General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Isn’t this Judge Doom’s plan?
you are loved and deserve happiness
Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
If you’ve ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you’d get it! They’re fairly expensive, and aren’t airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they’ll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we’ve been using for thousands of years
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it’s actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that’s what I’ve heard. I looked it up and it seems like it’s your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
i dont believe it causes cancer necessarily, but i think 5g is worrying for the sake of big increase in location tracking precision
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.
I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge
Thats 900 years dumbass
Edit: you got epic trolled by summzashi!!!
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/
EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it’s still really huge.
I think that says more about how unbelievably massive Africa is.
Oh, I have two good ones:
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Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
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You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they’re on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there’s a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don’t have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They’ve been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.
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The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it’s a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm… Nah, those dots don’t connect at all.
Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids
I’ve always thought this was amazing
An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.
Maine is the closest US state to Africa.
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
Most people have more than the average number of legs.
The average person has one fallopian tube
"The average person has… " is very different from “People on average have…”.
I suspect you meant the second, but sometimes people truly mean the first.
The difference doesn’t matter until it very suddenly matters. 😉
I was actually quoting Bo Burnham, it’s a direct quote from his 2010 special Words Words Words
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it’s axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus’ axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
Texas is larger than any country in Europe except Russia.
Wait, is Russia in Europe?
Edit: apparently it’s in both. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents
I always feel weirded out when people are surprised part of Russia is in Europe, when I was surprised to learn part of it is considered Asia.
Geographically only, not in essence
Essence?! We have tacos and bbq!
Turkey has kebab but they can’t into Europe either.
Maybe if EU becomes the World State it can welcome honorary members
