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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • The thing people don’t really get about “bullet proof armour” is that it’s job is to stop the bullet going into you and messing up your fragile internals - but Newton still wins. The force still has to go somewhere.

    Imagine someone held a stake to your chest then someone else smacked it with a sledgehammer - this would be a Very Bad Time for you, what with all the bleeding and internal trauma. If instead someone held you down with a steel plate and that was sledgehammered with the same force - it would hurt like hell, but probably not do the same amount of internal damage because the force is distributed over a wider area. There is of course a limit - at some point the force is still going to be too high and cause fatal damage.

    Helmets work the same way - the internals of your head are very fragile, so keeping the bullet out is pretty important, but the same problem exists. The force has to go somewhere, and while getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer is better than having a stake driven into your forehead it not that much better





  • Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.

    From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It’s not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it’s that they have to always behave in a predictable way.


  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldOh well...
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    24 days ago

    Back when I worked a shitty retail job we would usually hire a few people on fixed term/fixed hours over the Christmas/New Year peak (ie, you get minimum 20 hours a week for 16 weeks starting November 1st), first couple of weeks are mostly training, then peak, then cover into the new year while the full time people take some leave.

    Had one guy who got to the end of his training then informed management that he would need leave approved starting now and right through peak because his family was going to an expensive ski resort but that he’d happily pick up some more hours when he got back. Got really salty when he was told that that wasn’t going to happen, and he was welcome to go anyway but shouldn’t expect a job when he got back.






  • I don’t have a good answer to your question, but to me “white” as an ethnicity makes about as much sense as “Christian” does as a religious description - they both cover such a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs to be essentially useless. Do a Catholic, a baptist and a modern evangelical actually believe the same things beyond how they frame those beliefs?

    To my mind, same goes for ethnicity - “white” can mean anything from the baltics to western Europe to north America, and to my mind, is kinda racist. It lumps people from as diverse places as Ireland and Russia together purely based on appearances. I get “black” as a self-selected descriptor of people who do have a big cultural touch-point in common - our ancestors were enslaved, brought here against our will, and we still feel the impacts of that even if our ancestors themselves were from a wide background.

    I guess “white” is an easy antonym to “black”, but then that still comes back to a racist tint - “we are white because we aren’t Them” - and lumps in people who have nothing to do with the lasting impact of slavery in the US into this “oppressor vs oppressed” false dichotomy.


  • The MAD doctrine aims to make the intentional use of nukes in war unworkable, but in doing so makes their accidental use due to mishap, misunderstanding or miscommunication much more likely, and the more people that are party to the MAD doctrine the more likely accidents are.

    You don’t need to look very hard to find examples of cases where billions of people would have been killed if not for people choosing to ignore doctrine even when the information they had at hand said that they should use their weapons








  • Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a “wash tub” - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing “dirty” jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.

    The last few places I’ve lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it’s been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it’s harder than it should be to move clothes between them