I have to disagree. When I tried out a VR headset at a con I spent 2 hours with the headset on in Space Pirate Training Simulator thinking it had only been 20 minutes. This was the $250 Meta Quest 2 while I had a heavy backpack on my back because I didn’t have anyone with me to leave my bag with. I was trying to be conscious with not taking too much time with the headset so others could have a chance and figured about 15-20 minutes would be appropriate but apparently I was completely in the zone!

I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had that much of a time traveling game experience, so I’d say VR is a pretty dang cool experience and once hardware costs come down (or headsets become more ubiquitous) it’ll probably be a pretty big market for gamers, much like how consoles are now

Whenever I hear a running hit and miss engine it brings a smile to my face, similar with small stationary steam engines. There’s a club in Baraboo WI that does a big meetup once a year where there’s just tons of early tractors and stationary engines powered by all sorts of different types of combustion with all sorts of creative new engine designs that stopped being viable around the time of the first world war. I haven’t been able to go most years but it’s really incredible to see so many wonky engines wirring and popping and hissing and clanking around, all while struggling to reach the performance of a present day lawnmower (and not a good one at that)

They have a slim chance if they keep subsidizing VR headsets to hold a and luceative chunk of the VR market when that actually takes off. VR is genuinely cool enough that enough people will get hooked once they experience a headset on their face with a VR experience that jives with them

In my late night brain-to-keyboard dumping I forgot to specify it would be for a couple of years that I’d want to live somewhere like Puerto Rico or Alaska so that I can have that experience under my belt. It’s a thought that’s danced around my brain for a while as a “what if”

In short, money. My career is taking off and I might be in a difficult place to match my current income in the EU for example. When I’ve looked at listings for jobs similar to and a step above where I’m at and adjusted the income for the exchange rate it would be half or even less than I could expect to make in the States. It’s not a good place to live if you’re poor, but it’s a great place to live if you’re in the upper-middle class which my current career trajectory might well put us into by the end of the decade.

If there’s a sudden boom in prison construction in the next few years I’ll reconsider of course

The thought crossed my mind as well as “what if I did something crazy and sold everything and moved as far away as I could without the logistical challenges of changing countries” and who knows, maybe I’ll seriously consider doing that once my grandparents pass away. There’s bound to be someone looking to hire an IT person in Puerto Rico for a year or two. On the other hand I’m sure there’s a lot more heat and sun to deal with which I’m not a huge fan of…so Alaska maybe?

To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

That’s a lot of time to figure out an escape plan and execute it!

This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus

In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

New business idea!

You raise a good point

Honestly for me it’s muscle memory from the Windows 95 days of “it is now safe to turn off your computer” but I also don’t trust the OS to correctly interpret the ACPI signal sent by the power button 100% of the time. Obviously I’m not an average user, but I could see where an average user might consistently single press the power button to turn off a computer

Well like a lover you must reach behind and underneath to turn them on!

…I seriously do not like Apples design language that basically requires me to fondle unseeable parts of the computer to find the power button. Too much risk of spiders back there!

Dare to be Stupid?

I need to give Matrix another try

I feel that. I like Linux, but I also like using the right tool for the job, and sometimes that’s actually Windows. The rates of Linux talk here reminds me of Reddit like 15 years ago. It’s nice, but also I forgot how weird it is to be in such a Linuxy echochamber

Depends on the shelter. Some are gender specific, some are simply there to help anyone who needs it

Probably the easiest way to do an off-site backup for low-double digit terabytes is an external drive in a bank safety deposit box. Remember your home could burn down fall over and sink into a swamp and no amount of parity drives within the home would keep that data safe.

There’s a group called Improv Everywhere that used to do really creative flash mobs like the No Pants Subway ride where they would all claim to have forgotten to put on pants that day, or going into a cafe and lugging 90s desktops in and dialing in, or during the Great Recession they had a suicide jumper on a 2ft high ledge which they dramatically had to talk down.

They once tried to do a “writers against libraries” stunt but it ended up not being funny enough because people kinda went “oh yeah libraries are kinda weird in that they just give out books for free”