• 2 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Unless you want to take out a whole bunch of them. Swarm of nanosats with some kind of miniexplosives or even just one-use engines to force deorbiting would probably still be more efficient, unless…

    Unless you want to go for geostationary. A real crowd of satellitrs which have a feature of always looking at the same part of the Earth. While it would be very easy to send a boom device to low earth orbit (also very crowded), erasing a bunch of satellites there would be a temporary inconvenience (let’s not talk about Kessler) since a lot of what’s important is either a global constellation (starlink, gps) or has redundancies (earth observation comes to mind). But explode a nuke in the geostationary over the US and suddenly America has no sat TV/radio, no weather sat coverage and it’s harder to patch up than “just” replacing missing nodes of a constellation.






  • Oligarchs. You’re missing oligarchs. The issue with Ukrainian agricultire is that a lot of it is a big, concentrated business with ties to Western capital on top of the traditional post-soviet oligarchy. This influences actions of both Ukrainian and EU politicians. The matters of imports or transit from Ukraine could be very well sorted out for the short term, but no one in power is really willing to do so.

    In the long term Polish agriculture faces a serious challenge from Ukraine when it gets more and more integrated with the west but it’s also not so binary in terms of who floods whom with produce.



  • I recommend everyone who hasn’t to look up the idea of “Potiomkin villages” (and subsequently Potiomkin anything eg. Potiomkin AI). In short: back in the tzarist days lower ranks put up mock villages which looked clean, modern and prosperous for higher ranks (and tzars) to see during visits. These mockups were essentially theatre decorations which hid the real state of the matters - dilapidated, dirty, poor and corrupt. For at least the last decade everything we saw of Russia was Potiomkin in nature - either to show off before the West or to hide corruption before own superiors.





  • Nyaaah, when will people understand? No one in the rich and powerful and tech circles cares about people. We’re “human resource” and always have been, one more mineral to be strip-mined until exhaustion (cf. South Korea) or obsolence (cf. echbros’ AI wet dreams). Once gone or too hard to mine, the drilling ops move on to another quarry just like with minerals (offshoring).

    High fertility in the West is bad because the American and European human mines are capital-intensive while the global South still has billions of units laying bare on the ground. “Pronatalism” is only about the top of pyramid and the narrow slice just below it - white, educated, well-mannered, elegant, artistically minded and creative societe who perpetuate the imaginary, self-proclaimed “western culture”. Shame they are also those who are too worried to have lots of kids in this economy and climate, but oh well.




  • Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.

    Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.

    The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.