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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • A train sends 100 cargo boxes from town A to B in an hour. It takes 4 hours to put all the boxes in, and 5 hours to pull the boxes off the train and stack them in the yard

    Conveyer sends 1 box every 6 minutes for 10 hours.

    Same throughput, but one is easier to schedule workers around at both ends. I’ve never worked in a train yard or anything, don’t know how accurate my time frames are or anything, just trying to imagine what’s better about this.










  • Petroleum may be both an accelerator and a filter. Filter in the form of plastic, like you’re saying, but maybe it’s weird that crude oil even exists in the first place. An era where plants die, but don’t decompose may be a rarity in itself. Then the geologic activity that buried that dead plant matter, but not too deeply for us to get to, seems like it could also be a rarity. So then we get this energy source that’s pretty energy dense and allows massive technical acceleration, but then poisons us and salts the earth behind us. Look how shortly we went from the first fixed wing flight to rocketing to the moon, amazing how short that time was. Hydrocarbons, allowing us to touch the greatness we could achieve, before smacking us back down.