I thought you were going to recommend a different flavour of cat.

What’s the point of these three random emoji?

It might be “an awful lot” in absolute terms, but certainly not in relative terms.

Take for example just the dinosaurs. They lived in a relatively short time span from -245mio years until -66mio years. A total time span of 179mio years.

Google tells me that between 300 and 1000 species of dinosaurs have been identified (the estimate is that broad because it’s not certain that each identified species is really an unique species).

That means, there’s about 1.6-5.5 species of dinosaur per million years that we know of. Or to put it differently, there’s on average 181k - 650k years between each dinosaur species we identified.

Homo sapiens have existed for 200k-300k years. All domesticated animals exist for less than that.

Within that time span tens of thousands of species have come into existance and died out again.

That’s about the order of magnitude of what we don’t know and probably can’t ever know.

And remember, these numbers are only for the relatively recent era of the dinosaurs. It’s much, much worse for times that are longer ago.

Also, even of the species that live right now, estimates say that we only know about 14% of all species.

Paleontology only scratches the most superficial part of the surface, since the vast majority of organisms die without getting fossilized.

What does a 64-bit system and 4GB RAM have to do with using 64bit timestamps?

32bit systems can use 64bit values without issue. In fact, even an 8bit system can handle 256bit values or even longer ones without issue.

The bittiness of a CPU and its address space have nothing to do with the length of usable data unless you end up with data longer than the RAM volume (and even then there’s swap).

That’s the thing though: It was well-prepared and due to that there was no big issue.

2038 is the same: very well prepared and thus it will not be a big issue.

Of course, if ignored, both would be very problematic, but that’s not the point.

The same holds true for roads as well: Build a massive highway somewhere in the mountains where nobody lives and it will cost a ton of money while having very little benefit. And highway bridges and tunnels are also very expensive to build.

For comparison, I pulled some numbers from Germany. High speed train tracks cost €25mio/km (not counting bridges or tunnels). Highways cost €20mio/km (again not counting bridges or tunnels). So it’s not that far off.

On the other hand, maintaining a high speed track is much cheaper, at around €70k/km pa., while maintaining a highway costs €390k/km pa plus another €180k/km pa. administrative cost.

But the real kicker is capacity: A 2-lane highway has a capacity of 3000-5000 vehicles per hour. At an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, that’s 3600-6000 people.

An Austrian Railjet for example, can carry around 1700 people and you can run them at 3-minute intervals on a high speed track. That’s a total capacity of 34 000 people per hour. They are usually not run at that frequency, because that’s vastly more than what’s ever necessary, but you get the point. High speed rail has such a massive capacity, that it’s virtually unlimited, for a price that’s very comparable to a regular 2-lane highway.

When it comes to cargo, low-speed rail is even much more efficient than trucks on roads, with the major downside being that you have to unload the cargo to trucks for local distribution.

But my main point here is that roads aren’t some holy heal-it-all solution that’s never a waste of money while rail needs to be profitable on its own, like a lot of people seem to perceive it. A highway is not more of a basic human need than high-speed rail.

Again, the same applies to e.g. the road network in the USA. Infrastructure is there to facilitate economic growth and freedom. Without roads it’s much harder to transport goods, get people to work, give people the mobility to move to jobs that are farther away while still being able to live closer to where they want and so on and so on.

And the same applies to public transport as well.

Only supreme idiots would argue that roads should turn a profit. And public transport is much cheaper at transporting people than roads.

It’s !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that people don’t understand what infrastructure is and what it’s there for.

Ok, let’s assume you read the article. Quiz question: who owns the China State Railway Group Co Ltd? (Hint: it’s in the name)

Also, I guess you didn’t just invent the “stated goal” of the China State Railway Group, so it should be quite easy for you to find said stated goal in their actual stated goals (http://wap.china-railway.com.cn/english/about/aboutUs/201904/t20190408_92993.html), correct?

If you had bothered to actually read the article and if you had bothered to actually research anything at all about the topic at hand, we probably wouldn’t have the discussion.

That is not wrong. But interpreting “dark” as “evil” is just wrong in this context.

It’s almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.

Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?

Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.

You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.

It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.

I also didn’t only post numbers for the US.

I have read the article, and I got your point before, and I still think that it’s totally moot and besides the point.

If they had been two total randos, say Max the car repair man cheating with Mandy the receptionist, then nobody would have even tried to recognize them. Not with social media, not with facial recognition not with anything else.

And even if Peter, the coworker of Max and Mandy would have recognized them, he’d maybe have told their partners, or he might have made fun of them at work, but that’s it. Because these people don’t matter.

To get back to your example: Somebody took a picture of you. Ok. Now what? Did that picture go viral on social media? Did that picture make it into international news? No. Because you don’t matter.

And you said it yourself:

Shit, my workplace couldn’t even identify the people who walked in the front door and stole stuff and walked out. The police could see their faces clearly in the security footage, but they weren’t from around here and no one knew who they were.

We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)

You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it’s difficult to roll that back.

For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you’d usually stick with one newspaper and that’s it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don’t particularly care about.

Now it’s often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don’t really even care for the publisher), but they don’t read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.

For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don’t really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that’s €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.

Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That’s not great either.

What I’d really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.

“dark” as in “not visible”. Adblock users can’t be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. “Dark”, in this instance, is not a derogatory term.

“Brutal” is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.

See it, sure. But as a society we used to have an expectation of anonymity, for better or worse.

That’s the case if you are some unimportant rando, yes.

But these two people we are talking about are very public figures due to their jobs, and they are compensated very well for this. As a public figure you can’t have the expectation of anonymity. That just comes with the territory.

Every time JK Rowling lets out an anti-trans fart, the whole internet is up in arms. When my transphobe uncle does the same, nobody cares. Because one of them is a public figure and the other one is not.

Yeah, sure. China has a debt to GDP of 88.6%. That’s not great. Luckily we don’t have that problem in western capitalist countries, right?

• USA: 121%
• Canada: 104.7%
• UK: 101.8%
• France: 111.6%
• Japan: 251.2%
• Italy: 136.9%
• Belgium: 105%

The main problem I see here is that people still don’t seem to understand what “public” means.

That applies to doing shit in public, but also posting shit publically.

If you do something in the open, expect that people will see it.

Tbh, this post only makes sense as anticapitalist satire. There’s no value in these statements when taking them at face value.

So of course people see it as what it is and engage exactly like that.

There’s even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

And bog land isn’t exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

It’s complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn’t consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.