Lurker > adjl

ConfusedTorchic posted...

those vibrations are making the gears move

Those vibrations are turning an electrical signal on and off. They're not moving the gears directly, just like the pendulum doesn't move gears directly in a grandfather clock. Instead, that signal turning on and off dictates whether or not power is allowed to flow from the battery to the motor. The motor - powered by the battery - is what makes the gears move. That same electrical signal can also be used to tell a digital display when to update, including the clock you can see right now on your phone or computer screen.

All clocks consist of separate timing and power components. In a clock that you have to wind, the weight or spring that you're winding up provides the power that drives the clock mechanism, while a pendulum keeps the timing steady and ensures that the mechanism can only be driven at the appropriate times. In an electric, quartz-based clock, the quartz acts as the pendulum, while the voltage source acts as the weight/spring.

captpackrat posted...

It is possible to make an electric clock that doesn't use a quartz crystal, using an AC synchronous motor instead. A motor supplied with AC operating at 60Hz will rotate 60 times per second. This is a much simpler design than quartz, but it requires that your power supply remain steady. The US used to require nearly perfect 60Hz, but those regulations were dropped a few years back as it's rather expensive. If the AC frequency varies, so will the speed of the motor, and thus the clock will not be accurate.

I'd argue that that's just deconstructing the clock, not actually making a clock with no timing component. In that case, the clock is effectively outsourcing the timing component, relying on whatever is being used to regulate the frequency of the power source instead of on its own internal timer.

rjsilverthorn posted...

Apparently we can add math to the list of things AI is bad at.

Which is baffling, because math is supposed to be the thing that computers are good at.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Some of the AI responses are good, some are bad. This is what teachers were fearmongering to us about Wikipedia, you really have to look at another source or you can't be sure if it's true or not

It differs from Wikipedia, though, in that it doesn't provide citations or otherwise reference further material that can be used to evaluate what it's saying. Toss in that nobody's overseeing it, and you've got a situation where the only reasonable (or even safe, in some cases) course of action is to assume that it's wrong and ignore it. Given that, why does it exist?

Dikitain posted...

Lets be perfectly honest, most of us could probably buy GameFAQs with what we have in our checking accounts right now. We don't need a Billionaire to do it.

Not quite. The site's valued at about $60-65k, which isn't exactly a ton of money and it certainly wouldn't take a billionaire to afford it, but it's still more disposable income than I expect most of us actually have to hand.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

feel like it would be much simpler to power a small piezoelectric motor with a planetary gear system instead of needing a rock that vibrates and somehow makes gears move instead of the battery in it

Quartz *is* a small piezoelectric motor. The piezoelectric effect is what causes the deformation when voltage is applied and generates the voltage when it rebounds.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

then why have all those f***in gears and cogs in the watch

So that you only need one motor to turn everything instead of a series of electronic steps that convert the timing signal from the quartz into the movement of other hands. Turning 1 Hz into 1/60 Hz and 1/3600 Hz digitally isn't the easiest thing to do, since 60 isn't a power of 2. Turning 1 Hz into 1/60 Hz and 1/3600 Hz using gears, however, is relatively simple.

For digital watches, though, they often don't have all the gears and such because the signal can just be digitally translated into time.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

there's already mechanisms where you just turn a little dial and the watch functions for days, requiring no battery or quartz

there's even a variety of that that you don't even wind, it just works by wearing it

Yep, they function similarly: Winding the spring (whether manually or by a self-winding mechanism) provides the energy to turn the hands, and another component provides oscillating motion at a frequency that the rest of the watch translates into keeping time. Quartz is not the only way to do this, it's just a particularly reliable option that runs for much longer than non-self-winding watches can.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

so why is the rock necessary if you want a battery

It's not strictly necessary, but it is the simplest and most reliable option. As I mentioned, a fully-electronic LC circuit could do the trick, but would be much more sensitive to temperature fluctuations and harder to translate the higher-frequency oscillation into something useful for timekeeping. Quartz is used because it works well.

shadowsword87 posted...

Oh, it's not physically vibrating, it's electrically vibrating. Then other electronic stuff can read that vibrating voltage.

Actually, it is physically vibrating. That's the nature of the piezoelectric effect: it's translating electricity into physical movement and vice versa. It's a very small physical vibration, by virtue of being a very small piece of quartz and the relatively small amounts of energy involved in the vibration, but it's a vibration nonetheless.

faramir77 posted...

