“Should” be in for a pricy repair bill.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of precedent, up to and including loss of life, where the police “cannot be held accountable because it might impact their ability to do their duty in the future.”

I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.

The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.

There’s plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.

They’re just not the traditional AAA / “AAAA” games companies because they’ve grown so big they’re hidebound.

The second one.

Mirroring is good for speed, but a storage mechanism with parity checks will always be more recoverable. And you will have far more storage available.

Open and close? Fingernails and toenails?

You are describing Indiana Jones. Graham is talking about getting funding for what is effectively Crystal Skull research. These are not opposing sides of the same coin. Ancient Apocalypse is not an outreach program for more general archeology funding.

This is not about calling the people watching the show idiots. It’s about Graham and his ilk being more beholden to their pet stories than actual research and trying to convince people that they are the One True Archeologist.

A conspiracy theorist complaining about how “the establishment” won’t take him seriously is not a gateway to people seeking out education. It’s an avenue for those people to mistrust actual research in a field because it doesn’t mesh with their preconceived notions. Much like Flat Earthers the problem is not a simple misunderstanding that will self correct. It’s a belief that the “Truth” is being hidden for nefarious purposes because a story is more intriguing than knowledge.

This is not how people get more interested in Archeology, or whatever discipline, or what drives funding for that discipline. This is what cuts budgets and drives people away because “the establishment is a hidebound in-crowd.”

Star Trek is attention grabbing. It doesn’t mean we should depend on time travel to save the whales. Not being able to separate fantasy from reality is not a scientific viewpoint. Actual education about any of this would be steering away from it, not into it.

The answer to all questions about advanced ancient civilizations existing is “probably not”. There are interesting examples that push back the earliest evidence of some things, like the Antikythera mechanism, but the only thing that is evidence of is that gears are older than previously thought. “Could there have been an ancient globe spanning civilization that only used wood or was on Antarctica or for some other reason has surviving no evidence?” is the same level of question as “Could there be a Discworld?”. The infeasibility of proving a negative is not the same as “yes this existed”.

Ancient Aliens level speculation on ancient civilizations is religion without a sacred text, inventing fantasies of a utopian past out of whole cloth because of an imagined fragment of a thread.

“What if every star was a human soul?” is not an interesting astronomy question to get people into astronomy. “Big Astronomy” not awarding grants to study that, is not a conspiracy. It’s due diligence.

Using a platform to say “What if [random speculation that has no basis and can’t be tested]” is not useful science outreach. It’s someone pretending to be science-y.

A person’s sole redeeming aspect being “being an engaging speaker” doesn’t make them a useful object lesson, it makes them yet another snake oil salesman. That’s not new or unique. That’s being a charlatan. Which is what people don’t like about Graham.

Not sure about the second part, tanks are built to go over things. Their “negative slant” seems more likely to push things under than a car’s hood or a truck/SUV’s flat face.

Spokane here, no one outside of a survey team would call it that.

“Inland Empire” maybe, but that’s about as specific as “Tri-Cities” or “the lake”. PNW is the tri-state area of WA/OR/ID in casual conversation.

For that they’re waiting on the paperwork to go through with Apple.

The study is talking about overall numbers of jobs, not specific companies. Get fired from McDonalds closing a location, get a job with higher pay somewhere else that’s paying the new minimum wage, is a net zero result.

McDonalds is gutted that their 2024 earnings are on track for only a 5% increase over 2023, which saw a 10% gross profit increase for the year.

Remember when there was a “shoplifting crime wave” that it turned out was just profits were down so they had to blame something?

…and they shouldn’t. It’s a government service vehicle, form and function over aesthetics.

They could’ve bought a fleet of <s3xy> EVs off the shelf but they would’n’t’ve been fit for service and more expensive per mile/year of use.

deleted by creator

Drop bears attack from the South.

Part of the problem is to meet their quoted throughput of passengers they would need to fully load/unload each vehicle in ~30 seconds. 4 adults in, 4 out, with luggage, with no delays or struggling. That’s… not very feasible for a commercial passenger car. They’re not designed for quick loading and unloading.

The tunnels are a single lane without a service tunnel, which the Victorians used in the 1800s for their subways. Because if a single car has mechanical issues the entire service has to stop and empty to clear it. They’re electric, so there are less mechanical systems, but they are still putting a significant amount of wear and tear on tires/axels/steering systems, all the mechanical systems they still have. Even without meeting the their goal throughput, they’re putting orders of magnitude more use on each vehicle, which are consumer cars. They’re meant to spend most of their lives parked.

If they made a “Tesla train/trolly” where the engine car was pulling a simple enclosed cart with seats it would significantly improve their throughput and loading times, and require less maintenance per passenger. But at that point you’ve just invented a train that uses significantly less efficient rubber tires on asphalt.

Tesla’s design [for Wardenclyffe] used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis. Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his return path in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.

It’s a very Victorian / Steampunk idea that is also kind of horrifying. It’s working off theories of what electricity “is” that we now know aren’t accurate, but if you try to scale them to actually working every building and tree and person is now a lightning rod.

Topsy was also electrocuted at the request of the ASPCA because otherwise she was going to be hanged and it was seen as more humane, which always seems to get left out.

To clarify, Edison wasn’t trying to ‘disprove’ Tesla, the War of the Currents was Edison vs Westinghouse. Tesla didn’t invent AC, he would’ve learned about that in engineering school, he invented the 3 phase motor, which made AC significantly more practical. Tesla had an argument with one of Edison’s managers over pay, not with Edison. Tesla and Edison wrote each other letters later on and generally spoke positively of each other in public.

Tesla’s an interesting guy but unfortunately went off the deep end pretty steeply. His ‘death ray’ was a ‘blueprint’ he sold to his landlord instead of paying rent and is basically gibberish. Wardenclyffe tower was doomed by not understanding wireless transmission and is basically a Bond villain device. Turning the Ionosphere and Mantel in to halves of a capacitor would both take more energy than humans have ever generated and be really really really bad for anything tall and conductive, which would be basically everything with the energies involved.

“Don’t want automated looms? Stop buying clothes. Buy material and make your own, as your forefathers did. Surely your neighbors will be open to your message of time and effort instead of ease.”

Stop assuming the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by scolding the people talking about wanting to avoid it.

Half of windows settings is a button that says “additional settings” that opens up the full settings window that hasn’t changed since Win95. It’s absolutely insane that in a decade they haven’t managed to even replicate full functionality.