[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

The Nazis based a lot of their racial laws on what was being done in the US, especially the south. Sure, the Allies included a diverse set of nations, but those nations were often incredibly racist too.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

If Germany hadn't turned on the Russians it would have won the war. If they'd managed to get access to the French Navy after invading France, they probably would have won the war.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 24 points 3 days ago

IMO the biggest deal here was the Royal Navy. The UK started the war still clinging on to an empire that included almost half the world. They protected that empire with the biggest navy in the world. That meant that once Germany went to war with Britain by invading Poland, Germany couldn't ship in anything via the Atlantic or via the Mediterranean. When they were allies with the Russians, that at least meant that they had access to everything Russia had in abundance, but when they did the ol' red beard thing, they were boxed in on 4 sides. Meanwhile, their enemies late in the war had become manufacturing powerhouses with access to vast amounts of natural resources.

The whole story of U-Boats in WWII is really a story of how outmatched the German navy was. Rather than going toe-to-toe with the Royal Navy, the Germans had to snipe some of the constant shipments of goods flowing into the UK from around the globe. Even at the peak of their military power, they had ceded control of the seas to the British. Their only real naval force were stealth craft that could ambush and then run away. Since the British and then the Allies controlled the seas, it allowed them to invade by sea, first Sicily and then D-Day in France.

So, without the Royal Navy, Germany would have had access to goods from around the world, and wouldn't have been vulnerable to an invasion by sea in the later stages of the war.

As for Russia, the bigger deal about getting within a few km of Moscow was that at the same time they were also getting very close to Baku. If they'd managed to control the Azerbaijani oil fields, it would have cut off oil supply to the USSR while gaining a huge oil supply for themselves.

What the Germans did in WWII was very impressive, especially considering that 15 years before the start of WWII the German economy was in such a state of collapse that inflation was running at 3 million percent per month. Prices for regular goods doubled every 2 days. Kids were playing with stacks of bills because those stacks were effectively worthless. Germany went from being the losers of WWI paying massive reparations that destroyed their economy, to being a force able to conquer virtually an entire continent. Unfortunately, that continent lacked critical natural resources and so eventually they lost because they couldn't keep up with the manufacturing powers of their enemies.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

I'd say they're tight, not loose.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 days ago

Ronaldo's ego is incredible, and he's almost always looking out for himself in everything he does. But, you can't deny that he's one of the best ever players. And his charisma means he's a great choice for something like this where he has to perform and interact with all the "scientists". Someone like Messi could do the same kinds of moves, but he wouldn't be able to chat with the presenters and "scientists" between events in a natural way. (P.S. I love that they got someone named Ronald to be the ordinary guy who couldn't do anything useful, that was just funny.)

I also think Ronaldo genuinely cares about all the biomechanics and all that, as long as it's something that applies to him, and that he could use to make himself better. A lot of other players just play on instinct and don't want to have to think about it.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 days ago

Hearing is definitely part of it, but I imagine it's only hearing the sound of the ball being kicked. After that it's going to be far too quiet to hear until it gets close, and he's obviously reacting long before that. Maybe hearing helps him adjust in the last tenth of a second, but he's not hearing the ball's entire flight.

As for the body mechanics of a pitch or a kick, it is amazing. Like, a proper powerful punch involves leg muscles, hip muscles, waist muscles, chest muscles, and only then do you start to get to the arms. For most of us, the best way to realize how coordinated everything has to be is to try to do something with your wrong arm/leg. Everything that flows naturally on your strong side is just completely wrong on your weak side.

7
submitted 1 month ago by merc@sh.itjust.works to c/gaming@lemmy.zip

This sounds like a disaster.

For those who don't know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to "scout" them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.

By releasing in March 2025, they're going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they're giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won't be much remaining interest in playing a game that's almost out of date.

They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they've done it before. They could have called "Football Manager 25" something like "Football Manager Next Gen" and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there's a FM 26 coming out so soon?

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 171 points 1 month ago

It's not the real name for the crime, obviously. But, it's true that section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass "access controls", which are so loosely defined that just about anything qualifies. As a result, any device with "access controls" gets to define how you're allowed to interact with it, and if you interact with it in the wrong way, even if you own it, you're committing a felony.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 309 points 3 months ago

In 1884 trade unions were demanding that work days be reduced from the typical 10-12 hours (6 days a week) down to a maximum of 8 hours. They set a deadline of May 1, 1886. When that deadline wasn't met, they held a peaceful protest in Chicago. On May 3rd, angry striking workers pushed toward some gates to confront strikebreakers / scabs. The police fired on the strikers, killing 6. The next day, there was a rally at Haymarket Square. At night, the police came in force to try to disperse the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police, killing one of them and severely wounding others. The police fired on the crowd, and some protesters fired back. At least 4 people were killed and at least 70 injured.

The result of all this, including the unfair trials, executions, pardons, etc. was a lot of attention to the 8-hour workday movement.

In 1890, the unions planned for another strike with the goal being the 8-hour work day. This time, with the help of the second Communist International, it went worldwide. The riot in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1 became a rallying cry for workers worldwide, and ever since then that has been the International Workers Day. But, in the US, the fact it was associated with communism was too scary, so the US celebration of Labour was moved to Sept 1st. Instead of International Workers Day, on May 1 the US celebrates (I kid you not) "Loyalty Day" and "Law Day" -- extremely rich given that the thing that kicked it off was a time when there was a bloody confrontation between cops and labour.

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

A couple of decades later in the 1910s, as unions continued to push for an 8-hour work day, Henry Ford went with the 8-hour day in his factories, and that was so influential that it eventually became the norm.