BotW is a master class when it comes to exploring a large open world. The series desperately needed exactly this kind of change. The trouble is that I've played through this a few times before, so exploring the world doesn't really feel as exciting as it used to. I'm trying to not hold that as a critique against the game, but I also don't think it can be ignored, as other major Zelda games haven't suffered from replayability issues like this one has.

I think you're approaching that opinion correctly (at least, as much as one can judge an opinion objectively). It doesn't necessarily make it a worse game overall or for a first playthrough, but it does mean it doesn't hold up as well on replays because it's more reliant on the sense of wonder you get exploring cool new areas for the first time. That ended up being a point against TotK for a lot of people, because having explored BotW's Hyrule relatively recently, exploring the same world again didn't really have the same lustre (I didn't mind, but I also haven't played BotW since I beat it shortly after launch, so the world wasn't exactly fresh in my mind going into TotK).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

this doesn't make sense

if you already have voltage, a power source, then what's the point of needing a rock

The voltage alone can cause the second hand to spin. The voltage alone cannot cause the hand to turn 6 degrees every second. That requires some kind of timing element, usually an oscillator of some sort.

In a similar vein, in a grandfather clock, you already have the energy needed to run the clock in the form of the weights or springs (depending on what it uses). You need the pendulum and an escapement mechanism, however, to ensure that energy is only released at the appropriate times to run the clock at the correct rate. The pendulum provides the timing element. Without it, you'd have to do something like carefully calibrate the friction the gears/axles experienced to ensure that they spun at the correct rate when under constant force from the weight/spring, and that would be extremely difficult and not remotely reliable (it'd stop working that precisely as soon as the temperature changed).

Similarly, the quartz and its oscillations function as the pendulum for a watch. You can, in fact, do the same thing with just electricity if you use what's called an LC circuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC_circuit), which consists of a capacitor and an inductor that effectively bounce a current back and forth around the circuit. The problem with that is that the period of that oscillation depends on the resistance of the system (so it's prone to fluctuations if the temperature changes and as the system ages), and is often much faster than is really useful for a timepiece. Quartz is stable and the resonant frequency for a given piece depends mostly on how it's cut, so you can be very consistent in the oscillation frequency you get. That's something you can build a timepiece around, in this case by cutting the quartz to have a resonant frequency of 2^15 Hz and using a series of flip-flops to slow that down to 1 Hz.

TL;DR: Quartz doesn't power watches. It acts as a timing element that tells the battery when to power them.

shadowsword87 posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2By2ane2I4

TL;DW: When you apply voltage to a bit of quartz, it deforms slightly. When it un-deforms, it produces voltage. If you use a battery (or other voltage source) to amplify the voltage coming off of it as it deforms, that voltage can be used to cause it to deform again, creating a perpetual (at least as long as the voltage source lasts) oscillation. By cutting the quartz in very specific ways, you can control the frequency of that oscillation, then translate that into mechanical motion or drive a digital display.

That's roughly analogous to Cartoon Network.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

actually isn't Shulk essential divine by the end of X1?

Pointedly not, actually. He turned down Alvis/Ontos' offer of divinity and gave up his Monado to trigger the rebirth of XC1's universe outside of Memory Space (which in turn set in motion the collision that prompted the creation of Origin). His abilities in FC and onward are of his own making, having built on the Monado Replicas to emulate the Monado's ability to control ether.

Salrite posted...

Consequences of what? It's a name of a body of water, not a declaration of war. Quit being so melodramatic.

It means official maps will need to be replaced, official documents will need to be reprinted, signage will need to be updated... There are worse things one could do, obviously, but there's going to be a considerable cost associated with this and absolutely zero value will be reaped because it's nothing more than Trump stroking his ego.

One, if this one counts.

Hah. Republicans updating school books. That's a good one.

But yes, the wider-reaching consequences of this little bit of performative narcissism are going to be much greater than a couple of restaurant menus. It's arguably less inane, but unquestionably a worse decision.

https://imgur.com/cDvocrd

Damn_Underscore posted...

I dont understand how car commercials are successful tho, how many people are buying new cars?

