TeknOShEeP
8mo ago
Really? Just before the Ukraine invasion, 50ish% of German natural gas came from Russia, accouting for roughly 25% of their total energy generation capacity, not to mention roughly a third of their oil (not counting other Russian allies). They laughed at Trump when he told them they were too reliant on Russian energy. Short of rejigging their economy to be entirely reliant on the Russian hydrocarbon teat, I cant think of a deeper national slumber.
It surprises me not in the slightest it took a war to (sort of) wake German political leadership to the dangers of their energy strategy- they are the same idiots who shut down their domestic nuclear power industry at the demand of uneducated Green Party morons, only to a) buy French nuclear power anyway, and b) mine a shit load more coal to make up for the shortfalls.
The post-war German political establishment is propped up only by the competence of their manufacturing sector, and as that slice of the economy falls under increasing strain, there appears to be a turbulent future in the offing.
TeknOShEeP
8mo ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.
The blunt truth is voter ID laws in this day and age are going to disenfranchise almost exclusively elderly rural people who managed to get along without an ID their entire life. The hypothetical poor urban dweller that blue tribers wave around is virtually guaranteed to be on some sort of public assistance which requires ID to collect. Or is not actually eligible to vote, possibly to their surprise but not to the ballot harvesters who knock on their doors.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
I live in a very blue city, and my very blue friends are expressing increasing frustration and skepticism with our local elections, because there are absolutely shennanigans going on, to the point that one went on an hour long rant about ballot harvesting the homeless community she works with, because many of the homeless are being paid for their ballots and its causing overdoses. No, i have no personal evidence for this claim, and yes its illegal as fuck, but i have no reason to doubt my friend and it jives with the genral politics of the city. Voter ID truly has become a universal issue, which is why i have nothing but contempt for GOP failures to do something about it.
TeknOShEeP
8mo ago
Yeah, voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
I'm in the UK at the moment, and there are posters everywhere reminding people to bring their photo ID to vote. India manages to give free, mandatory voter IDs to its population. For literally the rest of the planet, voter ID is a uncontroversial requirement. The fact that Democrats push against it so heavily when there are many more apparently lucrative applications to spend political capital on has turned me into a bit of a conspiracy nut about voting integrity.
Yes, reducing hull temperatures to background levels would be an essential component of minimizing IR signature, but this is something we do today on things like telescopes to avoid thermal distortions, its not even sci-fi tech. And highly expanded exhaust nozzles with cryogenic final exhaust temperatures are again already something that exists for simple efficiency reasons.
I think the "there is no stealth in space" meme comes from the fact that at least to public knowledge, no one has tried to build a stealthy spacecraft so there is no countervailing data to present against detector technology, wheres terrestrial stealth technologies (such as vs radar) has popped up almost as quickly as the detectors did.
Is your novel out? Im always looking for more good reading material.
TeknOShEeP
11mo ago
Ah, yeah that sounds like something not particularly stealthy, unless there is some very fancy nozzle tech going on.
The Voyager example is cited alot as some sort of definitive proof, but misses the obvious point that emissions controls (EMCON) on radio frequency emissions have been a means of avoiding detection since shortly after the first RDF equipment was invented, and the navies and air forces of the world have practiced its use for nearly a century at this point. A 20 watt RF emission is infinitely stonger than a non-existent one after all. The great thing about a vaccum is there are no pesky particles to scatter lasers, which means laser LOS communication is quite easy, and i would imagine become the default for military operations.
RE lasers as radiators- the basic recipe for a laser is to convert an incoherent form of radiation to a coherent form, with some transformation losses of energy. These tranaformation losses are usually waste heat, but if you are beaming a massive amount of IR radiation away, your thermal energy delta is negative. Gas dynamic lasers are a good example- they can arc weld quarter inch steel plate at a hundred miles in a fraction of a second, and the lasing mechanism itself becomes only slightly warm to the touch. There is definitely no free lunch in terms of energy generation, but since the problem you are trying to solve is an energy surplus rather than a defecit, thats not a particularly big deal. The simplest setup would involve a a solid state IR laser enveloped by a cooling mechanism which is in turn coupled to some form of thermionic converter that is the actual power source for the laser. This makes for what is effectively a laser refrigerator of not particularly great efficiency, but still capable of cooling a spacecraft while emitting only coherent radiation.
