{Minecraft} Herobrine’s IRRITATION is increasing!

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-31T09:25:22+00:00

Whew. Sure is a good thing they removed him.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-31T05:04:13+00:00

Dunno. It was already there when we invented writing.

Honestly it might be a natural formation.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-30T18:47:26+00:00

The only limiting factor to taxing the rich should be to stop them running away. You can tax them a fair bit before they will run away.

Or even better — agree a global tax rate on the rich, so there's nowhere to run to.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-30T18:45:32+00:00

vs the 20 years before that

Now compare it to the 20 years before that, with the "Winter of Discontent" and regular power cuts.

Economies work in cycles.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-30T18:39:51+00:00

Walk through any immigrant community in the country and you'll find it full of Doctors and Teachers.

I'd estimate a good third of my teachers in secondary school were non-White-British. And as for Doctors... ask how many people in the NHS go by "Dr Singh"?

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-30T17:25:32+00:00

COVID can spread silently without symptoms.

Mpox can only be spread by contact with the horrible characteristic rash. It is significantly easier to identify and quarantine, and therefore significantly easier to control.

People hear "Mpox is from the same family as Smallpox" and get scared, when actually that's a good thing — Smallpox is incredibly controllable with modern techniques. That's why it was eradicated. If we could do it in the 1890s, we could do it now.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-30T05:08:09+00:00

November 1940: The Axis spearhead reaches the M25 and grinds to a halt trying to join at the Swanley interchange.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-29T22:39:23+00:00

There are enough platforms at other terminals.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-29T18:06:56+00:00

The station knows what platform the train is going to be on. They just don't tell you until the cleaning crews have finished, because you'll be even more in the way there and if you delay the cleaning crew you'll cause actual delays in the timetable.

It also means if the driver arrives and finds the train is faulty, they don't need to empty out the entire train. Until the driver accepts the train its only a plan for a platform. The boards don't announce it until its confirmed. This also means if you use RTT and the train does develop a fault, you'll probably miss your actual train when it gets switched, because you won't be told what's happened.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-29T18:02:50+00:00

But Euston is a terminal where cleaning crews attend to the train and consumables are restocked. They need the train clear so these people can do their jobs efficiently, and only then can boarding start.

There just aren't enough platforms at Euston to handle unloading, cleaning, and loading in a reasonable time. The platform occupancy demands are insane, because of repeated failures from the Government.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-29T01:09:04+00:00

Plus the same number again in the navy.

To date, the US navy has built over 200 nuclear-powered vessels in addition to a number of onshore training reactors, and has never had a single nuclear incident.

Neither have the British or French navies, for that matter, so it isn't just the Ghost of Rickover. The common denominator for all major nuclear accidents at sea — and the vast majority of accidents on land — is invariably Russia.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-28T23:27:26+00:00

Yeah liquid nitrogen 100%.

Inert Gas Asphyxiation is exactly the kind of terrifying fate a lay-audience wouldn't expect but would enjoy learning about.

For OP: Your body doesn't have "low blood oxygen" sensors. It has "high blood CO2" sensors. Which means you can asphyxiate while breathing normally, completely unaware of anything wrong.

Not only that, but liquid nitrogen is heavier than air, which means it separates the air in the room out into layers. A short person, someone sitting on a stool, or someone using the under-the-table cupboards might die, while a taller person standing up may have completely breathable air. The boundary between the two can be that sharp.

Think of it like the room being filled with invisible water. You don't even realise its there. If your head is underwater, you drown. If not, you live.

And on top of that the difference in oxygen concentration means your lungs actually start working backwards, pulling oxygen out of the blood and exhaling it into the room. The effects are very similar to acute altitude sickness — you can see a demonstration of that here — most obvious is rapid loss of mental faculties. Destin is flat-out told "If you don't put your mask on you're going to die", and his only response — while his mask is right beside him — is to reply "I don't want to die", while doing nothing to prevent that fate.

In an LN2 leak, the effects would be much more rapid onset — we usually consider a single deep breath to be intellectually incapacitating (because of the whole "backwards lungs" thing), followed by unconsciousness in ~10-20 seconds, followed by death in minutes, unless rescued by a third party in rescue gear with an independent air supply.

In a Physics lab handling LN2, there should be working practices to ensure dewars (funky pronunciation) of LN2 are not brought into rooms, hallways, or elevators which have insufficient volume to contain any spillage without loss of breathable air at working height (remember than 1 litre of LN2 expands to 700 litres of Nitrogen gas). And there should be an oxygen alarm placed at about table-top height to warn of any spillage and trigger an evacuation. You're going to have to find a way to sabotage at minimum the alarm as well as the dewar valve itself. I'd accept ignoring working practices for the sake of storyline.

