>The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars
I keep hearing this and completely disagree.
I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.
As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.
Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:
* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society
* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society
* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.
Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.
* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)
* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs
* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)
There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood
All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.
I am a middle-aged man.
I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.
I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.
You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.
>To get around thousand-year generation ships, we are examining some beamed energy solutions that could drive a small sail to Proxima in 20 years.
The odds of a spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust while in space are 100%.
A spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust at 0.2c will impart tens of millions of joules into the body of the spacecraft, the equivalent of getting hit with hundreds of pulses from the most powerful laser ever created by humanity-- simultaneously.
Or concentrating several kilogram's worth of TNT into the size of a particle of dust and detonating it.
Ten megajoules sounds like a lot, but a single kilo of TNT produces about 4 megajoules of energy. And the size of particles of dust and how often you’re likely to hit one in the interstellar medium is quite speculative.
> the size of particles of dust ... in the interstellar medium is quite speculative
Technically yes. I think there's a significant variety of sizes of dust or larger-than-dust particles in interstaller medium but I don't really have much to back that up.
> how often you’re likely to hit one in the interstellar medium is quite speculative.
Also technically yes. But unless you can map every single particle of dust, and their trajectories, I think the risk is absolutely real.
Most of the designs for a system like this are "chip" designs where a single 1cm x 1cm silicon wafer is towed by the sail.
This design prevents the need for lasers so large that they create enough ozone to kill the entire human race.
The contents of the chip vary, based on who is speculating, but tend to contain exotic, uninvented, circuitry capable of both harvesting energy from the laser and doing "something" of use besides zipping by the target at 0.2c deaf, dumb, and blind. Sometimes it's even an AI-enhanced swarm! (Shoulda figured out how to work blockchain in there, post-doc guy)
Regardless, during the 40 trillion kilometer voyage to Proxima Centauri, that 1x1cm silicon wafer (and the sail) will hit space dust, and numerous other atoms and molecules (including carbon rings) because empty space... isn't.
So it passes through the sail and then hits the spacecraft attached to the sail. Now what? kaboom? small holes in the hull would not be good for the occupants.
When it passes through the sail, enough energy is deposited in the grain to explode it, so if there's sufficient distance to the hull the vapor deposits sufficiently low energy/area to be tolerable.
Are there any real proposals that deal with this issue for a vehicle that would carry humans and go fast? Something that's not "energy shields".
Edit to add: we basically understand the physics of accelerating something to a high speed, what it would need to be made from, etc., afaik all within the realm of possibility- if we could gather and direct that much energy and then wait long enough to decelerate at the other end.
It seems like the questions that are completely unaswered are: keeping people alive and healthy for that long, and how the ship could survive if it hit something.
"A 0.1 µm interstellar dust grain (≈10⁻¹⁴ kg) striking a spacecraft at 0.2 c carries ≈20 J of kinetic energy—millions of times below “tens of millions of joules.” Reaching 10–50 MJ would require a ≈0.14 mm grain (≈10 µg), vastly rarer than ordinary dust, and even that impact equals only a few shots from the world’s highest-energy laser (~2 MJ per pulse), not “hundreds.”"
I used something something 10^-10 for my dust. To reach ~50MJ.
As far as the laser goes, ~2MJ is the total output. Energy that reaches the fuel pellet due to inefficiencies throughout the path of the laser, the actual "hitting power", is hundreds-ish kJ.
alternatively you ionize that particle, may be make in into plasma by laser for ease of "digestion" down in the engine, direct in into the engine where it is used as working mass for your ion thruster, kind of similar to scramjet.
As far as i see with today's tech - like Starlink's ion thruster + classic nuclear reactor - we can get to 300km/s in about 4 stages. Straightforward improvement of ion thrusters - mainly voltage increase and associated engineering (which will immediately happen once we start flying to Mars and beyond as ion thruster currently our best/fastest option inside the Solar system) - can get us to 1000-2000km/s, i.e. under 1000 years to Alpha Centauri (that for a large populated spacecraft, and for just tiny probe to announce our existence (and to send back photos which we'd receive using Sun's gravitational lensing) we can do even better). And using interstellar gas and dust scramjet-style will improve on those numbers (as such ship is mostly limited by the working mass it starts with while the reactors would be able to continue produce the energy much longer).
> alternatively you ionize that particle, may be make in into plasma by laser for ease of "digestion" down in the engine, direct in into the engine where it is used as working mass for your ion thruster, kind of similar to scramjet
This is a Bussard ramjet [1]. The interstellar medium is too thin to make it work. (Maybe we'll find the husk of an ancient ramjet from an earlier era of the universe floating around one day...)
This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.
