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Joined 15 days ago
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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • And if we shared cars instead of owning them it would also save on gas for everyone

    And if we paid someone to drive the car around for us it would be swell

    Also if we do that we might as well make the car bigger

    You know what’s more efficient on gas than rubber on road? Metal. If we made the wheels metal we would have like zero rolling resistance

    That tears up roads though so we should probably pave the roads with metal

    That’s kind of expensive, so we should only pave metal directly underneath where our metal wheeled car will drive

    If we’re going to do all of that it should be bigger. Multiple cars connected together.

    Hey we can get rid of gas entirely? We could run this thing using catenary arms and overhead cables. GENIUS!





  • In not a Chinese shill but realistically modern war is a competition of industrialized might. China would whoop the US in a slugfest (i.e. not nuclear exchange. Nobody wins that) because the US can’t produce at the rate the Chinese can.

    China can mass produce sophisticated weapons… The US’ military industrial complex and incentive structures (cost + % billing) has created a giant cancerous tumor of an arm’s industry. It’s currently tooled for bullying and murdering brown people for profit, not fighting a near peer nation and changing that system takes years.

    It won’t change as long as cost + % and corruption continue, which they will. If the US finds itself in a war with China it’ll have entirely the wrong arm’s industry for fighting them and they won’t have the grace of 1939-1941 to scale their domestic arms industry prior to a major conflict… There’s also the fact that the US is heavily deindustrialized now too compared to WWII… China is closer to the industrial heavyweight the US once was in 1941-45, but they have technological sophistication and a knowledge economy now too…

    Patriot interceptor missiles are a decent example of what I mean. They cost millions to produce and take forever to make which is by design. They could be made faster and cheaper but that’s less profit. If the arm’s industry in the US were paid a lump sum and not “pump your costs as high as possible to get the highest cost+% you can” things would be different.



  • If you get cheap large flash drives the thing that’s wrong with them is QLC memory, and the fact flash memory rots over time.

    Bitrot is a thing no matter the medium it’s just what timescale we’re talking about. Blurays are the poor man’s LTO tape backups. M-disks were also good for a long time too. Very stable and high density.

    However there is a way to make flash drives work for a backup solution. I would pair drives together in mirrors under ZFS. Maybe 4-6 drives in a pool, with 2-3 mirrors. That way you have error detection (ZFS checksums for every bit of data stored), and error correction (mirrored data across drives, along with the checksum to verify which copy is good).

    It also allows you to run “ZFS scrub <pool>” to check everything once a month or so and detect corruption and fix it. ZFS can also identify a drive that’s failing from consistent errors.

    Edit: if you don’t run Linux you could manage this using a raspberry pi 3 or 4 as the host. It could be a very low power and cheap NAS.




  • When you do the math on how much it costs both a private citizen along with the public to enable cars as transportation it’s mind boggling.

    The province I live in makes around $90-100B / year in tax revenue, and spends around $4.5-5.5B / year on roads and road maintenance.

    There’s also the hidden cost of road work caused by utilities being replaced, struck, or newly installed. We pay thx bill for that through our telecom, power, sewer .etc

    Insurance, gas, car payments…

    If a road is built to last 10 years then technically on average you’re replacing ⅒ of your roads every year. Utilities are the same and trenching/patching is horrible for roads necessitating rework on them earlier than the life expectancy. A fiber line might have a 40 year life span, but installing it turned a 20 year road into a 10 year replacement.