In a way, it's because people buy new cars so infrequently that ads are extra-important. Pretty much nobody says "I'm in the market for a new car and I just saw a commercial for this one so I'm going to buy it." When they do start looking, though, their search process is subconsciously affected by all of the car ads they've seen leading up to that point. This is why so many car commercials lean hard into creating a "vibe" instead of just rattling off the features of the car: People remember how they feel much better than they remember lists of features (especially when those lists of features blur together with dozens of commercials for other cars; how often can you actually recall which features were attached to which car after seeing a couple hours' worth of commercials?), so brands will attempt to cultivate a feeling for viewers to associate with them in hopes that that inclines customers to visit a dealership for that brand.

It's finger-LIXin' good.

Salrite posted...

Freedom Fries, not even a question. At least Gulf of America is technically correct and makes sense. What does Freedom Fry even mean other than the US waving its dick around?

It means a couple government officials were butthurt that France didn't join the US in Iraq and felt that that was a good way to spite them.

Well now it's a terrible day for rain.

EclairReturns posted...

When I forwarded this text to my therapist, she asked if my psychiatrist wasn't working out for me. It almost sounds like she's trying to get me on medication so that I won't bug her as much with my problems. It's almost like she wants me to keep holding in my feelings, when I've been doing just that to the point that I had gotten amnesia somewhere along the way, so that she doesn't want to listen to what I've got to say. I won't deny that this angers me. She seems to think I'm a sociopath that might do something rash if I don't keep my anger in check.

It's more likely that she thinks medication would help you get into a better place to process your feelings therapeutically. For psychotherapy to work, the patient needs to be in a state where they can confront their feelings without being overwhelmed by them, processing them in a controlled setting that feels safe. If you're particularly overcome by anxiety or similar heightened emotions, though, confronting your feelings is likely to overwhelm you regardless of how carefully a therapist controls the setting, and you aren't going to feel safe. Medication can help to moderate those heightened emotions and make them more easily managed, allowing you to later wean yourself off of the medication once you've developed the skills to cope without it.

Think of it like an asthmatic training to run a marathon: If they don't take a puffer beforehand, they aren't going to be able to train for very long before they hit the limit of what their lungs can handle, and that's going to make it very difficult to build up their stamina. By taking a puffer, their asthma won't be bad enough to cut their training session short, allowing them to improve their stamina to the point that eventually they might not even need the puffer. Their personal trainer suggesting that they take a puffer isn't that trainer blowing them off as being a lost cause who will never get in shape, it's just recognizing that they're experiencing a disability that's going to interfere with their training and suggesting that treating it first will help.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Just remember that nothing is trying to tell you anything!

Which means that you aren't trying to tell him anything by saying that, which means he can believe that some things are trying to tell him things, which means that you aren't trying to tell him anything by saying that, which means...

AltOmega2 posted...

Not to be difficult but what about just calling it a plan ol' remaster?

Nobody can ever seem to agree on the distinction between remakes and remasters, so I tend to shy away from putting any stock in that distinction. It might qualify as a remaster, but I think that will depend on just how significant the new content, story tweaks, and gameplay adjustments are.

ArvTheGreat posted...

Really the disney one?

Yep. The protagonist's name is Goliath, he faces discrimination and persecution for being big and scary despite only wanting to use his strength to help/protect people. The primary antagonist for most of the series is a super-billionaire named David who starts out by pretending to be Goliath's friend, but it turns out he was just using him and most of the rest of the series consists of him doing sneaky things coloured by a personal vendetta against Goliath. Meanwhile, Goliath and his buddies figure out how to carve out a life for themselves in a world that's hostile to them.

It's not a perfect fit for what you described, but it's honestly not that far off, which is impressive for a random shitpost.

ArvTheGreat posted...

Called Goliath and it's about some sweet innocent child who grew up to be a giant and he got bullied to be the way he is and David all smug and and his poop smells like roses makes Goliath feel small. So Goliath goes on a journey to find himself

One could argue that this is just the plot to Gargoyles.

Thank you for your input.

darkknight109 posted...

The worlds were too large, there was too much backtracking, and you were constantly running into puzzles where you needed to be a different character configuration (since you either needed to be Banjo and Kazooie, solo Banjo, solo Kazooie, Mumbo, or whatever the Wumba transformation for that level was).

