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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • I think that there are no all or nothing questions in something like this. I think the lions share of ocean plastic comes from third world countries where ‘dump it in the river’ is the most common form of trash disposal. I think that reducing harm is helpful, whether it’s a little or a lot. I would agree that tackling small issues with extremism while ignoring big ones is performative. For example, telling people in California to take 2 minute showers while ignoring the giant agricultural operations are wasting millions of gallons a day on inefficient air spray sprinkler systems.

    Focusing on us, I think keeping plastic out of our landfills is generally a good thing. We use plastic for millions of things in our society. It is simply not feasible to completely switch off plastic, not anytime soon and probably not ever. But reducing or removing single use plastics does an awful lot.

    So I say let’s replace single use plastic starting in places where it can be done easily and cheaply, where there are readily available cost effective alternatives. That is especially true for plastic film, like plastic bags, that can’t be recycled in a normal recycle bin.
    Use paper cups instead of styrofoam. Put your take out food in aluminum foil trays or cardboard clamshells. Use paper bags for grocery check out.

    And for the vegetables and meats, I don’t suggest banning those because you would get a lot of pushback from both stores and consumers.


  • I tried one in the store. It’s an amazing experience, the augmented reality is done very well.
    The problem is I don’t think there’s any content for it. If it could play 3D movies or games or something, that might be a reason to buy it. But for right now as far as I can tell the main reason to have one is to view 3D photos from an iPhone in actual 3D. And I’m sorry but that’s just not worth $3,500.

    The other issue is the competition. Quest 3 is very close in terms of technology, not quite as good but close, and it’s 7x cheaper with a hell of a lot more content available.

    Make it $1500 and release enough content that there’s a reason to buy it, and it’ll sell.




  • Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday. And also not something most little planes have, it’s part of a top of the line autopilot system. Given that everything for airplanes costs way too much due to ridiculous certification requirements that do more to keep safety tech out of people’s budgets then to improve safety, not many little planes have it. To take a basic Cessna type airplane and add the system can cost as much as a car.

    You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.


  • Pilot here.
    There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

    If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.