FiFoFree

joined 1 year ago
[–] FiFoFree 23 points 11 months ago (3 children)

*since 2020.

If my cowboy math is correct (assuming two parents and two children), that comes out to about 292 people per year or 876 since 2020.

With a population the size of the United States (330 million), that means that, for a given year, 0.00009% (rounded up) of that population dies as a result of a family annihilation. For comparison, around 40,000 people (including around 1,000 children) die in vehicle accidents annually in the US.

Not that family annihilations aren't horrible. They are. But, from a purely statistical perspective, there are much more frequent horrible things that we don't talk about as much, for a variety of reasons.

[–] FiFoFree 17 points 11 months ago (4 children)

In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It's more expensive than what you'd get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.

The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities -- the kind of people for whom "neighbor" means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.

If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it's not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.

[–] FiFoFree 23 points 1 year ago

This is the comic Salvatore based his skit on.

[–] FiFoFree 15 points 1 year ago

[gestures vaguely]

[–] FiFoFree 5 points 1 year ago

Speak for yourself.

[–] FiFoFree 17 points 1 year ago

It definitely could be both.

[–] FiFoFree 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see someone else has discovered the gold mine that is SkyCorp Home Video.

[–] FiFoFree 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Everything means nothing.

[–] FiFoFree 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wait, there's a 3000k SFT-40?

[–] FiFoFree 3 points 1 year ago

This is fascinating stuff! Now I kinda wanna see one of us build it...

[–] FiFoFree 3 points 1 year ago

I mean, we've already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).

Something that struck me was in Caliban's War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn't foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.

Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban's War was published in June 2012.

The L-prize "60W" category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn't become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 -- far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.

[–] FiFoFree 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
view more: ‹ prev next ›