This is actually what I liked about Tooie over Kazooie. In BK, there's exactly one Jiggy that requires backtracking in a given playthrough (either the one in Freezeezy that requires the running shoes or the one in Gobi that requires Beak Bomb, depending on where you go first). The game is presented as mostly linear series of self-contained levels, with no particular reason to explore between them. They're all fine levels, but you're never thinking about how the world as a whole fits together, and I just like the vibe of having to do that better. Certainly, some of Tooie went a bit too far in that direction, but I still prefer that over having virtually none of it at all.

Really, though, comparing Tooie to Kazooie is like comparing Metroid to Megaman: Neither is intrinsically better than the other, but they're structured very differently overall and therefore satisfy different things that people want out of their action platformers.

Even with older RPGs, it's not unusual to be sitting through a substantial amount of text/cinematics before getting to the gameplay. The only major difference now is that you no longer have to press a button to advance the cutscene because they're videos.

AltOmega2 posted...

I'm not sure it counts as a remake but either way, this one

Given the new story content and improvements to at least the UI (possibly other gameplay aspects, but there haven't been many details yet), I think it's valid to call it a remake and not just a port.

Not that I can remember, but it wouldn't surprise me if I have. I've got enough people in my life that would appreciate it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Which would make me proactively say "Man, f*** those people, they don't deserve to be saved."

To be fair, the issue with that is less that you're specifically positioned to save a million vengeance-obsessed assholes and more that when you're dealing with a million families you're pretty inevitably going to find a significant number of people that are willing to come after you for choosing to doom their loved one. Even as few as 10-20 of your victims having more vengeful families would be enough pissed off people to put you in serious danger, which says nothing about the remaining 999,980 (and also nothing of the victims themselves, since remember that it's not the people dying that are going to consider coming after you).

Usually it was something along the lines of "this person everyone remembers as a child actor is 18 now" and not actually asking if the kid was hot, but the whole thing where people count down until a celebrity becomes old enough that it's socially acceptable to rub one out to them is heckin' creepy. I don't think Duckbear was actually personally engaging in such a countdown himself so much as he was just emulating tabloids that do under the belief that that was how Regular Human Beings conducted themselves, but it still wasn't a great vibe.

KingInBlack posted...

You can keep trying to defend Trump as much as you want, but the fault lies partially on him.

For these two crashes? Not really. The airline industry was in a messy state already when he took over (as you say, overworked, underpaid, etc.), and the things he's done so far haven't had time to really be blamed for that.

He has, however, committed to speedrunning the rest of it into the ground, including firing the head of the FAA as you mentioned (while simultaneously whining about government resources and authority being "weaponized against political opponents," because his adherents are too blind to notice obvious hypocrisy). His current and planned actions will 100% be making the issue worse, and he's going to just keep hiding behind complaints about DEI and pushing conspiracy theories to avoid admitting that he might have done anything wrong. Is what he do.

Trust me, I'm with you. This presidency is shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster. It just probably didn't actually play a role in a crash that happened a week after it began that can mostly be blamed on deeper systemic issues from multiple previous administrations (though I will say that I haven't dug into how much Trump's first presidency might have had to do with it and it's very possible some choices he made then played a role).

KingInBlack posted...

Bet you didn't see the news yesterday that Elon f***'s employees were caught installing hard drives on government computers containing personal information on citizens.

I didn't, but I'm also not surprised. The guy's been publicly admitting to blackmailing politicians with their Twitter DMs. He's obviously not above exploiting his government connections to get away with serious crimes.

It was a series of relatively rapid instances where they left jobs for various reasons. Their dad was sick/dying and they had to move to take care of him, their wife was suffering a massive psychotic break and needed to be taken care of, one of the jobs reneged on a major promise they made when they recruited them that was a prerequisite for it being an enjoyable place to work... I don't think any of them were actually "losing" jobs so much as choosing to leave, but they definitely did go through a considerable number of jobs in a short time frame.

Yellow posted...

It's actually fucking incredible how fast he's destroying the country.

To be fair, it's unlikely that anything Trump has done to date was actually responsible for these crashes. They will, in fairly short order, almost certainly increase the number of incidents by exacerbating the staffing difficulties and regulatory deficiencies that have led to these ones happening, but these have been long-standing issues and there hasn't actually been enough time for the impact of Trump's insanity to be felt.

