• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • The enterprise c did have a battle bridge that they used mostly for saucer separations, but there were times when they used it saucer in place and there are some ships which have more protected configurations.

    Disregarding the IRL reasons of that’s just where it always goes, I believe the in universe reason is that starfleet at its core does not like to identify as a true military organization. It’s why the enterprise C is built like a cruise ship and why despite being a swift science vessel voyager is also very spacious and sleek and elegant on the inside. They do make plenty of starships that are top in class and capable of holding their own against anything else out there, but starfleet is not in the business of making warships. They overtly mention this in DS9 when it is mentioned that the Defiant is officially an “escort vessel” even though it is a very no frills combat vessel.

    Of course they can get away with this concession because generally the shields do most of the work when it comes to absorbing hits anyway. Once shields are down if another vessel wants to go for the kill it wont take long for it to tear through the hull. In theory the centralized location also means that the bridge can get additional protection by tilting the saucer away from the enemy(sorry lower decks).



  • China has been militarizing and between the gender gap, the soon decline in population, and recent global attitudes towards them shifting , theyre going to be in for a world of economic hurt. A large population of unattached young men with poor economic outcomes doesnt bode well for peace in that region.

    Likewise the US policy of “surely embracing capitalism will lead to a liberal democracy” gave way to mild hostility towards china when it didnt happen. Especially with a president for 4 years who kept saying those quiet things other presidents didnt outright say because they knew it would be poking the bear for no reason.

    God help us all if this actually happens because it would lead to a world war centered on Asia and china, and I hope that what will happen with the age gap and decline in china will mirror more japan, but we do live in uncertain times.




  • When you consider that the bridge is on the top and center of the saucer section and a very enticing target the constant explosions make a bit of sense. It’s not that the enterprise got shot in the ass and it sent a current up to the computer that monitors shift rotations, no the high powered energy weaponry is aimed right on the other side of the wall. Structural integrity fields, shields, ablative armor, and other technobabble keep the the whole bridge from popping like a balloon when something bad happens.

    It’s like if your tv is plugged into a house with breakers and safely on a surge protector it’s not going to keep your tv from getting fried if zeus decides to target that outlet specifically and strike it.


  • It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.

    If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.

    For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.

    This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.









  • When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).

    That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.





  • Youtube is still the biggest video website on the world and there just isnt a viable competitor to it and nor is there financial incentive for anyone to jump into something like it given the overhead and cost. Hell even early on when youtube was lower resolution and ran worse on hardware it still beat out competitors like vimeo, dailymotion, and the various early internet content creator sites that spun off of youtubes early copyright purge.

    At the end of the day they serve a tiny amount of ads which honestly is more of a minor inconvenience(especially when you remember what TV was like) and the algorithm is pretty hit and miss(personally on my feed it’s not bad). Even worst case scenario if the adblockers stop working youtube will probably still not die.

    It would take an antitrust hearing or something to really push youtube off of it’s top spot and it would be interesting to see what that would look like for the site(though I suspect a google dismembering would leave youtube intact and just remove it form other alphabet brands which wouldnt entirely fix the issue).

    Hell look at what happened on reddit. That was a very visible very big protest and there was a huge amount of outrage and reddit skews nerdy enough that the userbase actually pays attention and cares about whats going on. Weeks later and not a lot has changed. Lemmy and some other alternatives became viable but even then it And thats essentially just a big message board which links to content on other sites, in terms of design it should be easier to replicate compared to an open video site that anyone can upload to.