drosophila

joined 5 months ago
[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's the combination of FPTP voting and the presidential government structure.

In a parliamentary system third parties are more viable because they can act as "king maker" to one of the two larger parties.

Of course a proportional voting system like STV is even better for party diversity.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

They've done that periodically for years.

I don't dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 month ago

The sculptor must've looked at all those statues that have cloth draped over bodies and said "I can do you one better".

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Where do I sign up for my "doesn't believe Kamala Harris can control the path of hurricanes with a weather machine" award?

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 month ago

Imagine existing.

Couldn't be me.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Interesting to note that although HAARP was originally a joint project between the US Air Force, US Navy, DARPA, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, since 2015 control was transferred exclusively to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven't had to open it in a very long time.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.

How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That's what their lives were worth to the factory owners.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering

Basically any stone structure made for any reason will vastly outlast any steel reinforced concrete structure. Although concrete might appear superficially stone-like and unchanging it is actually porous and chemically active. Within about 100 years the steel rebar inside a concrete structure will rust, expand, and crack the concrete apart. Freeze-thaw cycles and plant activity will reduce it to rubble shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile a piece of stone block was already about a billion years old before it was cut out of the ground. A stone structure might be destroyed by earthquakes or human activity, but it does not have a built-in self destruct sequence countdown timer like SRC does.

The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long.

We absolutely can and sometimes we do.

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