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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • “Real” lasers also show up sometimes in the old EU. They’re mostly explained away as outdated tech and “blasters are better” and that even the wimpy-est of force fields will stop them. There’s not nothing to that either. A laser you either need to hold it exactly on target for a measure of time or have a massive amount of cooling in the emitter. If you can just “send plasma” in that direction instead it solves those problems.

    “Slugthrowers”, i.e. ‘real guns’, also show up and “blasters are better” because the bolt is faster and doesn’t suffer as much from aerodynamic effects. But a lightsaber user is going to have problems if a bullet is now just molten instead of being reflected away.

    That’s leaning a lot into the older EU though which is much more a universe like 40k where tech just “is” and people maybe don’t understand the mechanics of how it works anymore.

    And of course it’s significantly much more about the rule of cool than real physics.




  • You’d need to rollback the last 70 years of pensions being replaced by 401k plans and/or limit responsibility to the brokers. If you hire a licensed plumber that ends up flooding your neighbor’s place, the plumber is the one getting sued.

    It would probably also be good to restructure retirement incentives away from the stock market, but that’s not going to happen overnight either.









  • Incognito mode (Chrome) and Private mode (Safari/Firefox) and InPrivate Browsing (Edge/IE) have had disclaimers/explanations for years, Chrome just expanded the disclaimer after settling the suit. Unfortunately for them the judge didn’t know how the internet works any better than the plaintiffs. Winding back the odometer on a car doesn’t mean toll roads don’t know you drove there, it just means “you” have no record of it.

    Opera / Vivaldi offer an integrated VPN, but they’re about the only ones other than stuff like the Tor Browser.



  • Google also accidentally deleted a random amount of user’s timeline data if you didn’t immediately catch it and restore from back up last March before the affected backups were overwritten. If you didn’t keep a close enough watch on your timeline to know that that happened, everything before ~Feb 2025 is gone now.

    Ask me how I know. Yes I kept up on permissions. Yes I had backups on. No I didn’t have a new device. I even have dozens of available gigabytes of paid storage on Google One.

    I’m sure it will only get more stable due to maps and timeline being revenue generators that encourage investment.



  • I’m sure that there are examples of actually wasted money, but just putting it out there that planning is fucking important. There have been several high profile projects, like Texas high speed rail, where planning was the hard part and the project got canceled as they were ready to break ground because “there was no progress”. Cue* Republicans “the government does nothing” after they stopped anything from happening. Infrastructure cannot operate on election cycle timelines.

    Digging in the ground and integrating with existing infrastructure isn’t just a plug and play operation. Leases and liens need to be sorted out. Estimates of current and future demand needs to be sorted out so you don’t install useless networks. Fiber isn’t that heavy, but “can the existing conduits under bridges/roads/etc support it and/or do they have room to without a complete replacement” isn’t a trivial question for backbone lines.

    Winging it just causes more problems as you find things you didn’t anticipate and cause delays while having to continue paying contracts so work can resume once the delay is cleared. If you don’t, the contractor is on to their next job and unavailable for an effectively random amount of time. While everyone is mad at you that “no work is being done”.

    It could be done faster, but it would cost more. Because planning is really important to keep multi-million/billion dollar projects accountable and on track.





  • I feel like using that statistic is misleading in terms of efficiency just from the factor of “gallons of gas per pound of food transported”.

    Sure there’s spoilage from product going bad, but marginal efficiency gains there are so far down the list of things to worry about that they’re not really worth going into. The reason people don’t have food isn’t because enough isn’t produced, it’s because they’re not allowed to have it because they don’t have enough money. Less food spoiling doesn’t fix that problem.