That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.

Oh boy, I can’t wait to get the coast and drink some chowder

Well, see, for that to happen, you’d need politicians who aren’t complicit in trying to rip the wiring out of the walls. Also, regulating railroads is hella complicated in the US because we’ve got a bunch of ancient laws that give the railroads more rights than God, to the point where you almost stop being a citizen when you step onto railroad right of way. We COULD deal with that, but it’d be almost as much of an almighty fucking lobbyist shitshow as when we try to regulate oil.

Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they’ve got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they’ll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don’t fucking fall for it.

Some asshole Mba/lawyers figured out that if they made the trains physically too long to fit onto the pull outs, then they could just shrug and say “golly, we’d love to pull over for you, but we just can’t lmao” and it’s perfectly fine. It’s called Precision Scheduled Railroading

Where do I enlist?

I want you to know that you nerd sniped me with this comment and I started doing the math. To raise the apparent size of Betelgeuse to the apparent size of Jupiter (at its largest to the naked eye), you’d need a minimum 20 inch aperture telescope to pull the required 1000x magnification. Mind you:

• 20 inches is not a mass produced telescope size, but there ARE custom makers who produce reflectors at and well beyond this size. There are certainly terrestrial telescopes that can achieve what we need.

• you’re still not resolving any details at that size, it’s just raising Betelgeuse to the same apparent size as Jupiter at its naked eye largest.

• most places on earth are not conducive to magnifications over 300x. You can certainly do it, and sometimes the atmospheric conditions are ridiculously clear and you can pull off stupid levels of magnification, but there’s a reason why observatories get built up on mountains a lot. 1000x is… Well, good luck. Especially since Orion and Betelgeuse never get too close to the zenith, meaning there’s always a substantial amount of atmosphere to deal with.

Edit: let’s go with raising it to the same apparent size as the full moon, which occupies about 30 arcminutes or 1800 arc seconds. Jupiter is 50 arc seconds at the largest, and Betelgeuse is 0.05 arc s. To figure out how much we need to magnify Betelgeuse by, we take the apparent size of the moon and divide it by the apparent size of Betelgeuse, yielding 36,000x. Assuming a spherical cow, telescope aperture is what limits the maximum useful magnification, and the equation to derive that is roughly 50x aperture. So, if we divide 36,000 by 50, we’ll get our minimum required aperture of 720 inches, or fifty feet. IIRC, we have at least one terrestrial telescope that’s at least that large, down in Chile, though I’m almost certain there are more and larger ones, too.

Isn’t this functionally true for objects on the infinite focal plane? I.e. a star? Betelgeuse might actually be huge in absolute terms, but from earth, and even in a large telescope, it’s still a pinpoint whose circumference is not meaningfully distinct from its diameter.

For me, as a DM, real shit always happens on session 1, you swim together or fucking die.

Wow, what the fuck

Can you share what exactly your concerns are so that folks could suggest a mitigation strategy?

No, I was speaking generally. I’ve seen several calls for non-violence, though the only people I’ve seen get hurt so far are those who’ve been hurt by the police. I wanted to share that there is space between not being violent and being prepared or demonstrating the capacity for violence.

That’s fair

Regarding the calls for non-violence, I don’t want to put anyone down or say anyone’s doing anything wrong. Good job being out there and trying. I would also like to point out

1. Dr. King was NOT spoken of as a paragon of non-violence by conservative contemporaries. It was very common to refer to Dr. King’s protests as riots and in terms of inciting violence, even if the violence being invited, much as today, was police on protestor violence. If Dr. King had bowed to the cries that he was sparking violence, we never would have gone anywhere. There was a huge acceptance washing campaign by conservative America after the civil rights wins.

2. In the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, protestors were getting cut down by police snipers during peaceful, unarmed marches. The police snipers were shooting people who were running out with stretchers to get the people who’d been shot. When they finally got sick of it and announced that they were going to come back tomorrow and do an armed march, the cops suddenly remembered that they all had dentist appointments in Belarus that day and skipped town. Nobody got shot during the armed march. See: https://youtu.be/yzNxLzFfR5w . So, it’s not so much that you have to use violence, but the state is a lot more likely to hesitate about kicking your shit in if they know you can be violent back and believe that you’re willing to do so. Ask any conservative what an acceptable protest is, and it’s likely to be something like “shouting into your closet”; as far as they’re concerned, peaceful marches ARE ALREADY violent if anyone notices them or they disrupt anything at all. Our cops don’t give a shit if you’re peaceful, they shoot reporters with rubber bullets and force people to grab billy clubs so they can beat the fuck out of them. We’re past that. It’s time to remind the state that there is alternative to peaceful protest if they really want to go that route.

I dunno, man, we could probably get into an entire dissertation about this, but I’m not totally convinced that most of these fabulously wealthy people didn’t just fail upwards by throwing the spaghetti plate at the wall; the only difference between them and us is that, often, they start with a lot more spaghetti to throw

Beans

Been workshopping a Terminator 2 one-shot in Fate, might drop in there!

cia.world gave me a giggle

Anon sucks, I want to hear about this mf drywall

Just wanted to say that I took your advice, and posted an update to this thread. It turns out that moving to LibreOffice would have virtually no benefit in any regard whatever according to the city IT manager. Thanks for the advice!