There is not a whole lot of literature on the subject, mostly because lasers dont make very efficient radiators and the only immediately plausible applications are all military in nature, but there is no thermodynamic prohibition on it. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19660023147 for the genral efficiency calculations.
The FTL interaction with stealth is definitely an interesting one, I find the way its portrayed in the Honor Harrington series to be good, essentially concluding that in a universe with relatavistic ships and weaponry anything moving in classical mechanic terms is stealthy because the light cone of detection is slow relative to the application of deadly force.
TeknOShEeP
11mo ago
Ooo, looks interesting.
"The no-stealth-in-space" principle isnt totally violated.
Which is a shame, because that "principle" needs to be violated, since it simply isn't true. I love Project Rho as much as any sci-fi nerd, but the entire "no stealth in space" article boils down to a claim that it is trivially easy to deploy and coordinate sufficient numbers of sufficiently sensitive IR sensor platforms around any given system that any incoherent IR emissions from malicious spacecraft can be detected, picked out of all of the other emissions that are around, interpreted as a hostile craft, all in a reasonable timeframe. This to me is a significantly high dose of handwavium critically compromised by such facts as: IR emissions need not be incoherent- IR lasers are very much a thing and can make (admittedly not particularly efficient) closed-loop radiators, and also liquid hydrogen propellent happens to make one heck of a good heat sink which by the way can be expanded in a rocket nozzle to background-cryogenic temperatures whose IR emissions are indistinguishable from all the other hydrogen atoms bouncing around.
TeknOShEeP
1yr ago
Ironically your comment proves him right. Quaritch himself may lack the scientific background to ask the question you just have, but assuming your user ID is accurate, other humans are curious enough to ask just such a question and ponder the consequences.
2 is the best option, you'll notice that everyone from amateur streamers to professional e-sports teams use it even when sitting right next to each other. The same is true for any team doing anything remotely high performance even if everyone is sitting in the same room- ie NASA mission control, military command centers, Formula 1 race teams, etc.
We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring.
You have a latency issue. The problem is not your microphones, or even likely your PCs, but Discord, which is notorious for (among many other things) terrible voice chat latency. Try Teamspeak or Mumble, which are specifically designed to be low-latency.
TeknOShEeP
1yr ago
1: Agreed on "very likely," as a minimum. Would upgrade this to "virtually certain". Happily an unproveable question for all forseeable circumstances.
2: Would upgrade this to virtually certain as well. On a cosmic scale, I would say the chances of extraterrestrial life and said life being intelligent are approximately the same (ie discovering a million non-intelligent species for every one intelligent species puts us at roughly the same ratio as Earth). Also the Fermi Paradox really doesnt hold any water for me, space is really, really big, and its perfectly reasonable to assume that any intelligent species with the capability of sending and recieving interstellar communications doesnt just blast those signals in a maximally inefficient manner on the off chance they might be picked up by another as of yet uncontacted species. 3. Agreed, with the possible exception of things postulated in works such as "Roadside Picnic" where our encounters with extraterrestrials were mutually incomprehensible ones, such as some the of the many gamma-ray bursts we detect being alien communications that we are totally unable to decipher, not having gamma ray based coms.
TeknOShEeP
1yr ago
"lurching" (a mild slur by the way)
No, it is not. It is simply a descriptor that can be applied to any group of things or persons with equal effect. Drunken revelers walking the street after last call lurch in the same way I do getting out of bed in the morning, and we are not diminished for such a description.
I agree this is the start of a totally unnecessary hyperstitous slur cascade, and NO! DOWN! BAD! STOP!
TeknOShEeP
1yr ago
Forty something were arrested following the final unlawful assembly order, and given wrist slaps of zero actual impact.
One man pled guilty to second degree murder for one of the shootings, and sentenced to 14 years.
The fact that J6 protestors/rioters/insurrectionests are being given far longer sentences than actual murderers and rapists is one of the many reasons i have lost all faith in American government and legal systems.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
Italy would be much poorer than it is.
Not sure why this keeps popping up, but Italy is the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP, and 30th on per-capita GDP. Those are respectively 3rd and 12th in the EU, and Italy is almost exactly average for per-capita GDP in the EU (behind France, Germany, Benelux, and Scandies but ahead of the Iberians and far ahead of eastern Europe). Certainly there are impoverished areas and populations, but on the whole Italy is a wealthy country, and corruption at the higher ecehlons of society would certainly amout to millions.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
Just read this after posting my reply advocating exactly this, so a quick question: was your father himself the one dealing with the companies, or did he have a law firm do it?
