Looks pretty similar to the Japanese SCMaglev. But does that means the track would need to be active like the Japanese one? I tried to research this in the past and all the sources say that the Japanese Maglev has the linear induction motors on the track, in addition to passive coils that the train’s electromagnets interact with.

That’s in addition to Maglev’s intrinsic need for power delivery coils in the track (the bottom of the track basically needs to be primary side of one giant very smart transformer).

Imagine building from Beijing to Shenzhen’s distance in ultra high tech tracks that can’t interop with regular trains, where they’ll have to safely handle a 600 km/h train passing over them in the harshest weather conditions. And you can’t have very thick armor for it because you need the magnetic fields to be as close as possible to make the power delivery efficient, It’s both a construction and a maintenance nightmare. The tracks themselves will offset a lot of the ecological benefits of trains over flying.

SNCF set the wheeled train record at 500 km/h with a test train. Why not try to beat that?

I live in Vancouver, Canada, in a townhouse with windows that swing out from the side like these:

See how little that window is open? That’s very likely the MAXIMUM it can be open which is dumb as hell.

They also make it impossible to hang a window air conditioner which means you’re limited to the significantly less efficient portable air conditioners. But even then you can’t form a good seal between the exhaust pipe and the window, which make them even less efficient.

Fuck my windows. We’re not allowed to change them even though we own the townhouse because the strata wants to keep all the townhouses consistent. So fuck stratas as well. And the worst part is I see these types of windows EVERYWHERE in new construction around Vancouver.

But they explicitly don’t show the actual problem solving aspects. Star Trek technical problem solving is WAY too straightforward because that’s required for a good show. In reality, solving simple issues can turn into a massive ordeal.

Ah yes, I was born in the month of Jay.

I’m not trying to convince you on this, but this is my personal belief:

There are runaway reactions already being triggered in the atmosphere that will make the planet hotter and hotter without stopping or slowing down for millions of years. Where are you going to live when the minimum temperature is 60C or higher? A difference of 30C or so is enough to make life impossible for us but isn’t even a rounding error compared to the temperature range of a planet. Look at Mars.

Will it happen in the next few centuries or even millennia? No. But those timescales are miniscule compared to the life of the Earth or the lifecycle of an entire species.

We will be the cause of not just climate “change”, but pretty much a life reset. Like the asteroid. EVERY animal larger than 10 or so cm will die. There’s no way out of it. This is the great filter.

They weren’t sure whether Grok will fit into the culture and agenda of the US government but the MechaHitler incident reassured them.

Opossums are lovers, not fighters

Phones. I haven’t been excited about a phone launch in literally years and I really think they’re getting worse by the year. Whenever I have to buy a new phone, I feel frustrated and angry because it’s never because I wanted to upgrade to the latest model or anything, it’s because my previous phone’s glued in battery has degraded so much that it’s unusable while the rest of hardware is still perfectly capable of running the latest software (or they arbitrarily decide to ban your device from the latest update meaning you either get a new one or expose yourself to even more cybersecurity risks than having a phone already entails).

There’s no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There’s no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.

We’re also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.

And IMO that’s extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you’re here, don’t worry about the far future because it doesn’t matter.

Human CELLS. Not human body.

There are human cells in the lab that have long outlived the person they came from. Look up Henrietta Lacks. That doesn’t mean you as a whole will live longer.

The replacement of human workers begins with bipartisan support.

How the country should be run, including what kinds of people are on the chopping block.

There’s a communist party of Israel? Are they actually communist?

IMO, simple fact that the majority of drunk drivers survive accidents that kill their victim instantly shows that no higher power is looking out to punish the wicked or protect the innocent.

Walk

The aggressor, in the process of atoning for their atrocities, doesn’t really have a right to say that the recourse proposed by the victim is unreasonable.

We are the colonial aggressors, Indigenous people are the colonized victims. I’m obviously not saying that eye for an eye doing the same to us as we did to Indigenous people is justified, but simply returning the land we stole is more than reasonable. And the logical extreme of returning stolen land is that if the rightful owners then wanted you to leave, you should.

Let’s say a man and a woman live in the same house, and the man hits the woman. If the man is truly seeking to atone for his crime, and the woman tells him to move out because even seeing his face is traumatic for her, would it be reasonable for the man to complain that he has nowhere else to go? To ask the woman where she thinks he should go? To try and guilt the woman into letting him stay? If he does any of those, is he truly sorry for what he did?

You’re right that most Indigenous people don’t want mass expulsion. We should be incredibly grateful for that and it’s a testament of their compassion and desire for equality among all people, even after all we did to them. What we shouldn’t do is tell them that they can’t tell us to leave or that we’d refuse to leave because we have a rightful claim to this land. Doing so is completely unproductive and will only serve to make us less deserving of staying.

I can confidently say that I, an North American with European decent, also have no interest in “waging a multi-generational genocide”; why must I be punished for it, then? Nobody gets to choose their ancestry.

The goal is not to punish anyone, nor is the goal to kick everyone out. The only goal of decolonization is to give back control of the land which was forcibly taken. Like Cowbee said, you give them the reigns, and then you let go. The logical extreme of this is that if they wanted everyone to leave, they could in theory, but that’s only a logical extreme and it doesn’t mean it will definitely happen. The majority of Indigenous groups make it pretty clear that’s not what they want out of decolonization.

Indigenous peoples are not interested in punishing you. Most aren’t even interested in having you go anywhere. They’re reasonable people with empathy and compassion. The notion that you were born here not by choice is not lost on them.

I think this thread is focusing way too much on the notion that Indigenous people could force you out of their land and many people are under the assumption that they will definitely treat you worse than the current government treats you for not being Indigenous. But honestly, the way the current government treats even non-Indigenous people is absolute shit and getting worse by the day, so there’s no reason not to think our lives would be better under Indigenous sovereignty.

I recommend the book The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth if you’re interested in what decolonization looks like from the perspective of Indigenous people. They certainly don’t solely think about benefiting themselves.

Ironically Uranium by itself isn’t actually that harmful compared to some of the other stuff on the periodic table. You can hold uranium metal in your hand for short periods of time without too much risk, there’s other stuff that will actually kill everyone within 10+ meters of it.

At what scale? I’d say it’s definitely closer to colonialism than it is to Indigenous wars. No doubt some Indigenous groups were capable of immense cruelty to those around them, but a continent wide ethnic cleansing is something utterly incomprehensible to even the most expansionist Indigenous groups.

Colonialism developed logistics, beauracy, and governing bodies specifically for genocide, which happened over generations. The people in charge of perpetuating it didn’t even know all the people they killed, the concept of those people alone were enough to condemn them. By contrast, even the largest scale Indigenous wars had the combatants reasonably familiar with those they were fighting.

The thing that gets me is that even if we catch sight of what is indisputably signs of intelligent life from another planet, due to the magnitude of the universe and the comparatively slow speed of light, what we’re seeing is thousands or millions of years in the past. Even if we get a transmission from an alien species, they’re likely long extinct by the time we receive it, let alone the time it will take for a reply to get back to them.

Same for us too. Any life that can see us will not be from our time, they will be eons in the future by which our species will be long gone.