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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You say that, but without the US military support it will be rough for Ukraine. The EU has spent a bunch of money to get all other kinds of aid to Ukraine, much more than the US. But the US has supplied more military support, more than the EU. If the US stops helping out, the EU will probably not be able to fill the gap. And Trump can put pressure on the EU by threatening to pull out of Nato again. If Russia decides to invade more countries and the US leaves Nato hanging, the EU is in trouble. Now these are a lot of ifs and since Trump has been elected the EU has been preparing. Plus laws have been passed in the US to prevent Trump from pulling out of Nato, but you know how much Trump cares about laws. Once the EU feels like they don’t need the support from the US any more, Trump has nothing to say anymore, but we ain’t there yet.




  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoFediverse@lemmy.worldI really want to like Lemmy
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    12 days ago

    I’ll post and respond all day, but if nobody is interacting, it’s going to stay quiet.

    Well I just wanted to respond because I’m also trying to comment as much as I can and even post every now and again. But the issue I’ve seen is Lemmy draws a certain kind of person, which means a lot of like minded people in the comments. I see your response here, read it, like it and then think: “Yes I agree, nothing to add”. So I don’t respond, which makes it feel pretty quiet.

    Another thing I’ve seen is not a lot of people even bother opening posts, they just scroll through the feed, get their dopamine and that’s it.


  • I know you are joking, but for people that don’t know: Solar Stills are total scams. They might work in a pinch as a survival tool, but for long term it’s a non starter.

    They have many issues, for example in places that don’t have a lot of water and thus would be the most needed, they simply don’t work. If there isn’t a lot of water in the air, there isn’t any to extract. Even in perfect conditions these things produce very little water, in most conditions you’d be lucky to get a couple of drops. Second issue is the water isn’t clean, there is so much stuff floating in the air, you can’t drink the water that comes out without filtering / boiling first. If that step is required you might as well go with ground or surface water sources. And if there isn’t any ground or surface water sources, there won’t be any water in the air most likely. Third issue is you are creating a hot and humid environment, which is an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of nasties. Think legionnaires disease and all sort of other bacteria and fungi. Within days it becomes a serious health hazard. Last issue is the materials used are almost by definition cheap and exposed to hard uv a lot of the time. This makes them degrade quickly and fall apart. Leaving plastic waste and chemicals leaking into the water it produces, until it just falls apart.

    There have been so many crowd funding campaigns for clean water from the air over the past decades. Maybe some of them are simply naive and well meaning, but almost all are plain old scams. Feeding off the desire of people to help other people, only to fill their own pockets.

    And furthermore, the problem with access to clean water is capitalism. There is plenty of water available, we have the means to extract it from the ground, surface and sea. We can process it, clean it, recycle it. Use trucks or pipes to transport it to places that don’t have it. The only issue is, that costs money and the people living where the water is needed don’t have a lot of money. So bringing water to these places simply doesn’t generate a profit and thus doesn’t get done. It isn’t some kind of huge technical issue, there are many rich places in the desert that have plenty of water. Think oil states in the Middle East, or places in the US like Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico etc. Capitalism is the issue, not technology.




  • The tracking on the lasers for CDs is pretty crazy, since at those scales even well balanced CDs wobble like crazy. If it had to be super flat for it to work, each disc would be much too expensive. And as soon as it got dirty or warped in the sun, it wouldn’t work anymore. In reality CDs are pretty rugged and can take a lot of abusive before they can’t be easily read in even a cheap reader. It’s amazing technology really. It’s kinda crazy to think about how many holes per sec the laser can track and read for something like a blu-ray disc running at multiple times playback speed for data transfer.


  • Good point, however I don’t know if I agree actually. That’s looking at a human in a very simplistic way, which probably means it isn’t fully true.

    For example humans live (and always have lived) to a relative old age, well past their prime and past the point where they can produce offspring. Even back when the average life expectancy was low, people still easily lived to 50 years old. It’s just that a high infant mortality and death due to accidents and illness pushed the number down, a single human could easily live to be 50. At this age they don’t work as hard, can’t produce offspring and can’t really compete, so why keep them around? Many other species don’t live that long or are even actively killed off. The theory is with humans being very social creatures, always working together to outcompete everything else, keeping the older ones around must serve some kind of benefit. It is thought they could no longer work hard in terms of hunting and gathering, they could still look after offspring whilst the rest does those tasks. They could also do smaller, less demanding tasks and so still contribute. This made them earn their keep so to speak, providing more benefits than the extra resources they consume. This meant a group which had elders around had a better chance of survival than a group which didn’t or had less of them. Thus there was an evolutionary gain to living into old age and it was selected for, giving humans (and other hominids who we are related to) a much longer lifespan than one would otherwise expect.