The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform who shifted the conversation to WeChat and asked me to wire money to a bank account is so incomprehensible to me that the mind of someone who would do that is entirely different to how mine is constructed physically, chemically, and electrically to such a degree that it is difficult for me to even believe that it exists.
I am not even particularly financially literate. In college. I barely scraped by my statistics class, took no finance or business classes, and the only formal financial literacy education I have ever received was a single one hour course given to me by the US Army in late 2001 when they announced the TSP (401k for military) was coming where the only takeaways were “compounding interest is magic” and “put your money into a retirement account and don’t look at it until you’re a decade out from retirement”.
To me, believing an unsolicited stranger who is offering you an investment opportunity like what pig butchering scams are will make you rich is the same exact thing as walking out of a rundown gas station that also sells nunchucks, bongs, and ninja throwing stars with a little baggie of pills that have a tiger on the label thinking that they’ll turn you a super sex machine.
Is it desperation?
Profound financial illiteracy that exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude?
I am happy to share my mom's story, as tragic as it is.
My stepfather passed away just before Covid. After he passed away, my mom was isolated and started spending time on Match.com.
Eventually she found her match - a total scamming operation.
She proceeded to liquidate my deceased step father's retirement savings and also took out high interest loans to send her match money.
She wired the scammer well over $100k. The high interest loans totally ruined her life.
They were using a US bank. She was using Wells Fargo.
She is/was:
1. Desperate for attention
2. Prone to deception
3. Tech illiterate - some of the photos the scammer sent her were so obviously photoshopped
Happy to share more if it's helpful. It's been one of the most difficult things to deal with throughout my life, but I hope that our story can be helpful to someone else.
A former roommate of mine who is extremely tech-savvy but just fat and lonely was constantly wiring women he'd never met money.
He was constantly getting catfished on dating apps and talking all day to fake facebook profiles 2-3 hours away and they'd always have an excuse to not meet him and have their hand out for escalating amounts of money until reality hit him and he'd start over and do it again with another catfish. I moved out partly because he would miss his mortgage payments because he wired some scammer money.
There is a kind of threshold in most humans where we assume we are dealing with someone who "feels like" they are (real and) in our circle of contacts. Once this threshold is passed, critical thinking as to who this person is/what their motivation is moves to a much lower priority.
I do think social desperation is real and does a number on some people. There are people out there in the world who will enter fairy tale love story mode if the right sequence of words reaches them as if they were some kind of self destructive sleeper agent.
A lot of these people lived decent rational lives and should know better. They are college educated and had good careers and large retirement accounts and made all the right financial decisions to lead a good life. But then some stranger pretends to misdial your number and reads a script about how they feel like they really connected with you. You get 'activated' and enter an irrational universe where you can be convinced to send your money away and keep the relationship a secret from everyone you know and lie to your bank about why you are withdrawing anything and who knows what else.
I like to think I am immune to this but who knows what I will be in 30 years. I make a living by being distrusting (security) and got activated as a good boglehead at a really young age. Or maybe the stupid-juice will suffuse my brain at age 70 and I'll give it all away to a cute AI voice that robodials me after decades of not answering any call that isn't already in my contacts, and everybody who knows me will be mystified as to why, including myself.
They butter you up for a long while before they get to the offer - that's the distinction from normal scams. They act as a friend and confidant for weeks, maybe flirt, and when the pig is "raised" they move to the slaughtering process
so it's not a stranger, it's "your close online friend says they have a good retirement fund and it might do better than yours, would you try it out?"
I chatted a bit to one of them trying to get money from me and it was quite subtle. Blah blah I make money in crypto why don't you try I'll show you what to do and then instead of going to say mexc which is a real exchange it would be to mexx or some such which is a clone they've made. It would actually semi function and show profits encouraging the punter to stake more not realizing it was a fake exchange.
I didn't send money to the mexx.com site but I did send some to a site called ftx.com which pulled a more subtle scam. Got that refunded eventually.
The Economist has an interesting podcast about this phenomenon called Scam Inc. You need to be a subscriber to hear more than the first few eps, but they were interesting and went into this situation in detail. Worth a listen to understand this crime and its nuance a little better.
Hah, this is too close to the joke that popped into my head:
Sure, we can explain how this works, you just need to subscribe to our educational series on the topic...
It's all about framing the con in a way that gets past the defense mechanisms the OP assumes. Whether this is done with synthetic intimacy, urgency, exclusivity, high-mindedness, etc. depends on the target victim profile.
But, it's always social engineering. The only 100% defense is to assume a deeply untrusting posture that makes social living nearly impossible.
haha, it's getting dystopian isn't it? At some point you end up letting your guard down just to be a human again -- it's all so exhausting.
