Isn’t this functionally true for objects on the infinite focal plane? I.e. a star? Betelgeuse might actually be huge in absolute terms, but from earth, and even in a large telescope, it’s still a pinpoint whose circumference is not meaningfully distinct from its diameter.
We’re an empire in decline. I imagine we’d probably feel quite a deal of spiritual kinship with Romans living under Nero or Caligula
Agreed. I think a lot of people in light red and purple areas probably had my same experience of being really surprised at the amount of support there was. The occupy protest in my city was like three dudes in two tents. The No Kings protests stretched for three city blocks and we got a ton of enthusiastic responses (and only, like, three counter protests that I saw) from people driving through. I never ever would have imagined that kind of turnout and support in this town, and I found myself feeling really encouraged that there’s a lot more local support for resisting this bullshit than I estimated.
So, I attended my local protest. 9/10 experience, had a blast and also realized that being anti-Trump and keeping our republic is a waaaaaaaay more popular position (even in my light red area) than I thought it was. The local police department has its priorities straight and they didn’t show up to the protest at all, so there were zero problems with law enforcement. The only thing keeping it from being a 10/10 was what I didn’t see:
Clear demands. This was what happened with Occupy. It generated a lot of buzz and got tons of attention, and when they finally asked the protestors “what are your demands?”, the answer was basically “idk, everything sucks. Make it stop sucking”. We need some clear, hard, attainable demands or we’re just going to repeat Occupy.
Organizing. There was almost no organizing happening, no outreach or recruiting for or between political, advocacy, or support groups. People showed up and left with no additional contacts, commitments, or follow ups. That is a wasted opportunity.
The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.
This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.
I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.
You could be right about that. I was going to say that they caused the problem with subprime lending, but I think that subprime lending would probably never have been attractive enough to not laugh the guy out of the room what proposed it if most people weren’t already in a bad financial position with low economic mobility.
Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I’m going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to “how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?” Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that’s going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn’t get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we’re going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that’ll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it’s a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we’re going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city’s fine taxpayer funded services nope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money’s going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.
The IRL answer here is that it doesn’t matter if it actually makes money / creates value in the long run, it only matters if the investors think it will, or if the c-suite think the investors think it will, or if the current investors (looking to sell) think that future investors (looking to buy) think it will.
I mean, there’s all these pictures of Trump, but not a single good shot.
Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?
God damnit, stop making me like you, Newsom. I really don’t want you to be president of Greater Pacifica.
Oh no way! Agh! Okay, I know what I’m trying next time.
Wild that that dude was almost a SCOTUS justice.
E: changed my mind about snark
I meant my remark in good humor. Looking at the ratio, I can see that it was taken very different to how I meant.
I just… I will never be able to recruit Minthara.
Bless you, cousin, for your boomer posting, but I feel compelled to warn you. You keep this boomer posting up and you’re going to get stuck that way, like being sarcastic too much IRL.
Remember when Gemini said that you should eat at least one small rock per day?
I’ve started the process of moving my communities and stuff, but I plan on continuing to post on .ee until it goes down. Btw, is there an easy way to check which instances a Lemmy/piefed instance is defederated from?
I want you to know that you nerd sniped me with this comment and I started doing the math. To raise the apparent size of Betelgeuse to the apparent size of Jupiter (at its largest to the naked eye), you’d need a minimum 20 inch aperture telescope to pull the required 1000x magnification. Mind you:
20 inches is not a mass produced telescope size, but there ARE custom makers who produce reflectors at and well beyond this size. There are certainly terrestrial telescopes that can achieve what we need.
you’re still not resolving any details at that size, it’s just raising Betelgeuse to the same apparent size as Jupiter at its naked eye largest.
most places on earth are not conducive to magnifications over 300x. You can certainly do it, and sometimes the atmospheric conditions are ridiculously clear and you can pull off stupid levels of magnification, but there’s a reason why observatories get built up on mountains a lot. 1000x is… Well, good luck. Especially since Orion and Betelgeuse never get too close to the zenith, meaning there’s always a substantial amount of atmosphere to deal with.
Edit: let’s go with raising it to the same apparent size as the full moon, which occupies about 30 arcminutes or 1800 arc seconds. Jupiter is 50 arc seconds at the largest, and Betelgeuse is 0.05 arc s. To figure out how much we need to magnify Betelgeuse by, we take the apparent size of the moon and divide it by the apparent size of Betelgeuse, yielding 36,000x. Assuming a spherical cow, telescope aperture is what limits the maximum useful magnification, and the equation to derive that is roughly 50x aperture. So, if we divide 36,000 by 50, we’ll get our minimum required aperture of 720 inches, or fifty feet. IIRC, we have at least one terrestrial telescope that’s at least that large, down in Chile, though I’m almost certain there are more and larger ones, too.