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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The soybeans are not solely grown for export. They also fix nitrogen into the soil for the massive corn crop. And as to the corn, I think some of it is exported, but a lot of it is going to animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. So there’s a vector for food price impacts, particularly at the cheap and processed end of the domestic food supply.




  • If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

    Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

    At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

    At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.


  • There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

    Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

    The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

    The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

    So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.







  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

    The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

    East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

    Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

    Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

    There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.


  • The Federal gov in the US has a “road legal” standard for commercial motor vehicles like trucks and buses. The feds also have minimum rules for headlights, brake lights and turn signals on passenger cars.

    Everything else in terms of road legality is a state law in each of the 50 states.

    The reason is the Constitution gives the feds power to regulate interstate commerce (i.e. big commercial vehicles that frequently cross state lines). The feds do not have the general “police power” that states have to pass laws on whatever.



  • I gave you the downvote because I once attended a public lecture by Stephen Hawking, near the very end of his lifetime. It had to be one of the few, very last, public lectures that Dr. Hawking had in him. And the topic of that lecture was the nature of time, and how all of the equations of motion are fully reversible, etc, etc etc.

    Out of all of the topics Dr. Hawking could have discussed, that one is the one he chose. And to me, that means that the nature of time was interesting enough to him to spread around to the public. That there are live issues that are not well settled. And so on.

    Since that time, I’ve not seen any major developments in theoretical physics or philosophy to shift the status quo to an appreciable degree.

    This leads me to the final judgement on your comment: You are wrong. There are live issues to discuss here, and OP deserves to further explain, defend, and debate their philosophy.