While I've been an Econ subscriber in the past when magazines were a thing, the podcast didn't con me into subscribing. _this time_ But I enjoyed their free eps all the same.
Maybe it's trusting a personal connection and word of mouth over mainstream information because of some vague anti-establishment feelings? I also don't know really. I mean, even a small bank CEO fell for one https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...
By "everyone" I'd say that if any social or comms platform allows DMs you will get messages that say something like like "Hey!" from those scammers. If you reply you will get questions meant to qualify you like "How old are you?" pretty quick and if you pass they'll work you over for months
To be fair, if Troy Hunt, who's made his career in cybersecurity can get scammed, thinking you're too smart to ever fall for a scam is just pure hubris.
If am referring to pig butchering scams, not phising attacks or scams in general.
I would e.g. instantly enter my username and password at work into any prompt that requests and looks as usual since Microsoft request my system password randomly all the time theough webpages. It is not my fault...
It is also incomprehensible to most victims, before and even after it happens to them. Many people never report the crime because they're so embarrassed and cannot explain their own behavior. If you talk to them about it they usually won't defend their decisions, they'll say something like "I know it doesn't make sense, I don't understand why I did it and I see now that the scam is blindingly obvious, I don't know what happened".
Desperation and loneliness are often a part of it, and these scams happen over a period of months, so at the critical moment it doesn't feel (emphasis on "feel") like you're talking to a stranger at all. These criminal organizations have done this thousands and thousands of times, they know how to emotionally manipulate someone away from thinking objectively about the situation. They just have to catch someone at a vulnerable moment and get them talking for a day or two, and already they aren't a stranger anymore, they're "a guy I've been talking to", and they just build up the relationship for weeks or months before they even bring up money or investing.
This is also a good blog post about how even someone extremely knowledgeable about technology and fraud can be easily scammed if you just catch them at the right time: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/. It can happen to you too, you are not immune just because these victims seem like morons to you. They seem like morons to themselves too, but it still happened.
The trick is that they don't feel like an unsolicited stranger. The stories you read about these scams summarize away weeks or months of talking, flirting, maybe falling in love a little bit, until they're not a stranger but your very cute and very rich friend.
What does work is an absolute, ironclad rule that I do not trust and am not friends with anyone I meet online until we've met multiple times in person. But there's a lot of lonely people out there who don't find that rule so easy.
I think of it like the xz backdoor. A long time investment of goodwill over months before you tighten the noose.
The more sophisticated attempts seemingly do not straight up ask for cash. They offer an investment opportunity on a scam website which will report the investment doing well, so the victim will independently invest more money.
>What does work is an absolute, ironclad rule that I do not trust and am not friends with anyone I meet online until we've met multiple times in person
That's a good rule and should be common sense for all internet users.
I know two people in my network who this happened to. One is the elderly father of a friend who has dementia who was told that his friend in Asia had a business opportunity (they actually collected this money in person in San Jose). The other is a young woman whose mother is a member of the CCP (as many in China are) and who was told that she had to do this or her mother would face consequences there.
I found both situations unbelievable but I can see how. Two situations which turned out legitimate were:
* I was in a bad accident and there was a settlement which was intended to go to the insurer but went to me instead. The subrogation claim eventually made it to me and I was informed via phone. I told them to send the docs etc. and contacted the insurer to ensure this was their guys. It was and I paid (perhaps more than I should have but not all that I received)
* About half the time I send a big wire on Chase, they call me to confirm details and this and that. I always say "I shouldn't really be doing this, right? Can you tell me how I can call you?" and they tell me to go on the site and find the number etc. etc.
So it seems there are many cases where the fake seeming is legit. These two were drowned in a large number of other scam phone calls, admittedly, and I must confess that hearing an Indian accent with a Western name now sets off my alarm bells.
> This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.
Same logic behind AI girlfriends or in general losing yourself to online life. It's a lack meeting your needs offline and scammers/technology willing to fill those needs online.
I've only heard of "pig butchering" scams in the context of people who pose as family/friends of people on social media whom they target with urgent requests for money, e.g.:
> I've been arrested/kidnapped/lost my wallet
the scammers create a flase sense of urgency and exploit the victim's concern for their loved one's well-being.
IMHO, that's not really 'pig butchering', that's another category; FTC calls it 'family emergency scamming'.
To me, pig butchering is a long term process where the victim is convinced that a new contact is a trusted friend, and then the trusted friend needs money for (transportation, investment, living arrangements, etc). The symbolism being that the victim is a pig that is fattened up via building up a relationship, and then butchered via the demand for money.
>No, many airlines operate in imperfect markets and reap excessive profits compared to other airlines.
Which ones? Practically all airlines are public companies with easily accessible financial data.
