Migrated from rainynight65@feddit.de, which now appears to be dead. Sadly lost my comment history in the process. Let’s start fresh.

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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • Good on this kid for going to such lengths to verify his hypothesis and show a serious weakness in railway infrastructure. I hope he goes on to become a serious railway enthusiast and advocate for safe, efficient rail.

    However, there are way too many factors in the number of derailments and safety incidents in US rail operations to pin them down to this one issue. Once the major operators embarked on a journey to squeeze more and more money out of the business, a lot of things happened. Trains became longer - excessively so. Used to be that a train 1.4 miles long was considered massive. These days they are the norm. Can you imagine a train so long that, in hilly terrain, sections of it are being dragged uphill while other sections are pushing downhill?

    Reductions in staff, motive power fleets and maintenance have led to trains being badly composed, with loads being distributed in a less than optimal way. An old railway man once told me that the only time he broke a train was when he, in a rush and under pressure, agreed to attach a rake of fully loaded freight cars to the end of a train of empties. Unequal load distribution played a role in a number major derailment incidents, among them a derailment in Hyndman, PA, which required the town to be evacuated for several days.

    ProPublica have a series of articles regarding rail safety, and specifically one about the dangers of long trains. So while the worn out springs certainly don’t help, they are only one of many things that are impacting rail safety, and probably not even the lowest hanging fruit.


  • By that token, I would also recommend the one-season X-Files spin-off ‘The Lone Gunmen’. It can come across as a bit hokey for the first few episodes, but they found their pace and it became really enjoyable. I don’t think it was ever meant to be more than a single - and, by then-current standards, short - season but I really enjoyed it. The show blended the comic relief of the three geeks from the main series with some more serious storytelling and even had an episode with a plot that resembled a later real-life world-changing event.



  • rainynight65@feddit.orgtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat word or term annonys you?
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    13 days ago

    The only thing worse than people misusing the term ‘enshittification’ are people who criticise that but can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.

    No, it’s not a meaningless buzzword. And no, it was not made up by nostalgic millennials. It would have taken you a mere minute of online research to figure that out yourself.



  • rainynight65@feddit.orgtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat word or term annonys you?
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    13 days ago

    I suggest you read up a bit on how and by whom the term was coined and what it actually means. It’s by no means ‘vague’ and it is also a bit more than just repackaging and selling something already known. I suspect many people using the term aren’t even fully aware of what it describes and, crucially, what is being proposed to reduce the effects it describes.






  • Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right?

    Deaths from an accident at an active nuclear power plant are not the same as deaths caused by a burst dam that was originally intended to produce electricity one day, but has never produced any. Especially if you call the statistic ‘Deaths per unit of electricity production’. At the time of the accident, it was just a dam, construction of any hydroelectric facilities was nowhere near beginning, so calling it a ‘hydropower accident’ is highly debatable (probably as at least as debatable as calling nuclear ‘conventional’). Without the inclusion of those deaths, hydro would be shown to be even safer than nuclear, given that it has produced nearly twice as much electricity in the time span covered by those statistics, while having caused a similar number of deaths (if you continue to ignore the increased miner mortality, otherwise nuclear will look way worse). The article also does not cite how they determined the number of 171000 deaths, given that estimates for the Banqian dam failure range between 26000 and 240000. The author mentions (but does not cite) a paper by Benjamin Sovacool from 2016, which analyzes the deaths caused by different forms of energy but, crucially, omits the Banqian dam death toll. I will try to get hold of that paper to see the reasoning, but I suspect it may align with mine.

    How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?

    The article makes zero mention of any such thing, and the section about how the deaths are calculated (footnote 3 in this section) only calls out the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Direct quote from the footnote:

    Nuclear = I have calculated these figures based on the assumption of 433 deaths from Chernobyl and 2,314 from Fukushima. These figures are based on the most recent estimates from UNSCEAR and the Government of Japan. In a related article, I detail where these figures come from.

    No mention at all of any other deaths or causes of death, nothing whatsoever. It’s the deaths from two nuclear accidents, that’s all. The figures from the cited study alone would multiply the number of nuclear deaths in this statistic. What’s worse, the author has published another article on nuclear energy which essentially comes to the exact same conclusions. But if you include deaths from a burst dam that has never produced electricity (but was planned to do so eventually), then you must include deaths among people who mine the material destined to produce electricity in a nuclear plant.

    To me it simply looks like the author of this article is highly biased towards nuclear, and has done very selective homework.








  • rainynight65@feddit.orgtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    The USB transfer speed claim is misleading to say the least. The iPhone 15 was already capable of up to 10Gbps transfer speed (USB 3.0 support). You could quibble over the fact that the included cable didn’t support that (if only the USB-IF could get its shit together), but to claim the hardware doesn’t support it is a lie.

    Also, non-US iPhones support both physical SIM and eSIM.