I’d still disagree.

The core premise is that average worker productivity on eclipse day will dip by 1/24th (assuming 20 mins of “eclipse break” on a 8 hour workday).

And that’s BS on several fronts.

For one, many people have taken days off (PTL or similar) or move their break to the eclipse, which is already accounted for in the averaged productivity statistic.

Second, people in positions they can’t just leave (factory workers on an assembly line, cashiers etc.) will often have to skip on the eclipse.

And people who can leave (I’m thinking of white collar desk jobs here), are often spending a similar amount of worktime off-desk on other days, too, for a myriad of only indirectly productive reasons (networking, thinking on a thorny problem over a smoke…).

The formula assumes

• that all of the American workforce spends every minute of their 8 hour day actively working on their desk/station/etc.
• that every minute they don’t, is “lost”, work-wise.
• that all of that workforce is on the job during eclipse time, but will take a paid break during the actual eclipse

All of which are questionable at best.

OK, I’ll bite:

You appreciate civilization because you’ve lived in nature.

What’s the most danger you’ve lived in

People die of starvation in a world that literally has enough food for everyone - because speculating with food is more profitable than feeding them.

People die of diseases that have known cures with low production cost - because the market will only finance medical research if the resulting drug comes with a net gain price tag.

There are literal wars being fought and people being shot for economic gains.

Humanity doesn’t have a resource problem. It has a distribution problem.

And the current method of deciding distribution of goods is capitalism.

that you think getting rich is equivalent to predation?

Genuine question: Where do you believe a millionaire’s millions ultimately come from?

There is only so much net economic gain one can create with their own two hands. Everything beyond that is created by other people’s hands.

The genre is usually divided into “soft” and “hard” fantasy.

Cyberpunk is generally considered hard fantasy, as is stuff like The Expanse or Interstellar.

Star Wars is unabashedly soft SciFi, it’s a straight Fantasy story in space.

Star Trek is a half-breed - it pays some lip service to scientific “plausibility”, but much of it stretches that envelope beyond the breaking point. Scientific accuracy was never the point of the series to begin with.

Or did we become okay with being ruled by tyrants all of a sudden?

If so, what’s the point of federation?

The point of federation is not to prevent tyrants.

The point is the option to exclude or include any instance due to whatever metric you want.

If you don’t like tyrants, you can defederate your instance from any tyrant-ruled instance.

And, obviously, you can run your own instance as tyrannical or democratic as you want - users who don’t like that are free to leave, instance-owners who don’t like that are free to defecate from you.

If you’re just a user on the relevant instance, all you can do ist petition the people who have that power.

I understand that’s basically what you’re trying to do, but your argument shouldn’t be about federation or lemmy’s inherent structure - the question should be “is anyone else annoyed by that behavior?”

Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.

Subways are.

Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.

They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.

Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

Genuine question: Why not?

While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

The way I understand it:

Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.

I genuinely like this idea, because it would allow to reach both goals.

The problem I see is that this would probably go down the same as the bodycam idea, with inconvenient recordings vanishing due to “technical issues”.

You’d need an independent third party doing life recording and delayed release. Subjectively, the US don’t have a great track record with these.

Easier idea: Just publish last week’s encryption key. Probably won’t happen because some tech supplier will lobby for a more expensive solution.

Found the morality relativist.

Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?

(Warning: Might be coded by German extremism culture)

Right-wing extremists burn immigrants. Left-wing extremists burn cars. The latter is worse, because it could be my car while I don’t own any immigrants.

(from the Cangaroo Chronicles)

To clarify:

Even if an unambiguous majority of Texas would say “we’d like to turn Texas into an independent country”, you’d rather force them to stay by force of arms?

C3 talks are available online for quite some time after the actual event, so you might still be able to watch it then.

Anyone who hits enter on a dd command without triple-checking it gets exactly what they deserve.

Good to know, thanks.

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.

Well, it works well for some people.

Once you get used to it, it can be a dang powerful tool. For people doing a lot of config-wrangling on the CLI (i.e. admins working a lot ovet SSH), overcoming the learning curve will pay dividends.

If you’re working mostly locally and in a GUI environment environment, it’s probably not worth it - there’s a reason most devs use more specialized IDE’s.

Midnight Commander has been around for ages. It’s a straight ripoff/homage to the original Norton Commander, a full-fledged file manager and a godsend on week-kneed machines (like old netbooks).

I really hop you’re trolling, because you’re letting out some pretty crucial parts here.

Democracy is also when you vote and your voted-for result doesn’t happen. More than 40% of the state just had that experience.

Democracy isn’t about you. Or me. It’s about the majority.

You’d need to significantly increase overall education (both among voters ans legislators) on how science works to make the latter feasible.

Scientists are human. Scientists have opinions. Scientists require funding. Scientists disagree.

Simple example: The heliocentric model didn’t become accepted knowledge because the “earth is the center of the universe” crowd (who *were? scientists) was convinced by scientific argument - they weren’t. It did when they died.

Science holds a lot of high-likelihood facts. This is what we call the “generally accepted body of knowledge”. We know that the earth is round. We can predict gravity in most circumstances. And yes, we know that anthromorphic climate change is real.

But there’s also a lot of “game-changing” studies/experiments out there that are still to be debunked without ever making it into said body of accepted knowledge. This is normal, it is how science works.

Yet it also means that for virtually any hair-brained opinion that is not already strongly refuted by said body of knowledge (flat earth, for example, is refuted), you can find some not yet debunked science to support it.

Separating the wheat from the chaff here requires insight into the scientific process (and it’s assorted politics and market mechanisms) most people (and voters) don’t have.

And no, just telling people whether a fact is broadly accepted in the scientific community or fringe science doesn’t work. We tried that with the topic of anthromorphic climate change.

There is a plausible economic incentive to do this:

Reputation.

This happens less in markets with few, big sellers and lots of customers locked into long-term contracts (like ISPs), but it does happen occasionally in high competition markets where customers can take their business elsewhere easily.

Restaurants are a good example - where I live, a host might hand out a round of after-meal shots on the house to encourage a big table of uncomplicated guests to come again.