moved over to sh.itjust.works

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.

    When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.




  • If you’re ok with small spaces, the Seattle underground tours are really really fun.

    I live in West Seattle so I’m biased, but I think the best park in the city is Lincoln park over on the west side of West Seattle. Grab some sandwiches (or ice cream) from Husky Deli in Alaska Junction then head down to Lincoln Park, get a bench down by the waterfront, and just hang out. The southern most part of Lincoln Park is the easiest way to get to the water. You can go thru the park too (which is a big beautiful urban forest) but the walk down to the water thru the park is a little steep, especially for people not used to hiking.

    If dorky Americana type stuff is fun for you, there are lots of semi-pro sports happening around then. Our family likes going to the Dub Sea Fish Sticks games here in West Seattle, but there’s teams all over Seattle. The Fish Sticks play low level baseball and it’s much more people having a good time outside and screwing around than actual serious baseball. There’s also Ballard FC for soccer, with the same vibe.




  • Imagine being so divorced from your community that you think only the actual act of being killed in their school affects children and not the practicing for active shooters, dealing with the fact that people walk into schools and murder children in your society, etc and not understanding the possible consequences of that on small children.

    Very good statistical argument. You may have missed a very small issue though, the part where it’s children and being murdered and them having to deal with that. Other than that, well done.











  • In the mind of the pro-nuclear advocate, they imagine oil and coal plants being decommissioned and beautiful, brand new super perfect never failing nuclear plants taking their place. In these dreams these nuclear plants are never made by the lowest bidder, are never under staffed or inadequately maintained, are never involved in war, are never targeted by terrorists, and are never struck by acts of God. These plants have perfect supply chains whose materials are exactly as durable as described and never less. They are run by people that will, quarter after quarter, year after year, never take shortcuts for profit or make decisions that will negatively affect the plant or the people working there. You see, even the capitalists are perfect little angels in this perfect plan that makes perfect sense.

    Because what they’re selling is a perfect version of a perfect nuclear plant. All inputs and outputs are perfect with the very small exception of the nuclear waste of course, which they have a perfect answer for as well. You see, we will perfectly store and perfectly wait for a perfect answer to our perfectly nightmarish waste product from our perfect energy source.

    hey bro its cleaner than oil hey bro we could get rid of coal hey bro it’s super safe that’s why my plan calls for it to be built in South Dakota

    No thanks. We don’t need to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire to prove our environmentalism. Renewables are here. Let’s make the great leap forward of this generation be the deployment of renewables on an unimaginable scale.

    Even the baseline assumption that oil producing countries and corporations would just sit there and let it happen is so patently absurd that it’s hard to take the conversation seriously at all. Sure buddy, Exxon and Saudi Arabia aren’t going to deploy their armies of lobbyists and use their cartel to undermine the wholesale transition away from their product.

    Sure buddy. Environmentalists against nuclear are binary thinkers but our idea of using nuclear isn’t just naive magical thinking. Sure.