The 5 day work week came after the 8 hour day. It was partially the result of Henry Ford deciding that it was more beneficial to give his workers 2 days off. It was also influenced by a cotton mill employing both Jewish and Christian workers arranging work schedules so each group could have its sabbath off. Once Ford made that rule, unions pushed extremely hard to make it a standard thing, but again, it took decades. It wasn't until 1940 that the Fair Labor Standards Act in the US made a 40 hour work week mandatory.

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

The point of all this?

The 40-hour work week was never "designed". People fought and died to make it a reality.

People, mostly in unions, frequently communists, fought and died to gradually reduce the number of hours that workers were expected to work. In the mid 1800s the expectation was 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. It took decades of fighting to get that down to 6 days of only 8 hours. It took decades more fighting to get it down to 5 days a week rather than 6 or 5.5. It was never something that was "designed". It was something that took decades of battle.

White families in the US after WWII were the first to really benefit from a law which had gone into place just before the US entered the war. Those families benefited from decades of work from labour unions and communists to get the work week down to only 40 hours. Then, the economic boom the US received from being the only major country to come out of WWII with its infrastructure essentially untouched meant that for the first time, maybe ever, working-class families were living relatively comfortable lives. The man in the family went to work for the legal maximum 40 hours, and still earned enough to support a whole family without his wife needing to work outside the home.

What has happened since then isn't that the "designed" system failed. It's that the post-war economic boom ended as other countries recovered. It's that the labour unions got weak, and the capitalists started squeezing again. The 40-hour work week is still theoretically the law of the land. It's just that take-home pay has been stalled for decades as the cost of living has gone up.

Don't get me wrong, workers today still live better than the workers did in the mid 1800s when a work week was something like 60-80 hours. But, because labour unions got weak, and communism was demonized, there was nobody to oppose the owners of capital as they found new ways to squeeze their employees. So, even with a 40 hour week, things have been getting worse.

The history of the 40 hour week is also important because it shows what's going to be needed if people want to work less than 40 hours. People are going to need strong unions. They're going to need to go on strike. They're going to need to get hurt and maybe killed by the cops who will side with the bosses. And, once enough blood has been spilled, maybe there will be reforms. Complaining about it on social media and thinking that we just need to "design" a new mutually beneficial arrangement is missing the whole point.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 251 points 6 months ago

To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.

Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That's about 10x as much power as a cell phone's radio, but it's still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it's extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it's still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It's being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they're still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they're decoding a signal that's 10^-18 watts.

So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you're doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.

The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you'd probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn't do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.

So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.

19
submitted 8 months ago by merc@sh.itjust.works to c/til@lemmy.world

Maybe the "great" America that Donald wants to take us back to is the 1860s?

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 319 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

One way of classifying languages is grouping them into stress-timed, syllable-timed and "mora"-timed languages.

Stress timed languages (like English) are ones where the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same. Take the phrase "I went to the store with my friend John". Most native English speakers will stress "went", "store", "friend" and "John". It might not be a big difference, but you'll notice the "to the" between "went" and "store" is rushed, and that there's a sort of gap between "friend" and "John" since both are stressed. (Also, if you were to modify that slightly and say "I went to the store with my friend named John", the time between "friend" and "John" wouldn't change much at all, you'd just slip "named" into that gap.)

Many Romance languages are seen as syllable-timed, where each syllable takes the same amount of time. In French that phrase is "Je suis allé au magasin avec mon ami John", that's 14 syllables, all roughly the same timing. In Spanish it's "Fui a la tienda con mi amigo John", 12 syllables. Unless you're really drawing attention to one of the words, every syllable there gets roughly the same timing.

Japanese is mora timed, which is pretty similar to being syllable timed, except that when you encounter double-letters they double the length of the syllable. So, "Just a moment please" is "Chottomatte kudasai", where the syllables with double-t letters take twice as long. The cities Tōkyō (two syllables), Ōsaka (three syllables) and Kawasaki (four syllables) all take the same amount of time to say because the "ō" symbol means that letter gets double the length of the standard "o".

The 4 most widely spoken languages in India are Hindi (way out in front with 44% of the population speaking it as a first language), followed by Bengali, Marathi and Telugu (with about 6-8% each) The first 3 are all Indo-Aryan languages, and Telugu is a Dravidian language. The 3 Indo-Aryan languages are considered to be syllable-timed and Telugu is considered to be mora-timed.

IMO, what makes Indian-inflected English seem fast is that they're adopting the syllable / mora timing from their primary language and using it in English. That means they spend less time on syllables / words that English speakers would stress and more time on the un-stressed syllables. The overall timing of what they say is probably similar, but in evening out the length of the syllables, they take time away from the syllables that other English speakers naturally slow down to stress. Since you tend to notice the stressed words more, since they're rushed it seems like the entire sentence is rushed.

7
submitted 10 months ago by merc@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

Note: National Bank of Canada is a commercial bank, not the Bank of Canada which is Canada's national bank. Um. Which is Canada's central bank.

The graphs in the presentation are the key takeaway for me. But, some key words:

"Canada is caught in a population trap that has historically been the preserve of emerging economies. We currently lack the infrastructure and capital stock in this country to adequately absorb current population growth and improve our standard of living."

...

"To put things in perspective, Canada's population growth in 2023 was 3.2%, five times higher than the OECD average."

...

"But to meet current demand and reduce shelter cost inflation, Canada would need to double its housing construction capacity to approximately 700,000 starts per year, an unattainable goal."

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 178 points 10 months ago

The picture suggests that there was an ad that suggested a stop at the sponsored gas station, if the user clicked on the suggestion / ad, then the route would be modified.

IMO that's massively different than the detour being added by default. If they actually did / were doing that, it would be a huge scandal, but I don't think that's what's happening here. Instead, it's just an intrusive, annoying ad.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 167 points 11 months ago

Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.

Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it's old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.

Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that's very different from stealing something.

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merc

joined 1 year ago