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
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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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!!!
My local pub is older than the USA.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
Wait, you’re saying that the Aztec empire was just 64 years old when Columbus discovered America and ships with conquistadors followed to butcher and enslave everyone?
Yeah, I’ve heard similar things in the past and I’m always confused by it.
There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.
The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).
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
Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
The tinfoil hat you’re wearing amplifies the signal!
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.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what “right” really means
If you’re lucky, a clock that’s slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
This only works with 1-dimensional time though.
Luckily we don’t build clocks for n-dimensional time
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.
The world is running out of sand.
It’s one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.
Air is a fluid.
What… how?
It flows
what about a glacier? it’s solid but it kinda flows too
So does glass almost, glass is not a liquid, there are more than 5 stated of matter, a lot more, but glass is still a type of solid. It has some characteristics that recemble the characteristics of a really slow moving liquid.
Well glaciers contain both solid and liquid parts. When you compress ice it turns to liquid. Water isn’t really easy to compress, liquid water can be lower than 0c (freezing), which is called super cooled, and it turns to ice when it’d not compressed anymore. You can make super cooled water or even soda at home, and if you give the bottle a shake it will turn to ice in a couple of seconds. Also the ground under the glacier will be moved together with the ice and water, there is do much force there. When a part of a glacier breaks off it’s called calving, like when a cow gives birth to a calf
if you scramble a rubiks cube up there is a good chance that it is the first cube to be in that state. there are 43,252,003,247,489,856,000 possible states that a cube(3x3) can be scrambled up in to.
Not only that, but every single one of those configurations is solvable in 20 moves or less! https://www.cube20.org/
Gary Numan is two weeks older than Gary Oldman.
Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids
I’ve always thought this was amazing
