You’re talking about the people who lowered a car from a rocket crane onto the surface of another planet, you can be thoughtfully critical, but their technical record has earned them a lot more than surface level dismissal.

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

“Steve’s quite erudite.”

“Steve’s quite intellectual.”

I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed”

For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

“I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

“I don’t understand, can you explain?”

Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.

When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.

Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …

Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.

Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.

For each of these, what would you use instead?

Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.

I would argue that the majority of sci-fi has predicted otherwise.

Yeah bud, there’s also these little shelters called caves.

The author of the article literally guffaws at the prospect of respinning a planet’s core when that’s not remotely how you would approach that problem.

It would be like writing an article saying “Come on, you believe in vaccines? What, you think a scientist can cut open your individual cells and put antibodies in each one? You really think they have tweezers that small? Get real dum dum.”

The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

The word you’re looking for is “big”. As in, it embiggens the noblest spirit.

I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

It’s also not possible to protect the ISS from either of those and yet it’s operated fine for 30 years. You do not need every little bit of it to be perfect, you just need to deflect enough solar wind that it allows Mars atmosphere to build back up which is what provides the real protection.

If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

Like I said, we waste more resources than that all the time. I’d rather we didn’t build yachts and country clubs and private schools, yet we do. There’s no reason to not get started building that array, especially if it will take a while.

There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

That is not what e-waste is. E-waste primarily consists of silicon chips and the metal wires connecting them. Even the circuit boards themselves are primarily fibre glass, not petroleum.

And no, we wouldn’t be creating those using actual magnets, we’d be using electro magnets, which is just coils of wire connected to PV and logic chips.

I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly. You know that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire right? And you know virtually that all of them just sit on their wealth, and do nothing with it but wast on luxury lifestyles for themselves right? Yeah it would be better if billionaire’s did not exist, but as long as they do, why are you upset about their money going to space exploration as opposed to just yachts and $20,000 a night hotel stays?

No, not really. If we’re talking about colonizing a planet, building a bunch of magnets connected to solar panels is not going to be that big or expensive a part of it.

It’s also the kind of relatively cheap thing that takes a long time that we may as well get started now. I mean we churn out that much bullshit e-waste constantly for no reason, if we were more focused / more billionaire’s money went to that, you might actually be able to get it done.

deleted by creator

The rub there is that it’s 1-2 Tesla’s over the whole cross sectional area of Mars (I believe).

It’s not that hard to make a 2 Tesla magnet, but the most powerful electromagnet we’ve ever made is only 45 Tesla’s and even that only produces a 2 Tesla strong field out to 2.8m. So you might be looking at a Mars diameter worth of small magnets.

Solar panels would be my guess, though you can always build a space based nuclear reactor if you can refuel it and get rid of its waste.

It would certainly need a lot more to figure out an actual feasible plan, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally impossible about doing it with today’s technology, let alone the future’s.

This is a pretty embarassing way to open this article:

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

NASA legitimately has a plan for this, and no it’s not crazy, and no it doesn’t involve restarting the core of a planet:

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point (the orbital point that is stable between Mars and the sun), and then it will block the solar wind that strips Mars’ atmosphere.

Otherwise cosmic rays etc are blocked and interrupted by the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere.

The confident dismissiveness of the author’s tone on a subject that they are (clearly) not an expert in, let alone took the time to google, says all you really need to know about how much you should listen to them.

The stated reason being political disagreement.

That was your stated reason, not theirs. Please try and keep track of your own statements at least.

Were those on Lemmy.ca, or Hexbear? If Hexbear users want to call out Canada for being a right-wing country on Hexbear, many of whom are Canadian themselves, why does that mean it would spread to Lemmy.ca?

It’s literally the stated reason they defederated. If you disagree it’s up to you prove otherwise.

Communists have and continue to do so, Capitalists continue to produce a system that ruthlessly exploits workers for Capitalist riches.

Name the country. Vietnam known for its working conditions and lack of exploitation? How are those Chinese Uighurs doing?

That doesn’t bear out when compared to Hexbear’s thread, which was more level headed on average. The issue is in political disagreement, which Hexbear was willing to open, while Lemmy.ca was not.

You seem insistent on it being politically motivated, yet that thread had far more vitrial that would have required mod cleanup than a typical lemmy.ca thread.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

I restate, again, Capitalists making use of FOSS tools does not mean it is Capitalist, or compatible ideologically. Capitalists will use what’s available, users will use what works and aligns ideologically.

Then FOSS isn’t inherently ideologically anything.

Capitalism does not function even in theory for Material Goods. If it functions in theory but not in practice then the theory is wrong. That’s why Communists put a large emphasis on actually touching grass and developing theory through practice.

Lol neither system has ever produced a practical , implemented system that is good for the average worker.

So you say, yet you’re admitting that the most fringe of Hexbear is the issue in your opinion, not the entire instance, so then why defederate? Why not federate and block bad-faith users? Because Lemmy.ca itself is anticommunist and anti-anarchist, as I said.

The argument being that Hexbear has a larger than average number of shit posters, meaning that the benefit gained from seeing their communities is not offset by the increased cost to all the lemmy.ca moderators who have to clean up after those users.

The fact that Capitalism exists and makes use of readily available tools does not mean actively choosing to support and develop FOSS

But they do. Most successful FOSS projects are actively supported by capitalist companies, from Linux, to git, to web standards, etc.

Capitalism is an awful choice of resource distribution in general, not just information.

It is fundamentally ill suited to information in a way that it is not with material goods though. With material goods, it can function in theory, though always tends towards corruption and fucking the poor and working class in practice. With information, it is simply a cruel system design from a theoretical basis that imposes scarcity where there is no need for it.

deleted by creator

Hexbear wasn’t defederated from for its too comments. It was defederated from for its bottom ones, in which people repeatedly call people Nazis and the KKK.

I restate, Lemmy is built on Communist principles. FOSS is anticapitalist in nature, hardcore libertarians prefer Reddit. Anarchists are also Leftists.

Given that the largest and most successful open source projects are all openly supported by capitalist companies, that is evidently not true. There is nothing inherently anti-capitalist about FOSS. Capitalism is a poor choice of resource distribution system for information because unlike material things, information can be copied and replicated freely, so there is no need for scarcity. FOSS exposes that,l flaw with capitalism but it is no inherently communist.

I read their comment too, no need to worry. Anticommunist instances like Lemmy.world and, relevantly Lemmy.ca, still can’t get rid of Communists even by defederating from Communist instances.

Assuming that whole instances are anti-anything is a great way to judge a whole swath of people quickly and look childish, it’s less useful to do anything else.

My point is more that Lemmy itself is structured along Communist principles, while Reddit remains the right-wing Lemmy. Choosing Lemmy over Reddit is ideological in nature, which means there is going to be a steady influx of Communists and other Leftists, less so Liberals.

No, Lemmy is just decentralized in nature, while that’s attractive to fringe left groups like hardcore communists, it’s also attractive to anarchists and fringe right groups like hardcore libertarians.

They never said anything about getting rid of communists, they said it’s no longer a communist echo chamber.