• 2 Posts
  • 420 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: May 11th, 2026

help-circle

  • iocase@lemmy.ziptopics@lemmy.worldthey are not wrong
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    13 hours ago

    Big fucking agree!

    These are all natural monopolies. Massive, incomprehensible unbelievable amounts of money need to be invested to make a network, and then running the next train, or adding a new gas or power customer is peanuts.

    Any time suggesting “hey, maybe we should build an entirely separate system so we can compete” results in people bringing you in for a forced psych eval, you’re talking about a natural monopoly.

    It’s illogical to duplicate the network so “pRiVaTe CoMpEtItIoN” now has to negotiate common carrier agreements and the admin overhead makes it twice (sometimes 10X) more expensive than just one crown corporation owning the entire fucking thing!


  • So this comment sparked a rant I have bottled up

    District heating is objectively the best possible method for heating a town or city. The power plant rejects heat at like 70-150⁰C at the final stage as waste heat. Instead of using that to fucking evaporate water or to heat a lake/river you heat up water and circulate that around town and heat everyone’s place for a literal rounding error.

    Little do most people know, you can actually do cooling with heat.

    Yes I know, it sounds impossible.

    Basically certain compounds absorb heat when you mix them with water. LiBr and ammonia are two types of absorption coolants that can make chilled water.

    To regenerate the coolant after you added water to it, you heat the solution up. You can use any heat source for this provided it’s hot enough and you have enough of it.

    Therefore, you could make district chillers to also cool a town using waste heat. You could even run these off of renewables, especially if you paired it with a big dumb tank filled with soapstone sand and nichrome heaters. Now you can take renewable abundance and turn it into high grade heat for district heating and cooling.



  • 80% of all grocery sales go to one company

    Regulated for by the government of Canada

    And before people get angry assuming I’m against regulations I’m not, they’re just used as a weapon by Plutocrats to protect their own private kingdoms

    In Canada we have:

    2 grocery store parent companies

    5 banks

    2 railroads

    2 telecos

    1 power authority per province (in my province it’s a crown corp which is fantastic. Their shareholders are rate paying citizens not private shareholders)

    3 shipping companies

    What is it for car parent companies now? 3ish?

    1 gas provider per province

    All of our oil and gas companies are American except for 3

    The only competition is among coffee shops and bistros, and even then the biggest chains are owned by 3 companies.









  • I’m prefacing this by saying my background is playing KSP and inadvertantly making my own Kessler syndrome when running out of fuel braking during a station rendezvous 😅

    Yeah you’re fundamentally trading energy. It depends on how the impact happens but orbital scientists think in terms of the average velocity of a collision event and their likely angle. 30⁰ head on at 7km/s is roughly normal I think?

    A head on collision means that you have the full kinetic energy of both satellites to work with. Some parts get thrown up into massive orbits even up into medium earth orbit. Others deorbit due to hitting at the right angle to lose enough kinetic energy that their orbit drops.

    Overall your debris ends up in a plume heading in the direction of both satellites, shaped like a flat cone. In the case of starlink they might have to deorbit the entire constellation while they still have control over them since that cone is invariably going to shotgun blast one or more satellites on the next orbital string


  • Yeah that’s a mess because I understand both perspectives.

    On one hand yes he is innocent until proven guilty.

    OTOH a sovereign nation doesn’t have to admit anyone they don’t want. They could deny you entry for having blue eyes. You aren’t a citizen, aren’t even in the country, and are entering for work.

    OTOOH (3rd hand?) Canada is part of the British Commonwealth and observes British common law as their base legal system, so he should be considered innocent, especially since he hasn’t been convicted of anything yet.




  • The only good news is any debris you generate has some part of its orbit extremely low due to starlink satellites being so low themselves. That’ll stop being true once debris finds something else to hit higher up but it’s easier to deorbit stuff this low since there’s really quite a bit of atmospheric drag at periapse.

    Edit: I should clarify that even after a collision debris has to have an orbit that crosses through the altitude the impact happened at unless some more energy is added higher up in its new elliptical orbit




  • I guess they’re saying if you excluded the top 10% and only considered the 90th percentile and below (most regular people), the median of that value would be living on less than $40k a year. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a lot lower and their “60% live on less than $40k” is understating the issue. That’s a household with two parents earning minimum wage or doing gig work which is an incredibly common low income setup.