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
...best way to get off the ground is with limited starting capital and only a modicum of technical know-how. Normally, this would be a pie-in-the-sky nonsense dream
I regret to inform you, it is a pie-in-the-sky nonsense dream. To succeed in a field as complex as mining, you need both a deep understanding of all of the technical and legal issues, and a shit load of capital. The fact that you are even posing this question to some internet strangers shows you are really out of your depth. I dont say this to be insulting, but to save you from throwing your money into a literal pit, then metaphorically setting it on fire. If you don't have, or know someone willing to be employed by you, an advanced degree in mining engineering, you have no way of even properly estimating the technical hurdles and therefore financials of your proposed mine. Without that baseline, any business plan you make is constructed on a foundation of sand.
Fortunately, there is a much easier path forward, which has the potential to be extremely lucrative both in the short term, and going forward: explore leasing out the mineral rights to an established mineral extraction firm. There are plenty of lawyers who specialize in this type of deal, I would suggest contracting one (or several) and see what sort of deal they would recommend.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
The charitable take is that this supposedly disenfranchises vulnerable communities who might have difficulty obtaining government IDs.
The realistic take is that all the other government programs designed to help these vulnerable communities (such as subsidised housing, food stamps, medicaid, etc) all themselves require government IDs, and even in countries like India which have far greater challenges to providing voting access to all their citizens still require IDs. At this point, I'm pretty convinced its just a bargaining chip for Blue Tribe to offer up at some future legislation, because the alternative is there is a non-trivial amount of fraud being enabled by the lack of ID checks, which would be a whole different kettle of fish.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
Hard agre with the other posters, BSOD is not normal, and shouldn't really ever happen during normal use, much less a couple of times a month. For comparison, i have not BSOD'd for years outside of deliberate overclocking-to-failure tests.
The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers.
This is your problem. All "manufacturers" (they arent the ones actually building your system) are going to ship your PC with reams of shitty, unstable bloatware. Bloatware and its associated background processes is probably the #1 source of BSOD for normal users. Even doing a "fresh install" of windows is not usually sufficient to get rid of it, as the bloatware is now being hidden on separate partitions of the hard drives (you can thank Dell for starting this practice). So unless you installed your own freshly downloaded copy of windows (from MS only, not the computer seller), on a freshly wiped and single-paritioned hard drive, you probably have bloatware.
So either go with a PC building service that is just compiling parts and lets you do the windows install, or build a PC yourself, its really quite easy these days.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
After reading through his ballot discussions, there is nothing that makes me thing Scott is anything other than a party-line blue triber. In every case he is maximally charitable to the D candidate, and maximally uncharitable to the R candidate (ex: he states anyone disputing the 2020 election is an automatic no vote from him, yet conveniently forgets a large number of Ds did the same in 2016, and as happens in every presidential election). While he discusses and presents the issues in a very thoughful manner- why most of us read ACX in the firet place- I dont see him ever voting a majority not-blue ballot.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
Yeah, though the current ratio is more like 24 out of 25 investments fail, and the 25th blows up at 30:1 (or so ive been told by friends in the industry).
The fawning article is a bit nauseating, but its really just marketing, and a VC doing VC things.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
if you had bought bitcoin or etherium in 2012 you would likely have much greater wealth now
You can say this about virtually any security you think of, but a few landmines would have taken you to zero. It does not a compelling argument make. If im going to gamble money for 10:1, 100:1, 1000:1 returns i can already do that with conventional regulated securities, and not be at risk of getting hacked and losing everything.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
This is clearly just a foreign blackmail op, because truely un-Finnish crime is totally unmentioned: being so close to other human beings on a voluntary basis, touching even? I recall that when Finns were told they had to maintain 2m social distance, the response of the entire country was "why so close?"
But in all seriousness, i actually like the human sides of politicians coming out in a non-stage managed way. The flawless veneer so many of them build up is unnerving to me, and i think hampers judgement when at the voting booth.
TeknOShEeP
2yr ago
I always have to ask... in this day and age, why do people volunatarily still watch ads on YouTube? While it has given you fodder for an interesting post, simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
Oops, posting too late at night. But yes, ze Germans are a weird lot politically speaking.
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