards upper management. They don’t generously reward the bottom tiers for fun. They cut them, if anything. Getting cut by your own government is an insane thing to indirectly desire, but I guess these voters always believed it was other people, the right people, that would get hurt. Not the.

After the 10 min mark for the teleprompter switch, for anyone who can’t spare 15 mins in their hour of scrolling

Lots of couples stay together after infidelity. Please tell us, what else makes her a self centered cunt? Let’s find something concrete other than “she talks too much”.

This has been happening to me intermittently on Connect. Clicking the thread or entering/returning from the link fixes it. It took a few posts before realizing it wasn’t intentional

If something is broken, it’s probably clearly broken. That just wastes someone’s time later down the line, I guess. But the relabeled RAM is fucked. That is just going to end up in some other end user’s hands and give them a diagnostic nightmare along with, most likely misattributed hate towards ebay or whatever resale method moves that stick from Amazon scraps to the end user’s build.

So no, I cannot agree this is some harmless fuck-you to corporate overlords. This will eventually fuck over someone innocent.

Mid-adult deaths dragged down the average. Child deaths really dragged down the average. The point is that the interpretation of “40 year life expectancy” is caused by misunderstanding averages, not from some massively inferior physiology of prior humans. Yes, more things readily killed you, but it wasn’t a mid-life ticking time bomb. Excluding infant death bumps expectancy up around 10-20 years