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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • 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?







  • turmacar@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldAny ideas?
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    16 days ago

    Just to go ridiculous:

    You can get your Private Pilots License by buying a Phenom or Citation or Lear jet and doing all your training in top of the line luxury, if you spend the money. If you then find that what you want out of flying is going into backcountry airstrips and camping your initial investment is now worthless to you, and you not only need to buy a different type of plane, but learn an entirely different set of skills. So you should probably do the “basic beginner thing” and rent a basic flight school / club plane and see what you like/care about.

    Every hobby is fractal. If nothing else, if you buy the top of the line super specialized equipment you might miss out on the other branch of the hobby you would actually be interested in. (that has it’s own, different, top of the line super specialized equipment)


  • “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”

    • The Communist Manifesto

    Nixon’s Southern Strategy and it’s fallout made a lot of things weird.


  • 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.