The sheer brazenness of his immediate response being "I bet somebody was black and that's why the plane crashed," though, is pretty alarming. Like no evidence whatsoever that diversity was even involved at all, let alone responsible, but he still felt that was the best public statement he could make on the matter. Unfortunately, it's not exactly news that Trump is just desperate to say whatever he thinks his cultists want to hear, and anyone who's ever going to see a problem with that already knows it, so it's not like even this overt "I don't know why this plane crashed, but I want you all to help me find a minority to blame" is going to wake anyone up.

Purrtals

Duck duck ghost.

faramir77 posted...

Mipha's backstory is quite sad.

In general, I wasn't a huge fan of how Age of Calamity copped out of telling the actual tragic story of losing the war by doing the whole alternate timeline victory thing, but damn if Sidon's "I will not allow you to take her again!" didn't hit me right in the feels. That was a good scene.

ProfessorTurtzo posted...

They're all good, but favorites are Jolly Roger's Lagoon and Hailfaire Peak

I hate to come into your topic and just yoink your opinion, but I think this is exactly how I feel, so consider it yoinked.

Or abstract it away and let you just collect the Art/skill from the list in the Soul Hacking menu with a button press, under the pretense that when you hit the button you fast travelled to the target, beat them again, and travelled back. That might honestly be the best option, since it keeps the "oh man there's a Blue Mage class" as a mid-game revelation instead of something that's hinted early, keeps the theme of "you have to actually steal the ability from them directly" going, but it also means you don't have to sit through two loading screens to go one-shot that level 3 bunny.

It's Ridge Racer! Riiiiiiidge Racer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AB_X-Blv4

It would be more practical, but the class really isn't very useful until you've hacked quite a few late-game enemies and have the full arsenal of arts and skills to work with (to say nothing of the fact that it scales with your total hacks, so before you've got everything it's quite a bit weaker than everything else). Having it earlier would cut back on some tedious grinding, but the point where it does show up is reasonably good timing for "oh this is an endgame class I won't be able to use it effectively yet" without being so early that you're left wondering why they gave you something so early if it was just going to be useless all game. Even more so where you need to occupy a skill slot with Soul Hack to collect them, and that's a pretty big deal before you unlock the third slot (until level 50, iirc, which I believe also lines up pretty well with early chapter 5 when you get the class).

That said, if they just did something like having Triton read over your list of defeated monsters and teach you the Arts/skills based on his reminiscence of meeting them during his own adventures, that would be thematically consistent but also less grindy. But then Triton's got less memory than a Commodore 64 and that's kind of a key aspect of his character, so maybe that wouldn't be a good fit. I dunno. In the long run, I didn't find hunting them all to be an unpleasant grind, particularly where I had to explore some new areas to find ones I'd missed my first time through, and only grinding out the upgrades for the few of them didn't take too long, so I wouldn't call it a major design flaw.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Got it, thanks for that info! Damn, looks like I'll spend an hour farming prior Unique Monsters, then. The Wiki has a handy list, luckily.

It does go fairly quickly, but yeah, it's a grind. And then every skill/art has a second condition that you have to complete to upgrade it, usually something like killing the UM that gave it to you 3-5 more times or dealing X damage with the Art. The upgrades, I'd only recommend doing for the ones you actually plan on using.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If anything, the real question isn't why do companies spend so much on Super Bowl ads. It's why do they spend so much and produce s*** ads.

When everybody's trying to stand out, you often have to try extra-hard to stand out among them, and that can be really hit or miss.

Bonus points where having Youtube around means they're no longer just competing against the other Superbowl ads for that year, they're competing against every Superbowl ad that's been archived on Youtube, a list that gets longer every year. If they don't secure a spot on somebody's "top ten Superbowl ads ever" list, they're missing out on most of that post-Superbowl traffic that is such a huge deal for them.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I also have a ton of friends that are teachers in all levels, and all are having a crysis of faith when it comes to their jobs. Having to hold meetings on "what to do if ICE shows up" and worrying about what to teach, lest you get reported to the Gestapo has been taxing to them (never mind school shooting drills and the like).

