I mean, in an actual fight, that one movie notwithstanding, King Kong shouldnt exactly be an equivalent to Godzilla, he managed to get himself killed by being shot up by some aircraft mounted guns and falling off a building, while Godzilla can tank a nuke and fire radioactive plasma from his mouth
Honestly, they don’t really deserve the idolization they get even beyond the movies. Sparta was a rather brutal slaver society after all, the reason for their famous military training was mostly to deal with rebellion by their slave population which greatly outnumbered them. If they still existed as they did then, they’d probably be viewed with the same kind of contempt we view places like North Korea.
In theory you can launch humans magnetically if you have a really long acceleration track, though I don’t think “gun” is really a very good description of such a facility since it’s more like a maglev (or hyperloop style vacuum tube train) that gradually rises miles into the air with one end open. Technically possible, but given the costs and difficulty with getting a tall enough structure I’d be fairly skeptical that China actually intends to seriously build one.
Thats what I was thinking of, you still have to deal with building a hugely tall structure though, because the exit must be above the thickest part of the atmosphere
I understand that our local galaxy group is considered “gravitationally bound” and therefore exempt from the expansion from each other (((, but we don’t seem to have other galaxies collected into their own “local groups” of gravitationally bound clusters, so are we saying we’re somehow unique? Is there a trick of...
Dont we see other galaxy groups though? Im no astronomer, but I do recall the universe having some degree of structure above the scale of individual galaxies, with groups and clusters of them forming larger groups or filaments surrounding voids of space with fewer galaxies in them.
I imagine any explanation of the expansion of the universe for people that are not themselves studying astronomy is going to be simplified in a way that gives the average person the basic idea but not the complete picture to avoid confusion when explaining the concept. Ive not studied astronomy, but I did get most of the way through a physics degree, and know that at least there, a lot ideas are explained in that sort of way to people without much knowledge of the subject, especially the more confusing concepts. I wouldnt be surprised if thats the case for most fields of science. For a different example as an analogy, its common knowledge that you cant move faster than light (ignoring the whole expanding spacetime stuff), but it isnt always explained why this is the case, leading to questions from some people like “what happens if I fly a spaceship to the speed of light, and then turn on the rockets to try to go faster?” which have easy answers or just dont make sense as a question if one has had the behavior of objects at high speed explained, but which seem reasonable enough questions to ask if all youve been told is that the speed of light is just some cosmic speed limit. People cant reasonably blame you for finding an incomplete explanation you’ve been given, well, incomplete, and then asking questions that come to mind as a result.
If you’re actually curious, or someone else reading this is, you never can get a rocket, or anything with mass, to the speed of light either, not just faster than it, but you can get arbitrarily close. However, you never notice anything stopping you going faster than your current speed, there’s no point where your rockets stop working or anything, rather, time and space stretch and squeeze such that neither you nor anybody else see you going faster than light. If you have a magic rocket that somehow has infinite fuel and can fire forever, you can actually get anywhere as fast as you want, from your perspective.
Alpha centauri is famously about 4 light years away, but you can get there in 2 seconds, from your perspective, if you go fast enough. But, everyone on earth will see slightly over that roughly 4 years go by in the time that for you is just 2 seconds. (You’ll see them move slowly too at first, since they’re moving relative to you just as fast as your ship is moving to them, but when you slow down, you’ll see them seem to speed up until you’ll have seen them do 4 years worth of stuff by the time you stop). Meanwhile on your ship, you don’t see yourself crossing that 4 light year distance in less than the allowed time either, because space itself is squished kinda, so that the distance to alpha centauri is shortened to the point that if you’re getting there in 2 seconds, it’s now less than 2 light seconds away, from your perspective, and you’re not moving faster than light to cross that distance in that time. People outside will also see your ship compressed like this too.
This isn’t just a regular optical illusion either, space and time really are different for the people on and off the ship (and indeed very slightly different for everyone anywhere). Nobody has the “correct” view of the universe, because everyone’s perspective is equally valid.
As someone who doesnt really know a whole lot about military stuff, does layering ERA actually do anything useful? Id be worried that detonating explosives right against other explosives like that might be counterproductive, but I dont really know anything about the proper use of ERA
Blas Sanchez was nearing the end of a 20-year stretch in an Arizona prison when he was leased out to work at Hickman’s Family Farms, which sells eggs that end up in the supply chains of huge companies like McDonald’s, Target and Albertsons. While assigned to a machine that churns chicken droppings into compost, his right leg...
For many Jews, Zionism signifies a connection to Israel. But a large number of student protesters see the violence in Gaza as a logical conclusion of the late 19th century ideology...
The settlers that currently take land from Palestinians on the west bank, those specific people, not some group centuries ago that those people might share some part of their identity with, were not there before the specific currently living people that they are taking that land from. People living now matter more than some vague historical claims. If the area had been invaded by Islam and the land taken from Isreal within living memory, then sure, it would be just that it be returned to those it was taken from, but taking the land from people who have been there generations to give to people that have not been there for that time and had established lives elsewhere, results in people being uprooted and forced from their homes needlessly. Any history along the lines of what religion was where first is irrelevant to that fact.
Hamas is a different matter though, the post was talking about Zionism and the actions of Isreal more broadly. Hamas is a terrorist organization, sure, and a pretty intolerant one, but it exists largely as a response to those actions. The Palestinians were having their land taken before Hamas and are even in areas not controlled by Hamas, so Hamas isn’t the main problem so much as an excuse for Isreal to do what they have been doing for a long time to a faster or slower degree. Now, if Palestinian statehood and sovereignty were achieved, then sure, Hamas is not the kind of organization that one would want ruling the place, any more than the Taliban for example have been good for Afghanistan. But, one would have to deal with the situation that is pressing people in Gaza to join that kind organization first to truly solve that, because just blowing them up indiscriminately will just drive desperate and angry people into the same kind of group again. And at the moment, the thing pressuring people to join up with Hamas, is the conditions that Isreal has placed them under. Treat any group badly enough, and some of them will do horrible things in the name of resisting you.
