I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.

So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.

Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.

Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.

Wait, so someone is criticizing Factorio because someone who worked on Factorio linked to an article written by someone who has, at some point in the past, made awful statements?

Man, that’s some bullshit.

ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.

But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.

My mom has clothes made for her too, often made in Eastern Europe. It’s not exactly cheap, but neither were the off the shelf things she would otherwise be buying.

Yeah, I really don’t get the sizing thing. I’ve heard it’s because if the manufacturer makes a bigger size but labels it a smaller size, some women will enthusiastically buy it because they’re happy to be wearing a smaller (labelled) size. But, that sounds like BS to me.

I think maybe a difference is that men tend to rarely wear tight clothing, so even if the arms are a bit too long, or the chest is a bit too tight a medium still works. But, for women, because it’s designed to have a body-hugging style, if it’s too tight anywhere it’s too small. Like, I can’t imagine any men’s shirt that would result in a muffin top. For a guy, that might mean you’re off by two sizes, not just one.

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They’re really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they’ll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I’d like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn’t fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

Was “Motherfucker” the world you forgot? If so, where does it go in that post?

These days, can you find them online? I can imagine that a local mall might not have much selection, but the Internets are huge.

It’s not that they won’t buy them, it’s just that there’s typically a list of priorities including fashion, availability, price, durability, etc., and pockets is low on that list of concerns. If something is cheap, durable, looks good, can be bought easily nearby or online, and has pockets, it’s going to sell well. The problem is that most designers seem to feel that pockets ruin fashion, so you rarely get things that are both fashionable and have useful pockets. Even when there are knock-offs of clothes where fashion isn’t the main point, they tend to keep small / no pockets just because whatever they’re copying had small / no pockets.

The word pocket comes from pouch. Originally all “pockets” were bags worn either over or under clothing. Attaching them directly to the garment was a 15th century(?) twist.

So… you dress “like a man”?

Don’t get me wrong, I like it. But, there should be a middle ground where someone can not completely abandon the modern standards of feminine clothing, while also having decently sized pockets. The problem seems to be that every time women are asked to choose between style and pockets they choose style. Every time it’s between cost and pockets, they choose cost. If it’s between availability and pockets, they choose the thing that’s more easily available.

BTW, have you heard of Articles of Interest? It’s a podcast from a former 99 percent invisible producer(?) who went on to make a podcast about clothing. The first episode is all about how military clothing came to influence almost all modern non-military clothing.

There’s some truth to that. Unions got us the 8 hour work day, after decades of strikes made bloody by companies and cops. Unions were also working on establishing a “weekend”, for decades, and only making slow, incremental progress.

When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was able to make cars more efficiently and quickly. But, it was backbreaking work. Many of Ford’s workers quit after only a few months. Because training new workers was inefficient, Ford decided it was in his company’s best interest to offer the workers more pay and more time off. Workers liked that deal, so his turnover rate dropped and his factories ran more efficiently.

Eventually he settled on a 40 hour work week with 2 weekend days. He claimed it was for a more noble purpose, of giving workers more money and time off so they could spend more money on everything, including his cars. Maybe it was just a purely selfish calculation though, that to run his factories as efficiently as possible he needed to make the conditions and compensation such that people would stick around and not force him to train up new workers so often.

The history of that is pretty straightforward:

• In 1886, the Chicago labour unions organized for protests on May 1 to demand an 8 hour day
• On May 3rd strikers tried to confront strike breakers, police fired into the crowd of strikers, killing some
• An anti-police, anti-big-business rally was organized for the next day in Haymarket Square
• The May 4th rally was mostly peaceful, but there were police standing by
• At 10:30 the police moved in en masse to break up the rally
• As the police advanced, someone (it was never determined who) threw a homemade bomb into the path of the advancing police, killing 1 and injuring many
• There was a huge gun fight, involving some protesters and a lot of police, many more people were killed, including police, many shot by their own fellow cops
• The bomb throwing was blamed on the anarchists, the anarchist leaders were rounded up, found guilty in quick and massively unfair show-trials, and hanged
• There was massive backlash against the unions and the anarchists, and the cause of the 8 hour work day was massively set back
• Labour unions kept fighting for an 8 hour day, and decided to keep the May 1st date for their actions, with the first being 4 years later on May 1, 1890, but this time it was international, with strikes in Europe, Central and South America
• As a movement representing workers, communist parties around the world adopted May Day as a significant day
• After WWII, the US was in full-on anti-communist mode, and May Day came to be seen as a communist holiday, so they moved it to September 1st and made May 1st “Loyalty Day” instead.

Edited to add: the only really confusing part about the whole thing is the names. One of the main guys involved was named “Spies”, and another peripheral figure was named “Most”. That makes it really confusing when you get phrases like “Most thought hat…” or “Spies believed…”

It doesn’t matter if the excuse is plausible. People who want to show their loyalty can do it by claiming to believe the unbelievable thing.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. – Frank Wilhoit

By claiming to believe the lie, you also lay a claim to being part of the in-group so the rules (like telling the truth about things) don’t apply to you. Of course, the truth is that 99.9% of the people who think of themselves as part of the in-group were never part of it, and will eventually be treated the same as the people who they’re trying to trample on.

Somewhat relevant: when I first searched for those videos I searched for “robot that tests Ikea chairs by sitting on them” or something. I got lots of results, but every one of them was about robots that were building furniture, not testing it. To actually get the results I wanted I needed to say “furniture testing machine”.

So, I guess the Internet doesn’t think those are actually robots, so they don’t worry about their purpose.

Here’s a video from 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_gyzshNPQ

And another one from 2012 testing cupboards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW6RsT4w2hY

Ooh, here’s ine from 2018 where a machine hit 9,999,999 tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMB-qG_x8o

On the subject of devices lasting a long time, does anybody remember when Ikea used to have displays in their stores where you could see a machine testing a piece of furniture over and over? Like, they had one that simulated someone sitting down in a chair over and over again, or one that simulated a drawer being opened over and over again.

Those machines were great. They should bring them back.

Start a tech company. They spawn garages as part of their “backstory” stage.