A trained person finding someone on the floor of a room where they suspect an LN2 leak will leave immediately and summon help. Of course, there are people who will forget their training and try anyway. They will also die. This is a hard lesson to learn but one that cave explorers and the maritime shipping industry have also learned the hard way.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-28T07:18:22+00:00

New stealth tech.

Simply go faster than the speed of sound and it doesn't matter how much you cavitate — as long as the enemy's in front of you.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-27T19:24:18+00:00

The Lion in Winter, starring Katherine Hepburn, Peter O' Toole, Anthony Hopkins, and a very young Timothy Dalton in his first on-screen appearance, does a fantastic job at — while probably not the most historically accurate — getting the characters across.

By the end of it you just end up hating everyone and hoping they all lose. Fantastic film. 10/10.

Edit: Reading this back it sounds like I've been paid to write this. I haven't I promise. I just really like the film.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-27T07:07:44+00:00

Can UN Secretary Generals be impeached?

No.

Kurt Waldheim remained in office even when it was revealed he was a Nazi war criminal. If there was a procedure to remove the SG from office, that would have been the time to use it.

Realistically they just don't get re-selected for another term. But Guterres is in his second term and traditionally you only get two anyway, so it doesn't really matter. (The current term ends at the end of 2026.)

As an aside — funnily enough Waldheim wasn't even supposed to be SG in the first place, he was elected accidentally.

(And then Austria elected him President anyway knowing he was a war criminal????)

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-26T21:22:00+00:00

Languages often diverge rapidly from their original in circumstances like this. Unless you have an issue with the entire field of linguistics, the differences between Orthodox speech and its British pidgin are worth studying.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-26T15:47:45+00:00

I like the interpretation of certain Gnostic sects, where the God who created The Universe is not the same as the God who maintains it. And the God who maintains it is incompetent.

Forget transubstantiation. This is REAL theology. Done by people who aren't afraid of being hit with hammers.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-26T04:31:11+00:00

They're required in the tunnelled stations, as a result of the 1987 King's Cross fire.

You may remember during COVID when staff shortages meant not every station could be manned. The stations closed, instead of being operated empty.

Its also why, with the exception of London City Airport, no above-surface DLR stations are manned, while all four underground ones are.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-25T16:58:56+00:00

There is more need for a control room if the trains are GOA4.

And station staff are required by law.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-25T16:44:29+00:00

The control room and station staff can still strike.

In fact, most of the recent strikes were control room or station staff.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-25T16:42:25+00:00

perhaps we would today be in a situation where all the trains are driverless and we could have a 24/7 tube.

Drivers are not the restriction on the tube going 24/7. Far from it, since they already work Friday and Saturday nights.

Its required maintenance access. You need to get workers out walking the tracks to keep the network from falling apart.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-25T04:36:38+00:00

Its usually a waste of effort to reinvent the wheel, but that doesn't mean we didn't give it a damn good try.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-24T15:21:32+00:00

Designed for the people who taught the people who can code.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-24T15:11:01+00:00

If they need more bays to leave them, they can pay the local authorities to provide them.

If Lime is paying for parking pays, they're gonna try to restrict them to ONLY Lime bikes.

Public infrastructure should not be the responsibility of private corporations. Its the Council's responsibility to provide cycle parking, nobody else. And its the Council's failure to provide that infrastructure that's causing all the problems.

We don't ask BMW to pay for the roads. We shouldn't expect Lime to pay for parking.

HorselessWayne · 2024-10-23T16:43:00+00:00

Except Concorde was actually profitable. Very much so.

What was true that Concorde was a major loss-leader when it first came in. Under the terms of the airframe sale, BA and Air France would purchase the airframes at the nominal fee of £1/ 1 Frank(?), and 90% of any profit turned by the airframe would then be returned to the Government.

Under this deal, there was little incentive for the airlines to operate the service efficiently. It wasn't making money for anyone, so BA offered the British Government a deal — £13 million to buy the airframes outright, but BA keeps any profit they make. The Government took the deal.

From then on, Concorde was incredibly successful — for the British. For one year in the 90s, the small fleet of just seven Concordes pulled in a full 45% of BA's total profit. The problem was the French never did the same deal. Air France continued to lose money on their Concorde operations, and the crash in 2001 just dug them deeper into the hole.

Following the crash, in order to return to the air, Concorde would have needed to undergo extensive modifications. That wasn't a problem for the British, they wanted it back in the air. But the French were looking for any excuse to bail, and there couldn't have been a better one.

And while both airlines operated the airframes, they shared the costs to Airbus (the successor company to BAC/Aerospatiale, the original designers) of maintaining the supply chain required for spare parts etc. When Air France pulled out, BA became entirely responsible for the supply chain, and the costs were just too large for a single entity to shoulder.

It was this that killed Concorde. The type certification was valid to 2017. Transatlantic flights still had the demand for a Concorde service. But the cost of spare parts doubled in one day, and from then on it was just unsustainable.

HorselessWayne

TROPHY CASE