It was quite deliberate on my part. You can partly undo things done to or by living people, not even close to all the way obviously, but you can return things taken, from those that have stolen them, and reasonably minimize collateral effects from that, because any uninvolved descendants of the guilty party either don’t yet exist, or can reasonably be assumed to have available whatever resources the perpetrating group had beforehand. When the original victims and perpetrators are dead, though, things become more ethically murky, because you can end up in a situation where it isn’t clear who specifically to return stolen properties to, those properties may no longer exist or no longer be useful in the way they once were, the people in possession of them now may both not be involved in the original atrocity and be dependent on them/have nowhere else to go, and the two groups may have had time for mixing to occur or new identities unique to the region to form. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be done about addressing historical atrocities of course, one can still try to offset the impact on the victims descendants, but that doesn’t really undo any of the impact on the victims themselves or punish anyone involved, because you can’t at that point, justice is time sensitive, it just helps a whole new set of people with negative circumstances that they were born into as a result of the atrocity.
I wasn’t so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we’d want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we’d still need to do something about it. What you can’t do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that’s still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that’s just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
The thing with China imo is that part of the reason they’ve been so attractive for manufacturing has been that it’s cheaper there, and the reason that it’s cheaper there has been lower wages and lower safety standards. That’s bad for pretty much everyone except for companies making stuff in China, and consumers getting stuff cheaper than is probably viable with more ethical labor practices (and even then it’s not really much of a benefit to them, because those people need jobs too and so the negative impact there offsets that). It is sadly ironic that a country who’s stated ideology originally claimed to be in the interests of labor (not that it actually was, but they talked that way), has made it’s competitive advantage in the global economy pretty much be being a way around labor protections and unions.
Something I could see being potentially useful, then, would be a tariff policy that was roughly “if you make stuff using labor that’s significantly lower paid than our wages, or with worse safety standards, we raise the price to be around what it would be if it had been made to our labor standards, so that there is no advantage in not keeping things fair for our workforce and yours”. I’ve never really been a fan of things like tariffs, because I know that they mainly just make things more expensive and can reduce pressure to compete by domestic companies, but at the same time, the current system both makes the US dependent on goods made by exploited foreign workers as most people don’t have good enough jobs to afford much better than that which is made cheap by that exploitation, and incentives those foreign countries to keep their people trapped in those conditions and not raise standards, to avoid losing that competitive advantage to another country that does not.
I mean, realistically one wouldn’t want a rule like that, because if there was one, they’d probably make a bill that had both a child marriage ban but also a whole bunch of heinous rights restrictions and such, and then accuse anyone against of being against because of the child marriage part, but I get the sentiment.
Something I’ve wondered about myself if having a laser communication system on the drone and controller on mounts that always turn to point at eachother, so that jamming the signal isn’t doable because it’s highly directional. Probably want a repeater drone that flies at high altitude above trees and terrain to give it line of sight on all the other drones
In that it uses sunlight and large mirrors, but it should deliver more thrust, but also require some propellant. Also should be able to fire in any direction, depending on how the mirrors are able to pivot to focus on the propellant chamber.
If you name a wheeled vehicle you're immediately executed (lemmy.world)
An international institution doing something based for once (sopuli.xyz)
I'm new (lemmy.world)
What do we know so far about the mysterious crash of the helicopter carrying Iran's president? (apnews.com)
China Uses Giant Rail Gun to Shoot Smart Bomb Nine Miles Into the Sky (futurism.com)
Crabapple (sopuli.xyz)
vore reader: brutalist rss reader (vore.website)
Can Milky Way and Andromeda collision reconcile with an Expanding Universe with galaxies spreading away from each other like "raisins in a loaf"?
I understand that our local galaxy group is considered “gravitationally bound” and therefore exempt from the expansion from each other (((, but we don’t seem to have other galaxies collected into their own “local groups” of gravitationally bound clusters, so are we saying we’re somehow unique? Is there a trick of...
Is this a crime? Thoughts? (midwest.social)
Z shit (lemmy.world)
Hull - 3 layers of Kontakt-1, rubber screen, one more Kontakt-1 layer, and a grate screen. Couldn’t make this up if I tried.
US prisoners are being assigned dangerous jobs. But what happens if they are hurt or killed? (apnews.com)
Blas Sanchez was nearing the end of a 20-year stretch in an Arizona prison when he was leased out to work at Hickman’s Family Farms, which sells eggs that end up in the supply chains of huge companies like McDonald’s, Target and Albertsons. While assigned to a machine that churns chicken droppings into compost, his right leg...
Country music (lemmy.world)
"Portal" Between Dublin and NYC Shut Down After OnlyFans Model Flashes It (ca.news.yahoo.com)
How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left (www.theguardian.com)
For many Jews, Zionism signifies a connection to Israel. But a large number of student protesters see the violence in Gaza as a logical conclusion of the late 19th century ideology...
Biden really, really doesn’t want China to flood the US with cheap EVs (www.theverge.com)
Missouri bill to ban all child marriages runs into resistance from House Republicans (www.kansascity.com)
Why doesn't any country do this? (sh.itjust.works)
Are they stupid?...
A new space start-up wants to try out a long talked about space tech - solar thermal propulsion (arstechnica.com)
lil robot (mander.xyz)