Lol the attempt to show a fast read actually made it look like the text wasn’t read until after the meeting time had passed.

Hell, forget the photon sphere, even. Know that jet of energy black holes are thought to sprew out at their poles due to the material falling in to them? Imagine what that material is doing inside the event horizon. Whatever it is, it’ll be pretty violent, enough to call the moon slamming into the earth “relatively peaceful”. It would probably be more pleasant hanging out in the core of the sun than even an AU away from a black hole’s event horizon (and I mean on the outside).

Also, the event horizon is where light cannot escape. The “spacecraft event horizon”, or the orbital plane surrounding a black hole where a spacecraft couldn’t escape it is going to be much farther out, unless we can figure out ftl travel.

Woah, woah, there. What’s with all this thought and attention to details?

That was an episode that ended right where it started getting good. Not that the episode was bad before that, but it left me wanting more of that, not a jump to a new premise in the next episode.

Parabolic would only work if the camera is in the focal point, so you’d need a different part of the parabola or a different parabola depending on where you are standing relative to the camera. This is in addition to the aiming mechanism.

And even then, I’m not convinced it will damage all camera techs instead of just overexposing the image or frame for some. If they just clamp the affected pixels instead of trying to maintain the relative brightness, they might be able to still see your face clearly.

Metroid Prime OST, too many good options to pick just one.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. It is a bit cringy but who cares? It’s a game where you basically just play against yourself for fun. You fill out your own score card and you can write down any number you want without affecting anyone else in any real way. I’d find someone getting upset at your cheating at golf when you were a kid even more cringy.

When I was a kid, I played t-ball one year. My only memory from it was one time I was on defense but was more interested in drawing in the sand than paying attention to the game.

Or when I was a bit older, I was playing softball (parenta really wanted me to be interested in some baaeball variant I guess). I was on 2nd base and the pitcher missed catching a throw from the catcher and it rolled towards me. Instead of stealing 3rd, I stepped off the base and stopped the ball with my foot to be helpful. Lol the 3rd base coach wasn’t impressed. Technically I should have been out, but it was just a recreational game so they let it slide. I was really embarrassed at the time and would remember that moment for years with regret. But eventually I realized it didn’t matter in the slightest bit and I can laugh at how much of a dork I was.

Because the reality is all kids are dorks and doing stupid shit is a part of growing up and learning to be a bit less of a dork going forward.

I know you’re joking but is it even up? I haven’t driven in NYC, but my experience in other large cities is that unless you’re parking at a friend’s place, having a car in town can be expensive and annoying when you want to park it close to your destination. And that’s assuming no one fucks with it while you’re away from it.

Though it does depend on how much the tolls are. Hell, parking might even be cheaper now that demand is down, unless they’ve started repurposing parking space already.

Plus legal fees, salaries of everyone at the office (which is a bit more than app development costs when you think of all the middle and upper managers involved), leasing office space itself (and other related costs), assuming they haven’t gone full remote. Marketing, lobbying (at national, regional, and local levels, since individual cities decide whether or not to allow them at this point), PR, finances, paying the team that convinces the investors to throw more money at it instead of pulling the plug (though I bet sunk cost fallacy does a lot of legwork for them).

Though I do wonder about profitability. My cousin wanted to start a similarish app (though for connecting yard work providers with seekers) and asked me to join him. I ended up declining because a) there’s already a bunch of players in the area, both online and locally, b) the legal liabilities involved in providing a service where people go to someone’s house and either party could be a sociopath, pervert, or thief. I figured lawyers would end up getting most of the money.

Those also apply to rideshare and delivery services. They thought they could drive taxi services and local delivery services out of business, but didn’t think that others could come along and do the same thing, plus for delivery services, at least, operational costs are already pretty low and adding the infrastructure at the scale required to serve all the areas they want to serve is in addition to all the normal costs. Local delivery services I knew about from before uber and doordash just used cell phones to call the one or two drivers directly and since it was all so informal, they could add less legal options like selling drugs to make even more money, as long as they made sure to build a relationship of trust with clients before opening that up. The online services need to avoid a relationship between driver and client or they risk getting cut out entirely.

And personally, when I need a ride, I’ll still call a cab because I don’t want the services to win because I know they just want to build a monopoly and charge even more than the taxis were.

I think it was TMNT 2 that had a delivery guy on a moped back in like 92.

Are any of them actually profitable or are they still in the “drive established competitors out of business with unsustainably low prices” phase?

Especially given the high probability that the app doesn’t even pass on that full amount to the driver.

Though bottlenecks are complex and sometimes shouldn’t be fixed, at least not without building up capacity to the roads they feed into, or else you might end up with new bottlenecks that back traffic back up to the original ones anyways. Without 3 years needing to pass.

One… glances to the side hundred… more furtive glances billion… number two giving thumbs up and nodding dollars!

To take this in a different direction, legal or not (considering the “higher power” generally gets to define what is and isn’t legal and might do so for its own benefit rather than in the best interest of everyone, if there even is such a thing), how can it be determined if a subset of a power structure breaking away from that power structure is a good thing or bad thing? What arguments other than “we’ll use force” are there to support a region needing to remain under the thumb of a power they no longer wish to serve?

Personally, I like not needing to dedicate the space to a printer. The rare times I need to print something, I’ll just go to a store with a print shop like staples. Over the last 8 years, I’ve spent less than $10 on all of my printing needs, which is still way cheaper than even the most cost-effective, least-HP printer out there.

So kids should be made to work in the farms and mines so they have a reference for playtime!

Yeah, the vocab is where I most feel hopeless. I use an app for learning kanji and it has parts where they build into words and it just feels like I’m missing a ton of cultural context with how some of the words seem so random with the different kanji they string together. It seems more intuitive if you’re starting from there, because their words end up so much more related when made up of subwords rather than English where our words do have roots but they are strewn across a bunch of different base languages and evolve individually as sounds from there.

Trying to learn Japanese as a native english speaker gave me a lot of respect for Japanese (and I think Asians in general, since I suspect other languages in the area are more similar to each other than they are to European languages) people who learn to speak even broken English. Our languages are so different, from the alphabets used, to the way words are formed, to sentence structure, and even having formality baked into things like verb conjugation and titles for everyone based on what your relationship is with them (with different defaults based on how the relationship starts).

So assuming going from Japanese to English is a similar difficulty, it doesn’t surprise me that they might have a similar respect for those who make an attempt to learn their language.

After a year of learning (though with admittedly varying levels of motivation), I can still only pick out some words while listening or reading and can barely form my own sentences with a very limited vocabulary. Though I think part of that is duolingo particularly sucking for english - > japanese. My year sub expires tomorrow but duolingo never even hinted at formality being baked into the language and treats kanji as after thoughts.

What resources did you find btw?