it seemed like between 7,000 and 8,000 the air is not suitable, but I figured the pilot wasn’t likely to be taking risks like that, so there must be some explanation

Yeah, I mean the atmospheric pressure at altitude varies, it’s definitely not black and white. And it’s true, pressure does start to really drop off around 7000ft, but it’s just starting to drop significantly at that point, that just makes 7k a good ceiling.

So yeah, this all seems pretty much consistent.

7000 ft is relatively common for small planes like cessnas, they don’t even keep pressurized cabins, but It’s fine if you stay low. So there’s nothing wrong with that altitude, but it’s awfully low for a jet. The jet will be flying at low fuel efficiency the whole way and it certainly won’t have much wiggle room if something really goes wrong. (You can lose 7000 ft of altitude very quickly)

When the keys cost several hundred dollars to generate? I’d say the price vastly outstrips the reward.

It does not necessarily have to cost that much… But even if it did, the key to my Honda cost a couple hundred dollars to copy, so that’s not really different.

I don’t expect to change your mind, but it seems worth pointing out that the things you’re saying are pretty dumb.

So you really think the ability to trade digital keys is useless? That’s honestly weird.

I mean there are so many instances of people actively using digital keys right now, so clearly that part of the functionality has value. Surely there are situations where one might want to sell access to something, and the ability to transfer a digital key with a single transaction would be useful.

I think you’re being overly dismissive based on preconceived notions.

So I’m hearing that perhaps the idea I talked about in my example didn’t sound cool to you. But it was cool to a lot of people, and your opinion doesn’t speak for everyone. And it does work, like today.

To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs…

But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.

But Etherium didn’t invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It’s like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls… But you don’t blame the people that created the pencil and paper.

Well I would agree with that except for one thing, the Amazon tablets are still the only product on the market that actually has usable parental controls.

I’m not saying I’ll ever trust Amazon, or ever have. But the fact is they had the only usable product on the market, if I had other options I’d use them.

And before anyone says “what happened to just teaching your kids good behavioral expectations?” Let me just say that this isn’t always possible. Some kids have developmental challenges or behavioral disorders that make this an impractical expectation. Sometimes you just need parental controls.

Amazon apk store shuts down August 20th.

Huh… This sounds like a huge pain in my ass. What happens to Kindle fire tablets, that you know heavily rely on that functionality?

I can guess what happens to any of us that use that store on other devices (I think it’s safe to say we’re fucked).

I basically only ever used it because it gave away free apps, but man, the DRM put into those apps was so aggressive and annoying.

This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I’d leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.

If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it’s still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm)

I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn’t really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that’s basically the low end for a single machine.

Personally, that’s about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.

Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can’t replace Bitcoin. It’s too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can’t hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn’t do the others’ job.

So yeah, I don’t see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.

I think it’s early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.

Other blockchains have continued moving on.

So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there’s etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?

Proof of work is inherently ecologically flawed, but proof of stake is inherently socially flawed. It’s literally “the people with the most money get to make the rules”. While it’s undeniably better for the environment, it doesn’t seem like an improvement to me. If anything, it undermines crypto’s greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.

Oh man, I hate the whole git system so much, it was like the worst part of coding.

Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.

Maybe we’ll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.

Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland’s. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland’s.

Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.

The first half of your comment I agree with completely.

And even the second half I think is basically accurate, but it may also miss the point.

but even if you magically disappeared every gun in the country, the problems that mess people up so bad they get violent would remain.

So yeah, I think people would still get violent, for sure. The question is, how many people can they hurt when that happens? I mean, I recognize the impossibility of this, but if you could magically disappear every gun in the country, we would pretty quickly see a very different society begin to emerge. For starters, there would be much less murder across the board, less gang violence, less domestic violence, fewer murders by cops, no school shooting, probably even fewer suicides. It wouldn’t fix everything, but it would definitely have a huge impact.

But there would be additional effects too… The relationship between cops and the general public would begin to change drastically. There would be much less anger toward the police and the police would have fewer reasons to fear the public. The current cop policy of shoot first if you feel threatened is both completely unacceptable and simultaneously totally rational (if they assume anyone could have a gun). But without guns in people’s hands, (including the cops’) we’d have a completely different dynamic in so many otherwise dangerous situations.

All that said, you’re right that economic inequity will always lead to social interest and violence. So like I said, this wouldn’t solve everything. But on the other hand, getting rid of guns entirely wouldn’t be a bad way to go, it would certainly heal more than it would hurt.

Well there are a lot of factors defining how much usable material we could get, and how hard it would be to do it.

Yeah, about 98% of the sun is hydrogen and helium, with other elements making up the remaining 2%.

The machine used to generate the magnetic field would likely be a ring rather than plate, with the goal being to bend the trajectory of any matter that passes through the ring just a little. In effect it would work a lot like a lens, that could focus matter passing through it into a cone of trajectories, with collection happening at the point of the cone, possibly a point at a much higher in orbit. (This does introduce some complications in the different orbital speeds for the ring and collector, but without getting into it, there is a solution for that, it’s not the hardest part of this idea)

And how much you can capture depends a lot on how close to the sun you can put your magnet field ring. If it’s stationed closer to the sun it shrinks the size of the sphere you’re trying to cover. So if your ring could survive at 0.2 AU from the sun (about half the distance of mercury’s orbit), a ring of the same diameter would cover 25 times more area of the sphere than if it was stationed at 1 AU.

So your 59.5 tons collected turns into 1487.5 tons, 2% of which is 29.75 tons of usable material (which I’ll be honest, is not great considering the magnitude of the construction project). It’s probably a better deal if you’re using the hydrogen towards fusion power, but it’s still not great.

The good news is that it scales well, the larger you make the ring, the better your ratio of materials gathered vs materials needed to build the ring, which makes the optimal diameter of the ring about the same as the diameter of the sun. So… yeah, this is not a project in our immediate future.

we don’t even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.

Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.

It’s been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here’s the quick version:

The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth’s hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don’t separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.

And it’s a lot of matter that could be collected this way… The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars’s moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.

And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn’t help myself. 🤓

Exactly, petitioning steam doesn’t help, their hands are tied. It’s the behavior of the payment processors that needs to change. If they wimp out over every complaint, then we all live at the whims of the whiniest prudes in the world.

Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.

I love that. I still have the very first computer I ever bought, a Power Mac G4 I keep saying that some day I’ll modify the case to house my current PC.

My favorite feature of that case was the latch you can see on the side, you pull the latch and the entire side opens downward, no screws. .