Explain, please

This is the kind of shit why I say that white supremacists and Nazis love the state of Israel. Both they and Israel insist that this is what Jews are really about, at the expense of actual Jewish people just trying to live their lives.

It’s tacos and energy drinks.

• Central California

Remember when Israel kept yanking the football away from the Biden administration every time that Biden announced new Gaza ceasefire talks? At this point, you’d have to be a fucking fool to believe a word that slithers out of Nettanyahu’s head. Israel is working damn hard on burning as much political capital as it possibly can as fast as it can. Of course, they’re not doing it to do something cool like fighting climate change or build a moon base, it’s simply to murder as many people as they can as fast as they can.

"They’ve been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

I honestly to goodness can’t think of the last time I heard Trump drop an F bomb. I think he’s actually rather cross with them

ColdFusion

I was there, 3,000 years ago

That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.

Actually, not the wrong place. The similarities are enough that I think Ted was probably in the middle of a Ketamine bender when they told him about the Timor swarm

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.

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.

Can you share what exactly your concerns are so that folks could suggest a mitigation strategy?

I mean, if you can reasonably bridge the gulf between stars, scientific advancement is basically all that’s left, unless it’s just your culture to be slaving, warmongering dickheads. Your home solar system probably has all the raw materials and energy you could ever ask for.

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.

IIRC, you can get into public games on roll20. I also know Lemmy has an instance dedicated to TTRPGs; do they have any kind of game matchup community?

I’ve never met a public-facing tabletop group that wasn’t enthusiastic to introduce new people to it. I think honestly my worst experience was when some dude brought his insanely broken D&D 3.5 character to play in a level one 5E game. The DM handled it very well; much better than I would have, I think.

Your nearest, biggest city’s library is a good place to look. Libraries almost always have something going on in a spare public room or have public event flyers hung up. If you’re interested in politics, going and yelling at city council is a great way to meet local activists.

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.

Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?