happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

  • 0 Posts
  • 343 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: October 7th, 2020
  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoTechnology@lemmy.zip•Used EVs break records while sales of new EVs plummetEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    I’m really curious to see what happens with the Slate truck. The price keeps ballooning to the point that I don’t think consumers will be able to afford it over an econobox, but an electrified 1990s Ford Ranger is exactly what would give me the most utility from a vehicle. It goes further and hauls more than my cargo bike without any extra shit that will break, while having more safety features than a kei truck that can’t drive well on the roads I would need it to.

    Outside of a BYD at half the price, it’s the only vehicle I could see myself buying. Either I get a really nice car at a nice ebike price or a purely practical car at an econobox price. Otherwise it makes infinitely more sense to wait for solid-state batteries to proliferate outside of Chinese models so I don’t have to deal with any of the drawbacks to EVs.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•In your opinion, is space exploration necessary?English
    3·
    6 days ago

    It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.

    It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•In your opinion, is space exploration necessary?English
    2·
    6 days ago

    Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor.

    Funding streams are my big concern here. Government research is mostly toward non-profitable things. I like that NASA takes a decade to develop a robot and cancels the launch repeatedly to make it as safe as possible. Plenty of derived consumer tech will come out of that project and it has the least chance of exploding over my head. Corporate research is mostly toward profitable things. It further enshrines corporate power, limits more technology behind patents, and creates exploitative technologies to generate the most profit for their time. Our intuition goes so haywire with things like tech industry hope-ium, in the opposite direction of NASA considering lots of problems in its slower public research. The best version of an organisation like that is a slow trickle of good data for every field and products for consumer use without restrictions.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•In your opinion, is space exploration necessary?English
    11·
    6 days ago

    China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.

    The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.

    Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.

    edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•In your opinion, is space exploration necessary?English
    231·
    6 days ago

    There’s a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn’t matter what the puzzle is so long as it’s a challenge to solve. They’ll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is.

    Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D.

    Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting.

    We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they’re just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Talk like an 👽English
    2·
    7 days ago

    It’s a post-biological pidgin. You can’t communicate cultural ideas to beings that probably have entirely different ideas of culture, but you can establish the intent to communicate as two rational species. Since mathematics is presumably consistent across the universe, you can beam a non-natural signal into space as a technosignature. If something responds to it, you’re both sentient and have some kind of respect for academia. You can then use it to establish logic, make grids, and represent simple images without relying on their “eyes” perceiving the same wavelengths we do. Something like 1s and 0s is probably going to be easier for them to interface through than speech.