    This means being lazy to conserve energy isn’t the full story, there’s also the social aspect. Someone contributing to a tribe not only helps boost the survival of that tribe and therefor themselves, it also helps them not be ousted from the tribe and thus significantly decreasing survival odds. This means going the extra mile for the tribe, even self-sacrifice, would be selected for in terms of evolution.

    Another side would be I expect a modern human to be slightly more advanced than our hominid cousins and not be driven purely by instinct. We live in a society with rules and expectations and it’s a conscience choice whether to adhere to them or ignore them. It is generally accepted that in normal circumstances a person is fully responsible for every action they do or do not undertake.

    But the theme I’ve noticed is people are caring less and less about society and more and more about their own bubble, so in that sense they might not be malicious. They might be driven by this general trend and the causes for them, which I’m unable to speak of with any kind of expertise. I shared my personal experience, which might or might not be reflected by reality.

    But thank you for shining your light on this, I agree the term assholes implies it’s malicious.


  • Normally you need to put a coin in shopping trollies around here to take them out. When you properly return them you get the coin back. It’s not a lot of money, usually 50 cents. And if you don’t happen to have a coin on hand most shops will give you a key chain with a properly sized round bit of metal. It being so common, most people have one of those key chains anyways. I’d always thought it was a fine system, but people were pretty decent anyways.

    Then during corona because of hygiene reasons shops could only reopen if they cleaned the trollies after every use and that meant not using the coin system. Later the cleaning part was delegated to customers using facilities from the shop and then got rid of entirely. But the coin system wasn’t put back due to hygiene.

    To my surprise people would just dump the trollies everywhere. They would not care one bit where they put them. Some people put them away neatly, some just shove them sort of in the right place. Others would just leave them on the parking lot or shove them aside to end up in a ditch.

    As soon as possible the coin system was put back into place. Later some shops got rid of it again, because it’s easier for customers. But only in select places where people are decent I guess, or the shop puts in the effort to monitor and handle the carts. You would think it’d be the crowded inner city parts where the coin system was needed. But near me in a rich part of town they use the coin system because rich folk just leave the carts in the parking lot, feeling like putting it back is beneath them or something. In a more crowded normal part of town one shop I go to doesn’t use the coin system and I’m surprised every time. The carts there are always perfectly placed. Although that shop has an issue with people using the disabled parking spaces if they need to run in and out quickly, which is a terrible thing to do.

    This whole experience changed my view of humanity. I used to think almost all or at least most people were decent. Trying to do the right thing, with only a few assholes spoiling stuff for the rest of us. It showed me that a tiny little coin, not really worth anything is all that stands between a functioning neat system and total chaos. And it’s not just a couple of people, it’s more like half of them. A lot of people are lazy and inconsiderate, caring only about themselves. If it costs them money, no matter how little, they will do what’s required (because money is everything in this fucked up capitalist world). But if it doesn’t cost them money, they will just do whatever and not care.

    This experience, along with many other during the past 10 years have spoiled my view on humanity. I tend to assume everyone is a total asshole in some way or another, which is honestly kind of a sad way to live. So I make an active effort to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it can be hard and a lot of people shortly prove they are indeed assholes.




  • I’ve had great experience with Axis in the past. However in the past they used to have planned obsolescence where the flash they used had a very limited number of write cycles. With the Linux based OS they run it writes to the flash all the time. This would cause the thing to start dropping writes and misbehave. When ran 24/7 they usually died after about 4 years. The place I worked at just threw them away and replaced them whenever that happened, to not have downtime for cameras. Once I asked if I could have a couple to diagnose the fault and I found out the flash was out of write cycles on all of them. Maybe they are better nowadays, but it was pretty fucked up to see such expensive cameras be destroyed because of a few cents of flash.




  • My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.

    The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don’t see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn’t static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn’t move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn’t as I imagined, at those speeds it’s more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.

    So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.

    The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it’s more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it’s pretty much a bus.


  • This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.



  • How can a regular person block shipments of arms or dismantle AIPAC? That’s not possible.

    What does boosting voices of soon to be dead people do to stop them from dying? What does organizing or donating do?

    Trump has promised Israel everything they need, no questions asked, no limits. And they already have so much, they don’t really need a lot more. They can already destroy Palestine, they can already destroy parts of Iran and Lebanon. They just need the extra stuff and funds to do it quicker and destroy more of those countries.

    And don’t think for a second Trump and their cronies won’t block any money flow from the US to anywhere near there and divert it to Israel instead. And block organizations in the US from doing anything. Israel is already blocking aid for Palestine even from organizations like the Red Cross. What are small organizations going to do?

    Plus the time to act has come and gone. Time is up, this is going to happen within months. We can’t organize, lobby for policy change, set up aid and demonstrations. It’s done, there is a deadline and that means death for a whole lot of people.

    All we can do at this point is look with shock and horror as the far right grips the world and destroys a lot of the things we hold dear.