you are loved and deserve happiness
Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
If you’ve ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you’d get it! They’re fairly expensive, and aren’t airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they’ll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we’ve been using for thousands of years
Oh, I have two good ones:
-
Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
-
You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)
Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It’s also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something “hot” that fell on their roof and didn’t know it for a long time). Also? They aren’t dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc…
The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it’s probably “meh”. You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it’s in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you’ll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that’s not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren’t sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.
BTW, I’m pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don’t short sell everyone’s intelligence because you can claim “only” a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan’s population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they’re on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there’s a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don’t have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They’ve been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
-
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.
I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
My local pub is older than the USA.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
Wait, you’re saying that the Aztec empire was just 64 years old when Columbus discovered America and ships with conquistadors followed to butcher and enslave everyone?
Yeah, I’ve heard similar things in the past and I’m always confused by it.
There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.
The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Isn’t this Judge Doom’s plan?
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what “right” really means
Two wrong don’t make a right, but three left turns do.
Or if the “present” actually exists
My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
If you’re lucky, a clock that’s slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
This only works with 1-dimensional time though.
Luckily we don’t build clocks for n-dimensional time
Air is a fluid.
What… how?
It flows
what about a glacier? it’s solid but it kinda flows too
So does glass almost, glass is not a liquid, there are more than 5 stated of matter, a lot more, but glass is still a type of solid. It has some characteristics that recemble the characteristics of a really slow moving liquid.
Well glaciers contain both solid and liquid parts. When you compress ice it turns to liquid. Water isn’t really easy to compress, liquid water can be lower than 0c (freezing), which is called super cooled, and it turns to ice when it’d not compressed anymore. You can make super cooled water or even soda at home, and if you give the bottle a shake it will turn to ice in a couple of seconds. Also the ground under the glacier will be moved together with the ice and water, there is do much force there. When a part of a glacier breaks off it’s called calving, like when a cow gives birth to a calf
I was about to argue with you but the dictionary says you are right.
Take my upvote.
According to any hydrodynamics code, so are solids.
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it’s actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that’s what I’ve heard. I looked it up and it seems like it’s your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
i dont believe it causes cancer necessarily, but i think 5g is worrying for the sake of big increase in location tracking precision
Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
The tinfoil hat you’re wearing amplifies the signal!
The world is running out of sand.
It’s one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.
All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
this is actually a misconception! the gravity of the planets combined would cause them all to crash into each other!
Or would they just stack up?
I just did a simulation with representative bodies that included spheroid objects of varying densities to approximate the makeup of the major solar bodies and all the fruit bounced everywhere and the lady behind the counter is really upset now.
Moose kill more people than bears every year.
Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
That second one still fucks me up…
European settlers committed genocide in America on such an incredible scale that the global climate cooled.
How do they measure the global climate back into the past?
I don’t people consider the transmission of the black death a Chinese genocide of Europe. The vast majority of death in the America where cause by illness, not direct Europe action. Is it a travesty? yes. would it have happened with out Europeans? No. however It was not intended just like how the black death wasn’t intended.
That’s just false. This was done with conscious intent, and this is actually documented. For example, Amherst said in a letter to Bouquet that ‘This is a good idea to spread smallpox just be careful you don’t get it yourself, You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.’
The text of Amherst’s letter reads;
d’Errico wrote in his study of Amherst that “None of these other letters show a deranged mind or an obsession with cruelty.” Amherst’s “venom” was only directed at Indigenous peoples, he added.
While this person may have planned on using small pox blankets, what the original commenter, and the person you responded too are talking about is the fact that 55 million Native American died between 1492-1600. This introduction of disease was largely accidental
55 million Native Americans died as a result of a systemic genocide by any means necessary, including intentional biological warfare. This is a pretty well documented historic fact. Here are a couple of more examples for you:
The Cherokee Round up that you reference happened in 1838 (200 years after the end of my statistic). I agree that there was systemic genocide, physical and cultural, but 90% of the indigenous population of North America died before those policies even started
The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.
It’s not very democratic in common sense as well.
A democratic republic more specifically
That’s virtually meaningless. A “republic” is virtually any country that doesn’t have a monarchy or dictator.
So drawing a distinction between a “democracy” and a “democratic republic” in this manner is a waste of time. There plenty of democratic monarchies, which are equally democracies, too.
And it was never designed to be. It was always meant to be a republic.
We first were a confederation. Were your idea of a true democracy was more or less in place. The revolutionary war was won in 1783. The constitution wasn’t ratified till 1789, and the bill of rights written until 1793. Before that the US had almost no central government, and each state was independent from one another. Had their own currency, banking system, laws, and military.
States still have a lot of that same autonomy today, but there was no central government tying them together. If the US went to war and a state didn’t want to go, they wouldn’t. A little more complex than that, but generally that’s what it amounted to.
Having this type of system created a bunch of problems and came to a head when Shay’s Rebellion happened. I won’t go into depth about it, but mainly confederated Massachusetts couldn’t fight off the rebels attempting to take over the state. Since the US was a confederation there was no central government the state couldnt call on for help, and all the other states more or less said ‘meh sucks for you’.
This incident lead to the Constitutional Convention that wrote the document we still uphold today, and bringing in more of a centralized Federal Republic, and not a decentralized confederated one.
My ranty point is, we tried the whole true democracy thing and it failed. So we went to a Federal Republic, still very much democratic, but moved away from a true democracy.
“republic” is opposite to “monarchy”. It is unrelated to democracy or authoritarianism. Nazi Germany was a republic. France is a republic.
Your republic is flawed by design. Your founders didn’t trust democracy so they weakened it, the country hasn’t managed to improve the democracy since.
Australia is also a Federation, but a monarchy not a republic. Australia is quite a bit more democratic than America
Ok
Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids
I’ve always thought this was amazing
