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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • boolytoScience Memes@mander.xyzWorld travelers
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    10 hours ago

    They’re basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It’s believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities, bringing chickens, pigs, taro, coconuts.

    They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands, as far east as Easter Island. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.

    There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.


  • Eutelsat has geosynchronous orbits, which allows them to provide service over a much larger area per satellite and doesn’t require very many satellites to serve a consistent geographical area as the earth rotates and the satellites orbit the earth.

    Problem is, though, geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km altitude. Light travels at 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. So any signal takes 120ms to get to the satellite, and 120 ms to return. Any signal is going to have a 240ms latency at a minimum, and that’s just physics.

    Starlink satellites have an altitude closer to 600 km. Light only takes about 2ms to get to that altitude, and 2ms to return. So the satellites add only about 4ms, which makes for easier and more seamless communication.

    In order to compete with starlink for most typical Internet applications, it’ll require a bunch more satellites orbiting at much lower altitudes.



  • The article is paywalled, and I cannot read it, so I’m determining my opinion based on what I read in the summary of this post

    Here’s a suggestion: how about instead of forming your opinion based on known incomplete data, you decide instead to just, like, not form an opinion at all until you get that information, much less spout off based on your own speculation.

    She wouldn’t have been arrested for dispensing legally obtainable pills, normaly.

    ???

    They made abortion illegal in Texas. She performed abortions in the manner that is legal elsewhere, using a procedure that matches the standard of care where it is legal, under training and qualifications that are sufficient elsewhere. So she was arrested for dispensing pills normally and in the manner that they are regulated elsewhere. This is the safe and legal method elsewhere, and was the safe and legal method in Texas until recently.

    Comparing it to back alley abortions is intentionally misleading to the point of dishonesty.

    There’s no surgery involved.

    Not for the mid/late-term ones.

    She…didn’t perform any of those. I’m going off of the facts of what she is being accused of doing in the criminal charges.







  • boolytoLeopards Ate My Face@lemmy.worldMAGAt loses his federal job
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    7 days ago

    OP’s neighbor is one of the minority of federal workers who are probationary employees, because that’s the only group Elon has been able to really fire right now

    This part isn’t true. At this point, probably over half of the fired workers were permanent, from agencies that are closing or are implementing RIFs. Most are still drawing paychecks, but budgeting does (and should) change once someone is informed that they’ll be out of a job in the next month or two.

    For many agencies, these satellite offices often have monopsony power over workers of certain job skills. NOAA and the National Weather Service employ a lot of people who have job functions not really available from another employer, especially without moving. The same is true of NIH and CDC. HHS just announced the closure of several lawyer offices, and those specialists are going to have a bit of a rough time finding replacement jobs. USDA is a big organization, and have a ton of economists and scientists who would basically have to take a big pay cut if they’re laid off in this environment.

    You’re downplaying just how devastating some of these job losses are, by ignoring that many of these people moved to these cities in reliance on the job stability they expected, and downplaying the number of people affected and the length of tenure these people have.

    I don’t have a strong view of whether this story is literally true of this specific account’s neighbor. But I can tell you that versions of this story have happened to thousands already, and will happen to tens of thousands more.




  • I think this article could be a little bit more precise with its reporting.

    The Washington Post reported in April 2022 that Musk had already used more than half of his more than 170 million Tesla shares as collateral to acquire loans, and planned to do so again to borrow more money to buy Twitter, now X.

    This was before a 3:1 stock split, so would represent 510 million shares today. Back then, those shares were worth $62 billion. Today, it’s more than doubled. So even if he’s done nothing with his debt or his shares, all the gains of the past few years would serve to give him a lot more cushion, to where he’d be safe even if the stock price plummets further, to around half of what it is today. More likely, though, he’s used some of the money from selling some of the shares to pay down his debt.

    Musk acquired X for $44 billion in October 2022, borrowing roughly $13 billion from several banks

    Unfortunately, that $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter itself, not by Musk. If the corporation defaults on the loans, the banks can force the sale of Twitter’s assets and wipe out the value of the shares (destroying the value of Musk’s investment). But that’s not debt that could be called and somehow jump over to Tesla share prices.

    So it is true that a tanking Tesla stock price can cascade into a bankruptcy for him. But it needs to fall a lot more than where it’s fallen today. Probably needs to lose another half of its value, at a minimum, maybe more, before it actually triggers a cascading failure.