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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I am one. I’m a pretty weak monarchist, though, it’s just that I look south and I’m glad that there’s a “higher level” looking over our politicians. Even if the GG nominations aren’t always ideal, at least in theory they aren’t beholden to popular opinion. The fact that they’re nominated and not elected ensures that they don’t have the legitimacy to push their own agenda either. So it’s a powerful position, but mostly symbolically and there would be a lot of backlash if some ambitious GG tried to use this power for anything other than extreme cases.

    In my opinion, this is partly why our politics haven’t yet devolved to the point of getting a Donald Trump. You can say what you want about Trudeau, but at least the government doesn’t shut down every so often just because they can’t agree on a budget.







  • Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.





  • I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

    It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.


  • Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

    But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

    What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

    Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

    1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches


  • Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

    If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.



  • Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.


  • ebc@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

    All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

    I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…




  • It’s not quite as point-and-click, but I’m using Docker for that because Yunohost kept messing up updates. Most server apps will have some instructions on how to run them in docker, especially a docker-compose.yml file, so you don’t have to rely on the Yunohost team to package said app.

    The way I do it is that I put each suggested compose file in their own file, and import them in my main docker-compose.yml file like this:

    version:  '3'
    include:
        - syncthing.yml
    

    Then just run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d every time you change something or want to update your apps, and you’re good to go.

    Software updates in particular are waaaaaayyy easier on Docker than Yunohost.