All of the one's I've looked at are barely scraping by with single digit profit margins. Delta is around 6% and Emirates is among the if not the best at around 9%.
Some people care that an unqualified cyber criminal was assigned with no vetting or oversight into an executive branch office with no congressional authorization whose only purpose seems to be data theft, the destruction of oversight organizations, and rampant bald faces instantly refutable lying about the effects of their actions.
The reply has been flagged but if they implied that the OP was being a bigoted dickhead then they were correct.
Practically every single time a comment like that is made, with exceptions so rare as to be irrelevant, the commenter is implying "Well if it weren't for the blacks and immigrants we'd be on top" which isn't true.[1]
But I couldn't be sure, so I looked into it.
The OP is a far-right (his self-description NOT mine [2]) Christian unhealthily obsessed with commenting on posts that contain an opening into which their opinions on race and/or gender may be inserted.
So, if the now-flagged comment was somehow asserting that the commenter was being a bigoted dickhead, the exact right amount of reading into was done.
The widespread use of plastic food packaging is relatively new.
By relatively new I mean within my lifetime.
There were not "innumerable" deaths in the US due to "improper food packaging" leading to sickness and death in my youth.
The only plastic products I recall from my youth were plastic bread bags for sliced bread, and plastic milk bottles. Everything else was glass, metal, or paper. I am pretty sure I did not see or touch a plastic soft drink bottle until my teens. If you wanted a lot of soda you got "The Boss" from Pepsi, which was a half gallon glass bottle.
3 billion miles of two dimensional 1080P images is what they've got plus telemetry for speed, acceleration, etc. A lot of the imagery was acquired at night or in foul weather or taken by a camera with a dirty or broken lens.
If it turns out that lidar is necessary, there goes the value of the installed base of Tesla, vehicles. It would be like starting from scratch. Clinging to vision only AV is some variant of the sunk cost fallacy.
If you're thinking, surely they must've thought of all that and have a plan, I'd point to the design of starship and ask, is that ever going to be human rated?
They collect video, not images, along with other sensor and control data.
It’s not a sunk cost fallacy, it’s a technical strategy that is very logical and showing compelling results (though as of yet unproven for achieving robust L3 or L4 autonomy, demos notwithstanding).
Driving over a double yellow is expected and legal in normal driving, such as when making a left turn or going around an obstruction.
In this example it looks like it oscillated between two different routing choices (turning left and going straight), and by the time it decided the correct route was to go straight, it found itself misaligned with the lane it should have been in. Instead of moving all the way back to the right, it kind of “cheats” its way into the upcoming left turn lane. This isn’t something it should do in this situation, but it’s likely emulating human behavior seen in situations like this which appeared in its training data, where people cut across the center line(s) ahead of the turn lane forming when they can see that it is clear.
The thing a lot of people get wrong is that they think the most valuable data for Tesla to collect are the mistakes or interventions. Really what they need the most is a lot of examples of drivers doing good job of handling complex situations. One challenge, though, is separating out those good examples from the less good or bad ones, as human drivers are notoriously bad at, well, driving.
Hey Xorg, your code is like, the worst in the entire galaxy spanning the entire history of mankind will you let contributors fix it?
"No" -Xorg
Hey Xorg, it's 2025 and people have really powerful GPUs so fancy-smanchy effects can be implemented that use like 1% of a GPU's horsepower but would have been considered impossible fantasy beyond the power of every supercomputer in the world combined when you were written, can you implement something to handle stuff like that?
"No" -Xorg
Hey Xorg, your code is so insecure that any instance of it should be considered a critical vulnerability of the highest severity level will you let more than the dozen or so people you have work on it?
"No" -Xorg
Hey Xorg why do my windows get all jaggedy and messed up when I wiggle that around?
"No, uh, I mean, that's called screen tearing and it's a feature" -Xorg
Hey Xorg I have three monitors and I want to run them at different resolutions, refresh rates, and fractional scaling levels. Can I do tha..
"What the hell kind of frame buffer do you have that lets you do that?" -Xorg
Hey Xorg I was going to ask if I could do that without touching any config files or using the command line because I ain't got time for that. Wait. Frame buffer? Is this 1993? Are you developing on a single headed TurboGX-equipped Sun SparcStation running the SPARC port of Linux and you have absolutely no clue about either the state of the art or the march of progress?
My understanding is that most of those issues stem from Xorg's core design not really being compatible with modern hardware and the only way to fix it requires breaking all clients.
I keep hearing this and completely disagree.
I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.
As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.
Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:
* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society
* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society
* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.
Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.
* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)
* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs
* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)
There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood
All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.
I am a middle-aged man.
I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.
I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.
You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.
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