In a comment thread on a report that the *Quakers* of all people were suing the government over the extent to which disregarding the "safe spaces" exemptions to immigration enforcement constitutes a violation of freedom of religion (and you know you've fucked up if the *Quakers* are willing to sue you, because they don't sue anyone as a matter of fundamental philosophy), there was somebody who was commenting that she was a health care worker and her team had been briefed with the blanket direction that none of them were to talk to police because patients' immigration status was none of their concern. It's profoundly disturbing to read something like that and realize just how closely it mirrors the people that sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, right down to people suggesting that she delete the comment so they can't prove that she was culpably complicit in sheltering the immigrants in question. Like I don't expect anyone to get shot for harbouring immigrants, but also it's not that much further before they are and somebody's been dumping a whole lot of Crisco on that hill.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

It doesn't help when an EO comes out that is vague and stupid, like schools that team CRT will lose funding,

Bonus points where the only definition 99% of CRT opponents even have for the concept is "history that makes white people feel bad," which is ludicrously vague and opens the door for pretty much anyone that teaches that any white person ever did a bad thing up for a potential lawsuit/funding revocation.

I like how that dude's just like "ew girls have cooties boys don't want to hang out with them." That's surely the mark of somebody with a deep, nuanced understanding of sociology and developmental psychology.

I also like how he's upholding Scouts as being a venerated institution because they value nature, but I can all but guarantee he'd be losing his mind if they came out with a strong environmentalist position. Nature only matters, after all, when all you're doing to protect it is planting four trees and picking up six pieces of garbage, not when you're trying to pass legislation to restrict emissions.

shadowsword87 posted...

That's going to suck for who's after Trump then, huh?

I expect another Jan 6 even if the next person is a republican. I also expect Trump will continue the election fraud narrative even if he can't legally run, and accuse "the establishment" of covering up all the write-in votes he's sure he had.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

Do you not consider an awareness of social inequalities an important part of helping everyone that needs it?

Perhaps more to the point so you don't get lost following the syntax, do you not consider social inequalities to be a factor in whether or not somebody needs help?

Glob posted...

In fairness, where I come from, its sold as chocolate flavour candy bars because its not considered chocolate.

It's worth noting that the recipes for candy bars can vary depending on where you are and the local regulations for what they're allowed to contain and be called. The Hershey bars you buy may not be the same product that others are talking about.

Yep. Most of the Democrats' difficulties with getting elected these days are because they're trying to be the responsible adult in the room. Responsible adults are boring, though. If you want to pull attention away from a misbehaving kid, in addition to being more likeable, you have to be similarly loud. Trump lost in 2020 because he managed to be really unlikeable, not because Biden was actually an interesting alternative. Harris lost in 2024 because she just didn't have the kind of charisma it takes to say "I'm going to make things cheaper by putting tariffs on everything we import" with a straight face.

I am genuinely interested to see where the GOP goes after Trump. They're fighting tooth and nail to not have to face that world (they've already tabled a proposal for a constitutional amendment to allow presidents to serve a third term if the first two were non-consecutive), but even if they manage to turn him into a forever president somehow they're still going to have to face the fact that he's an old man and will almost certainly be dead within the next decade or so (to say nothing of his mental state). They've put a lot of eggs in a basket that we know for a fact will be breaking, and I expect the ensuing scramble is going to be pretty entertaining.

When was Spider-man not woke? "I have a responsibility to help everyone that needs it that I can" is about the wokest attitude possible, and that's been a core tenet of his character since day 1.

ARCHONOIR posted...

Where and how do you get your news? That, for me, is important to know. Do you watch his rallies, interviews, debates, etc. at the source, in its entirety? I ask because nearly every anti-Trump poster on this board does not and only mostly watches clips or reads it on a full on, left slant, site or YT channel. I rarely read anyone speak honestly about him. No one knowledgeable.

Is there any point in answering this question when you've already decided that getting information about Trump from anyone other than Trump means somebody is being manipulated by left-leaning lies and is therefore not knowledgeable?

You cannot sit there and tell me that Trump rarely actually lies and then pretend that you're knowledgeable about the things he does. Or rather, you can be knowledgeable about the things he does, but not about anything else, and that's not much better.

ARCHONOIR posted...

Anyone that believes he was ever racist is not knowledgeable about him whatsoever. Period.

Hence my earlier comment that anything he does that seems racist is likely just posturing for his racist fan club and not a reflection of personal hatred.

ARCHONOIR posted...

but his general policies, especially this term, are pretty great.

