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SwingingTheLamp

@ SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

Posts
8
Comments
493
Joined
4 mo. ago

  • Trains

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  • Trains

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  • Okay, now that is at least debatable. Maybe there was genuine belief that roads were better than rail for defense purposes, or maybe the Secretary of Defense was the ex-CEO of GM. In any case, the belief that the Interstate Highway System was intended for military purposes is an urban legend, not supported by the original proposal documents, nor by the public statements of people backing it.

    But the idea that the U.S. just never developed a rail system like Europe has now is in the same level of ridiculousness as claiming that Julius Caesar was a small man who sold pizza, or that Napoleon invented dynamite. It's just such common knowledge that rail was so ubiquitous that it shaped the nation, and the physical legacy still manifest everywhere.

  • Trains

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  • I'm not going to bother, since the point of trolling is to waste my time. I've studied American history, so if you want to argue your alt-history, it's up to you to prove that the U.S. wasn't built by rail.

  • Trains

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  • Okay, trolling, got it.

  • Trains

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  • If this isn't trolling, you might want to read some U.S. history.

  • What do you take for granite?

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  • All kinds of schist.

  • What is the most confusing misnomer you've seen?

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  • Without doubt, the turkey. Buckle up, it's a wild ride: The North American bird is named after the Eurasian country because it reminded settlers from Europe of an African bird, the guinea fowl. Allegedly, they called the guinea fowl "turkey fowl" because it was first imported to Europe through Turkey.

    That'd be crazy enough, if it stopped there. The French call it dinde, as in d'Inde, or Indian fowl, because it came from a land originally confused with India. The Dutch, though, call it kalkoen, which derives from "fowl of Calicut," which is a city in India now called Kozhikode. Lots of other languages use a derivation of this word. Apparently, they got turkeys from India after Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. I say Americas, because the Portuguese name is perú, a South American name that they used to refer to Spanish settlements in the Americas, generally. The Spanish, on the other hand, call the bird pavo, derived from the Latin word for peafowl, which actually are from India.

    Germans, at least, call it Truthuhn, or Pute, onomatopoetic names based on the birds' calls.

  • What's a scam that's so normalized that we don't even realize it's a scam anymore?

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  • As the other commenter shared, in Germany they're working on an interchangeable battery system. In the U.S., the manufacturers sell intro bundles cheaply to get us locked into their "ecosystem." That's the scam part. I've got a drill and impact driver set that i paid less for than the replacement cost of the included batteries. It's the same scheme as inkjet printers.

  • What's a scam that's so normalized that we don't even realize it's a scam anymore?

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  • Cordless power tools. Yes, they are useful in concept, but today they're just a loss-leader to sell you overpriced batteries.

  • How big is it?

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  • Eh. 🤏

  • Metric system? Pffft....

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  • A headline created by an Israeli media outlet, aimed culturally at Britons, and run on various European sites? Much American.

  • Metric system? Pffft....

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  • The editor was certainly no true Scotsman.

  • Metric system? Pffft....

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  • This is apparently from The Jerusalem Post.

  • Utter trash newspaper

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  • Wasteful, or extremely efficient? The bus keeps moving. Meanwhile, each of the parked cars sits idle 95% of the day, taking up tons of valuable real estate.

  • Metric system? Pffft....

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  • Several Texan articles I found about this meteorite used the metric system.

  • What’s on your bucket list?

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  • Indeed, so why add the anxiety of an achievement checklist to our lives so we can feel anxiety about possibly not achieving everything? There's no awards ceremony, nor completion bonus, at the end.

  • Many Canadians have avoided the U.S. for over a year. Have we reached the point of no return? | CBC News

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  • Not only that, but for some reason, Americans have felt the need to step up their disdain for aethetics, e.g. putting up indistinguishable warehouse-style buildings everywhere, bolting eye-searing LED light fixtures to every square meter of the building façade, paving everything possible, and eradicating charm or grace in public spaces. It's gotten really bad since the pandemic.

  • Hotel has extra fees? Well then...

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  • Exactly. "Free parking" is a fucking ridiculous concept. It's just making others pay for it.

  • I'm not smart enough to invent time travel, but I still have some ideas.

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  • Think that's weird? What about: Why do we think it's possible to travel backwards in time, but never think about what it would mean to travel "backwards" in space? How would that even work?

    I mean, you can think about putting a car in reverse, but that's just a human design convention. Like, a ball doesn't have an inherent direction; no matter its motion, it's moving "forward." So if somehow we made a machine to reverse direction on the spacetime path of an object, what does it mean for a ball to move backwards through space?

    If the machine just changes the time component of its spacetime path, so it moves through space "forward," with normal translation of x, y, and z coordinates, but over ⁻t, then at the instant of switching time direction, the machine is still essentially in the same spatial (x, y, z) location, and will immediately collide with its +t self going the other direction. And whatever momentum it had will encounter the same magnitude of momentum in the opposite direction, and since the Earth is spinning, the galaxy is spinning, etc., it's going to happen with quite a bang.

    Except how can matter collide with itself? Another possibilty is that the time machine just moves back along the spacetime path along which it arrived at (x, y, z, t), like a film run backwards. Then, it would be impossible to change the past, as by switching the direction of time, the machine would be on the same deterministic path back to before we turned it on; turning it on would instantly turn it off.

    So the implicit way that time machines in fiction work is that they have to completely cease to exist (probably with a sound as if thousands of people gathered there said, "foop!") in the universe at (x, y, z, t), and instantaneously resume existence ("whop!") at (x', y', z', t') without passing through any intermediate coordinates. But since the Earth spins, the galaxy spins, the local galactic supercluster spins, time is all wibbley-wobbley depending on how fast you're moving relative to other things, and there is no fixed reference point for anything, there's no way for a time machine to lock onto (x', y', z', t'), even if there was a way to get information about distant locations faster than c.

    This is about the point when I wish I was high...

  • Uplifting News @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    Man who helped fellow runner across Boston Marathon finish line says it was natural instinct to help

    apnews.com /article/boston-marathon-fall-helped-runners-7fa6d85faf00ccdd486eb470e553aeac
  • homeassistant @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    Notes from my latest Home Assistant puttering.

  • You Should Know @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    YSK: Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system

    pudding.cool /2022/12/yard-sale/
  • Fuck Cars @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    Congestion Pricing: Will We Finally Learn?

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    Confidence in a romantic context is like salt on food: It can improve the flavor of good food, but can't be substituted for flavor, and too much spoils any dish.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    Everyone is a terrorist when you're terrified of everything.

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    The dream!

  • homeassistant @lemmy.world
    SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

    TV and soundbar with local integration