• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah this is the biggest issue.

    The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

    In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

    Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.




  • Besides the first all electric train bit, which is nonsense, it also touts the capacity of the train. It has 120 seats, which may be mind blowing to car heads, but for a train is rather on the low side. Regular passenger trains often have over 200 seats and many have more seats for the same length. For busy pieces of track 600 seats per train aren’t unusual.

    It really is like the author has never heard of trains before and has his mind blown by the concept.

    Personally I think putting in batteries is kinda dumb, trains need so much infrastructure already and it’s fixed in location. Adding a power delivery system (like overhead power lines like most electric trains have) is really easy. That way a lot of weight is saved, thus making the whole thing more efficient. You also don’t need any special materials to make it, compared with huge batteries. And the wear components are a lot less expensive to replace.


  • Yeah but this is referencing the movie trope where the person has a fully stopped heart and they shock it back to life. In reality applying cpr is just keeping the blood pumping to supply the brain with oxygen in the hope the body restarts the heart itself. That’s why modern defib machines check the nerve impulses to see if shocking it would help. Of there is no heartbeat, it won’t help and will refuse to shock. Once the body restarts the heart but the rhythm isn’t correct shocking can help. The shocks also aren’t huge shocks where the person violently lurches up and putting in more energy won’t help either. The machine checks the rhythm and applies a series of shocks to help the nerves regain their normal pattern and thus tell the heart to pump in the right sequence and speed. Just randomly zapping will probably do more harm than good.

    It’s pretty nice the emergency defib machines we have all over the place these days are smart enough to help without needing to know how it does their thing. Because 80s and 90s TV and movies have muddied the water quite a bit.



  • The whole mixing colors is white is kinda misleading.

    Colors only exist inside our mind, they don’t exist in physical reality. We have three receptors for wavelength information in the em spectrum in our eyes. They are S, M and L type and they are sensitive to a different range of wavelengths. The M and L range overlap quite a bit and are sensitive to a wider range of wavelengths. The S is apart on its own and quite focused. The receptors turn that wavelength information into signals our brains can read out. Simply speaking the eyes tell our brain for a given part of our retina we have x amount of S energy, x amount of M energy and x amount of L energy. That’s all the information we get.

    So our brain combines this information and decides what color it’s supposed to be. As a child we learn what the different colors are. So we correlate those energy levels to the colors we are taught. This is highly subjective as each brain and set of eyes is different. Most men for example have less sensitivity to colors compared to most women (exceptions exist, this is generally speaking). Thus men see different energy levels, but still can see colors just fine for the most part. However women are on average able to distinguish between more shades of the same color, because they have more information to work with.

    In the modern era however we found out our brains aren’t very picky and will just guess what color something is. In sunlight there is a broad range of wavelengths, which we associate with white light. However when making white leds we found out you can just output some spikes of light in the correct ranges and our brains will say jup that’s white. You can also output shit outside of the wavelength of our three detectors and we don’t notice or care. This makes cheap energy efficient white leds possible.

    In the early days the peaks were very narrow with not the best wavelengths. We would see this light as white, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. Without saying exactly why, we would experience the light as harsh or get headaches after a while. Modern white leds are very comfortable for our eyes and available in a whole range of whites to suit our needs.

    So while a whole lot of wavelengths combined like the light from the sun is white. A bunch of random spikes is also white. It doesn’t have to be all colors.

    Also because colors only exist in our minds, things like grayscale colors, impossible colors and metallic colors are also a thing. There’s a whole lot more to colors than just em radiation at a certain wavelength.









  • I accidentally opened linkedin the other day. Holy shit what a bunch of trash. It used to be a business networking site. Now it’s just a shitty Facebook clone. My time line was full of memes and dumb shit. It was also full of people I don’t even know.

    I only used LinkedIn in de past to give other people I worked with recommends. It was always appreciated. Now I think I will delete my account.


  • I’ve seen it as well. A part of it is because posts get down voted, so when you scroll down it gets displayed twice since it moved in the ranking in between loading. This also means if a post gets up voted, you can easily miss it. It’s only an issue with posts that have few votes usually, so not a huge deal.

    But I’ve also seen where the same few posts just repeat twice for seemingly no reason. I’m not really sure how the data gets retrieved. With other systems I’ve seen a “session” associated with a cursor. That cursor moves through the data, maintaining the order. That way it doesn’t matter that stuff changes in between client data retrieval. Lemmy doesn’t seem to work like that, simply querying the database with filters. That isn’t the best honestly.


  • Damn you know they have real doubt about Starliner with this decision. People were saying Nasa was just being super careful and the vehicle was perfectly fine like Boeing said. But with the astronauts being forced to use Crew Dragon, they can’t wear their space suits. Because the suits they use on Starliner aren’t compatible with all the SpaceX stuff. This can be a big risk, if there is a problem with the vehicle, the astronauts have no protection. But Nasa must have decided that was a smaller risk over using the Starliner. That says a lot.