I like that this is where Lemmy draws the line on fetishes and downvotes.

Honestly? The first thought that goes through my head is exactly how strong and responsive the force fields can get. IIRC they can do bullets, as well as the texture and movement of anything normal. So, probably some benchmark involving a bucket of paint I brought in. Start with the paint, then do weird things with the bucket.

Oh man, imagine the prank potential if you moved someone to a holodeck simulation of their own ship without them knowing it. Lower Decks ended too soon.

Just going by this graph and headlines over the last half-decade, probably still COVID hangover. You can see it did something similar in the early 90’s and early 2000’s.

At some point going forwards, blowing up all the US’s trading relationships is going to have an effect, as well. And maybe the AI bubble will burst.

Who cares about solving lost and unprovable theorems — how do these help anyone?

They do have a way of eventually coming up in something practical. It might take a long time though, that’s fair.

Y’know, maybe I’ve just never been that thirsty.

The recent thread (on .ml AskLemmy, maybe?) with transpeople who have experienced both kinds of horny was super illuminating for me.

Significant hunger is probably the closest thing to testosterone horny. It’s hard to ignore when you need to get some. Then again, it goes away once you (ahem) take care of it, so I don’t really get some of the most extreme things that end up happening.

Apparently estrogen horny is slow burning but doesn’t really go away, by comparison. OP in that thread said it’s actually more intense on estrogen, although in a different way, and now I understand the stupid relationship choices women make a little better.

Edit: Oh, I missed that you’re a man, OP. Obviously level of libido varies quite a bit.

If you want to call Gaza an open air concentration camp, you can’t really use it for war casualties. If you compare Israeli operations in Syria or Iran with anything the Nazis did, they look pretty good again.

There’s plenty of less extreme analogies to use. Rwanda would be more defensible.

I know that other territories and populations, which Israel already attacked repeatedly, are meant to be subjugated in the larger plan.

Religious Zionists want control of all historical Hebrew areas. What they think that is varies wildly within the movement. Subjugation of the entire Middle East or whole Muslim world is where things are going if Israel is never stopped, but nobody’s claiming a right to it at this point. Jordan or Sinai are more the ones you hear about as external ambitions.

It’s not uncommon for ethnic conflicts in general, but there’s a lot of extra dimensions in the Nazi case. The Jewish conspiracy that handed WWI to the Entante, and was also behind communism somehow, was always a centerpiece of their whole ideology. And obviously, Nazis didn’t just go after Jews. They make up about half of the Holocaust and are dwarfed by random war casualties, often civilian. If they won the plan was to kill a good share of all Slavs and bring back slavery for the rest.

There’s nobody more recent I’d say are on the same tier except maybe ISIS.

The part where the US contributed to the region sucking is real, although it goes back past the American century as well. The rest sounds (ahem) very Lemmy.

What about the space aliens? /s

I mean, there’s also the whole issue of the planned site for the state being occupied, and not even wanting to share with the original inhabitants.

Less problematic than Nazism, though? Sure.

People are still pretty sorry about the Holocaust, there’s Christian mysticism associated with it, the Middle East is a rough neighborhood and Zionists have used all of those things to great effect.

No, you have to lend it to someone else for that, who probably spends it. And it never really matches what it would be doing if invested, and if it’s something like a savings account the interest you earn might even be less than the inflation rate. There’s a whole logic to this.

Collection of interest and profit from investments definitely are included in the reasoning of central banks.

If money became worth more over time, there’d be an incentive to hoard it, which in turn would make it scarcer in circulation and worth more. Of course it’s more complicated in real life, and the cycle would eventually break, but that’s the gist of why deflation (what that is called) is seen as a bad thing.

Minor inflation is pretty harmless. Exactly 0 change in the value of money might be good too, but it’s right next to deflation. So, the usual target amount is a percent or two of inflation per annum, to be safe. Central banks achieve this primarily by lending money out, at a higher or lower rate of interest as conditions demand.

So I actually had to read into the history of political thrillers to answer this, because how they’ve changed before is kind of the biggest hint. All The President’s Men is around that old, and while of course it was based on real events, it’s pretty modern in the other ways. Technologies, settings and the inspiring fears might change (like all the terrorism-related plots after 9/11), but it could be that not much else does.

The other people mentioning it might not be allowed have a point. House Of Cards was huge in China, and it’s been suggested that that was due to the total impossibility of any depicting any remotely cynical take on politics in Chinese productions. A lot can happen in 50 years, but it’s good to guess that the authoritarian countries won’t be the exact same ones as today.

Edit: A lot of the earlier yet examples Wikipedia gives are really more like spy or adventure stories. That might not be a coincidence; it’s not just China that does self- and official censorship.

For me, a political thriller just has to be about internal struggles within institutions. That’s bound to have elements of truth, since competition and personal advancement never goes out of style, but powerful people using existing institutions for personal advancement is also scandalous as hell. Or, at least is in modern times where we believe institutions aren’t meant for that. Depicting it explicitly, as opposed to “in a dystopian future” or in disguise, is a pretty high watermark for media freedom, and media freedom was just not as strong in the 60’s and earlier.

Guns are the other guys’s thing. Democrats fight with hope and dignity and going high.

Wait, why are we losing? /s

Edit: Ignore all the other people giving reasons. Maybe some of them are true, but it’s not why.

I’m close enough to the country to know that taking up arms is too taboo and “other” for the blue Americans to have ever considered in the first place. Lemmy is full of blue Americans, who have an emotional incentive to make it rational, though.

I should mention I met someone IRL who makes their own vacuum tubes. You can own your own pump, although I don’t know how it would stack up against what you’re used to.

High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn’t available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it’s all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you’re doing technology all over again, I’d skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.

If you can get away with a low vacuum, a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do. It seems like a low vacuum would work for at least some kinds of VD. Maybe you can help clear it up a bit.

(although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).

1 micron features is as ambitious as I’ve bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.

Depends where you’re starting. If it’s sticks and stones, yeah, you’re going to spend a lot of time building up. Even getting to the prerequisites for the Gingery-esque machine shop will be a trick, and you definitely need machining first.

Sam Zeloof is the guy that actually did the semiconductors bit. He makes a transistor in the linked video series starting with a commercial wafer, some basic chemicals, a spinning piece of tape and an electric furnace. I read papers and just Wikipedia to get ideas for the parts he doesn’t cover. The standard ways of doing things are heavily constrained by scalability, which as an artisan you don’t care about, but will breeze past other things you really do, like ability to work in a small space. And, if you’re starting from scratch, using only common, locally available elements.