His policies this term are overtly just pandering to people that think immigrants, DEI, and environmentalism are the reasons America's economy is suffering, with a smattering of "I don't like that I don't have absolute power over the whole government," "any official that ever did anything that worked against me should be fired," and the occasional ego-stroking like renaming the Gulf of Mexico (because that's obviously a worthwhile expenditure of anything). Notable alarming standouts among his executive orders include "the federal government is no longer allowed to do anything to oppose misinformation campaigns," a commitment to harming trans people as much as he is legally able to, instituting an automatic death penalty for anyone that kills a cop (pandering to the cop worship crowd), what appears to be laying the groundwork to punish everyone involved in prosecuting Jan 6 rioters after pardoning said rioters (under the pretense of "ending the weaponization of the government for political agendas," no less), and "removing political influence" from science by establishing a council hand-picked by the president to advise what research is worth funding (because the president isn't political, I guess).

It's all aggressive showboating with little regard for the practical reality, value, or truth of any of it, quite a lot of which is going to cause significant harm to people that really haven't done anything to deserve harm. I'm sure some of it will end up being beneficial (like treating Mexican cartels as international terrorists is probably actually one of the best things that can be done to help the immigration issue, given that they're one of the main reasons so many Mexicans are desperate enough to immigrate illegally), but the degree to which everything is obviously ego-driven and pandering to some really vile, hateful people is profoundly concerning, particularly how much of it amounts to "stop telling me what I can't do." A micromanaging narcissist in a position of power is a pretty dangerous thing.

ARCHONOIR posted...

Lastly. How do you think Trump mismanaged COVID?

At pretty much every stage, he downplayed the need for a decisive, coordinated response to limit the spread of the disease, including overtly calling it (or at least the idea that lockdowns were necessary) a hoax in the early days, contradicting and publicly undermining the CDC and WHO on many occasions (including trying to withdraw from the WHO because they bruised his ego by disagreeing with him, which he's picked right back up again this time after Biden shot it down), giving backhanded recommendations for countermeasures that ensured many people wouldn't get on board with them (to paraphrase the best example of this, "My official position is that wearing a mask will help, but I won't be wearing one," ensuring that people who view him as a role model would feel like not wearing a mask is a badge of honour/bravado), handling his own infection in a way that made it seem like it wasn't a big deal and he beat it because he was strong instead of because he had access to a $10 million monocolonal antibody treatment that's probably the only reason he survived...

He handled some aspects well, such as Operation Warp Speed (as much as that sounds like a 6-year-old named it), but he very clearly bungled many other aspects. Most notably, his attitude and response to the disease can be pretty much entirely blamed for the fact that Covid turned into a Left vs. Right thing in the US, since he framed the response as him (as a "champion" of the right) clashing with evil big government agencies that just wanted to restrict freedoms for no reason. While it's hard to say exactly how history could have changed, I feel pretty confident guessing that if he'd acted more decisively and not made a point of arguing with public health officials, you would have seen far fewer people rejecting Covid countermeasures as a matter of personal political identity and it would have been much easier to assuage people's fears around the vaccines.

captpackrat posted...

The part that most people don't get is that you can't just aim at the Sun, light your rockets and crash into it. This is because the Earth (and your rocket) are moving at an incredible speed in orbit around the Sun, almost 29.8 km/s. To hit the Sun, you have to slow down, so you would need to reduce your speed by 29.8 km/s.

On the other hand, the velocity required to escape the Sun from the Earth's distance is 42.1 km/s. Since the Earth (and your rocket) is already moving 29.8 km/s, you only need to go 12.3 km/s faster.

That's why it's taken over 6 years and 7 Venus flybys for the Parker Solar Probe to reach 6.1 km from the Sun (about 1 AU total travel distance), while Voyager 2 reached Jupiter (about 4 AU) in less than 2 years using just rockets and Saturn (about 8 AU) in 3, and New Horizons has traveled over 60 AU in 19 years with just a single gravitational boost from Jupiter.

That's about what I was thinking. I imagine you could achieve a much closer orbit to the sun than Earth's by just slowing down a little and not fully stopping, but you'd still have enough kinetic energy to end up in a stable orbit that isn't actually crashing into the sun. Just one of those physics things that seems unintuitive until you realize that the earth is moving.