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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Balkanization isn’t a master plan of any thinker, it’s a natural process as people move to cut themselves off from those they strongly disagree with.

    I think there is a strong argument to be made that Balkanization is the ultimate, if unintended, result of the US founding fathers’ plan. From the very beginning it was a deal with the devil: a compromise between factions — who ought to be bitter enemies — under threat from a superior foe (the British Empire).

    The collapse really began to build steam after the last great foe, the Soviet Union, was defeated.





  • This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.

    Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.

    As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!







  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.worldRebellious Act
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    26 days ago

    That was an example that doesn’t really depend on there being exactly 2 competitors. If there are 20 competitors and they’re all spending a lot of money on advertising then they’re all producing a net negative

    I mean there’s probably some small amount of money they could spend on advertising that would be a net positive because it would inform the public of the existence of their product. But beyond that, they’ve moved from informing the public into trying to convince the public to buy their product. There’s simply no limit to the amount of money you can spend trying to convince somebody to buy something and no limit your competitors can spend to convince them not to!


  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.worldRebellious Act
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    26 days ago

    Society does not benefit from advertising. Vast numbers of people hate it and try to block it as much as they can. Others fall victim to it and get manipulated into buying shit they don’t need.

    But overall, if 2 competitors are advertising against each other then it can turn into a destructive arms race. They each spend more and more on advertising just to keep taking consumers back and forth from each other! That’s a net negative for society!




  • The harder thing to convey is the full dimensionality of it. With the rubber sheet (or trampoline) you can show a small ball orbiting around a larger one but only in a single plane (around the “equator” of the large ball). However in reality you can orbit in any direction you like and many satellites actually orbit over the poles. Trying to show that with a small model seems extremely difficult!

    Furthermore, most children are raised on the idea that gravity is pulling them down. They intuitively understand the idea that when they climb a ladder and drop a ball from the top, the earth pulls the ball down. General relativity tells us that this is not happening at all! That there us nothing pulling us down whatsoever. I have yet to see anyone provide a lay person GR explanation for the ladder problem.



  • Oh because that incorrect analogy is the most common “lay person” analogy for describing gravitational curvature of spacetime. The most common reply from children is that it’s the earth’s gravity pulling down on the bowling ball so that the trampoline demonstration wouldn’t work in space.

    Also the trampoline analogy doesn’t show us how gravitational lensing works, nor does it even touch how different gravitational reference frames affect the passage of time (GR generalizes special relativity, after all).