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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.


  • Maybe it helps to understand it when you think of it from the perspective that those $1000 expenses do happen, they’re not just hypothetical. But being able to cope with an event like that leaves you less able to handle a second one, and a third one

    Couple that with the fact that I’m the US there is very little financial education so what might be an expected event for one person surprises another. Imagine living with a roommate and not realizing that to move into your own place involves coming up with first and last month rent, deposit, hook up fees, renters insurance, furniture, kitchen supplies, toiletries, etc… None of those should be unexpected, but also why would you expect them if you didn’t happen to run into them before?

    Basically no amount of saving accounts for an expense that takes it all, and it’s then followed up by another one right after. And for some people those events are small and happen so quickly you never catch up and now you have late fees and interest and stress.








  • It doesn’t require suspension of critical thought when you can look around the world and see that nowhere does anyone have high speed rail spanning distances and population densities equivalent to what the US would need to go from, say, New York to LA, it East to West Coast in general. There are plenty of examples similar locally to East or West Coast population centers, but nothing in between. High speed commercial routes? Maybe. High speed commuter rail? It’s not even close to being worth the cost: utilization.


  • dnick@sh.itjust.workstoFuck Cars@lemmy.world'My car is more convenient'
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    2 months ago

    Not sure what you are arguing with exactly, theres a huge difference between commercial and commuter ‘profitability’. Things that freely allow for commerce like a road can be justified from many different direction where a periodic service only makes sense based on demand. That isn’t to say that maintaining an underutilized route with the goal of it becoming utilized based on is availability is always a bad idea, but a road can be built and it’s cost can at least roughly be correlated to it’s use. If you had to periodically rebuild every road, at roughly the same cost whether it was used or not, they would end up with the same ‘profitability’ concern, but mostly you have to build all the roads for minimal usability and then spend the most money on the most used roads. Freeways are understood to improve commercial visibility and are funded by taxes for that reason. The entire country benefits by having clear routes for good to move. Commuter rail primarily benefits a local area and is funded heavily by fares and local taxes.




  • Well, since you ask, it likely depends on whether they’re humorously encouraging you to look at something from a different angle, or if they’ve just discovered a handful of situations that get a chuckle from people who only encounter it occasionally, them proceed to subject everyone to the same ‘second-think’ ad nauseum.


  • These are nice for when you need to tighten something random and you have no idea what size it might be. They do not excel at being a dedicated tool for a larger job. Definitely a matter of preference, but if you find yourself being the go-to person for assembly, a dedicated tool of the correct size is like night and day. If you find yourself just needing something convenient that can jump from bed frame to electronics project and fit in your pocket, these are the way to go. Personally I’d have a hard time imagining not having both options in different tool boxes.



  • I think you are stretching the semantics pretty far…the US is primarily rural geographically and urban only in very sparsely spaced cities…where Europe is urban in more condensed areas. The US doesn’t make everything ‘more inconvenient’ for the most part, most things are simple more inconvenient by nature.

    On the other hand, within cities themselves, the US does shoot itself in the foot with it’s policies and what it subsidizes. Overall, though, most people don’t realize how really big the US is, space vs population-wise, compared to Europe or Japan.


  • There is no way a US federal high speed rail would look anything nearly as successful as ones in europe or other highly populated locations. I think people fail to realize that for the most part the US is very sparsely populated. with the exception of maybe 2-3 ‘regions’ that might look close to the population density and public transportation feasibility of Europe, there just wouldn’t be enough people going between each individual point to make it profitable, even if subsidized. Imagine putting up 300 miles of high speed rail that cost many millions of dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to maintain, and thousands of dollars to run each round trip, and then finding out there are only a few dozen people that need to go between those particular terminals each hour. Trying to adjust by running less often just makes things worse because running less often means fewer people yet will find it convenient…running more often makes it less profitable…so you end up like the US and basically don’t bother making routes and stations without enough traffic.


  • Maybe think of it like one of those big walls of post office mailboxes…behind the wall is your computer and an app might be waiting for a message at box 22 or box 45678. You could close all the boxes and nothing could get in, or you could open one or all of them and allow people to deliver messages to them.

    If you connect your computer directly to the internet, anyone who knows your IP address could say 'deliver message X to port 22 at ip address <your ip address> and the program watching that box would get the message.

    If you put a router in the mix, and multiple computers, the router has the same block of boxes, but if someone sends a message to one of the boxes it just sets there. If you set up ‘forwarding’, sending a message to your ip address gets the message to the router, but if you forward box 22 from your router to a specific computer on your network, then the router takes a message at box 22 on itself and ‘forwards’ it to box 22 on whatever computer you specific (using internal ip addresses).

    You could map box 22 on your router to any other box on your computer…like port 22 coming into your router might get sent to port 155 on your computer…this is useful if you don’t want external people just exploring and lazily breaking into your computer using known vulnerabilities. Lots of ports are ‘common’, so an ftp hack on port 22 is easy, and might be ‘slightly’ harder if you tell your computer to actually look for ftp traffic on port 3333 or something.