Ask Lemmy

Taxing buildings and other improvements to land, is bad for cities. A split-rate tax zone where land is taxed higher and buildings are taxed less, would get rid of a lot of urban blight (vacant buildings, empty lots) in downtown areas.

If you want to design and build large-scale industrial plant infrastructure like pressure vessels, piping, pumps, turbines, etc., most of the codes and standards you have to meet cost money to even see -and they are NOT cheap (in the tens of thousands of dollars for a full set).

In several jurisdictions, the standards are incorporated into law by reference. Most people think that you should have free access to read the text of the law that you're beholden to, but what happens when a copyrighted work is incorporated into the law?

archive.org asserted the law should be free to access. However, they lost a copyright lawsuit brought by the American society of mechanical engineers because they were hosting copies of these standards.

So, to read the law you are beholden to in this sector of manufacturing, you must either pay a private organization ($$$) or memorize it (impossible); you cannot make copies for yourself to reference at your leisure

Okay, so, there's this Canadian children's book author, Paulette Bourgeois, right? She wrote the Franklin books ( the one about the turtle ) that later got adapted into 2 different cartoons.

But little fun fact that I doubt many people know is the fact that in an interview, she admitted that the first book, the one where Franklin deals with fear of the dark in his shell at night, was inspired by an episode of MASH ( cannot format the title properly ). Specifically the episode where the 4077th have to move operations into a nearby cave. If I remember correctly, she was a fresh first time parent when watching that episode one night with her baby, but it's been a while since I read this, so take it with a grain of salt.

In a related vein, the Washington Post was hot garbage long before it was acquired by Bezos. They gained their reputation by chance during the Watergate scandal because they received classified docs which put them on the same level as larger media outlets.

But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.

Expanding on this, this was mainly exploited by the weakening British empire to create states that would be friendly in geopolitics and trade. Even the Pan Arab flag that many middle eastern countries share is actually a British design given to different uprising groups against the weakening Ottoman empire a couple of centuries prior.

Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite.

Jokes on you, Pakistan has a ton of natural resources that the small elite chooses to shoot people for attempting to harvest/refine/sell, which is why they import literally everything on IMF loan money and simultaneously invest jack into education and science outside a few high level military projects which gave them the nuclear bomb.

Here's another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.

David Vizard's books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing..

That's a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.

I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently..

sigh

the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.

Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than .. pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.

IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:

• "The Principles of Yacht Design", get the most-recent edition of it.
• ALL of Dave Gerr's books.
• Fossatti's Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
• probably Nigel Calder's books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
• Tom Cunliffe's books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs "good enough", & the implications of that, on the design
• a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
• "The Rigger's Apprentice", by Brion Toss
• "The Sailmaker's Apprentice" or something like that, can't remember, right now..
• the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
• look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
• Harry Riblett's book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil's problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
• Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren't touching any part of the code that you aren't working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can't find what it is that is skewing everything unless you're seeing the whole sheet's equations: it's the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )

Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing "wild geese".

For aircraft-design, I'd say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson's book, NOT Raymer's.

( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri's is on its 2nd edition, so I'm presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can't afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I'd got Gudmundsson's book, instead of Raymers, now )

You'll need Harry Riblett's book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.

You'll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn

( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold's birds. )

Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation .. become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.

Harry Riblett was using Eppler's simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you'd HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.

You NEED to understand both Bernoulli's principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.

There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics's complicated, & I'd recommend that.

It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one..

Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.

There is a video, which I now can't find, on changing Burt Rutan's Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.

That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you .. don't waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.

You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that's beginning to become significant in modern designs.

All the stuff I've realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I'll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection's required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.

Sorry I'm not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means..

but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more .. exploring-evolution's-potential.

Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you're really knowing-what-you're-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.

Don't expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.

It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc..

But I'd rather the world have other-people doing it, .. than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.

LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space..

Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.

If not, then just ignore this.

_ /\ _

in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC

going to disagree with most of your takes on the media/journos. that entire industry is mostly corrupt for the past 20 years because the barriers to entry are so high that you have to be part of the elite to become a journalist, hence why journalism has become increasingly irrelevant and seems completely out of touch to anyone who isn't part of the elite. Also i feel like a lot of your political claims are way over simplified and exaggerated, but there is some truth to what you are saying. I stopped reading most 'elite' publications because they really started showing their detachment from any greater reality around the late 2000s, and it got far worse in the mid 2010s.

I spent a decade studying/working/teaching philosophy, history, and political theory. Hardly anyone knows anything about these things... and often when you see them on media... the takes are horrible ignorant/bad/wrong and vastly oversimplified. So are the takes by most consumers of philosophy the podcasts/books/etc about them. And it's sad frustrating how people think they know everything there is to know about Plato's views because they listened to a 45m podcast about The Cave or read one of his books once. And the people who do know about these things? totally ignored both mainstream media and the social media types... but their insights when they are given the time/effort to shine is truly wonderful and insightful.

I also taught coursework in these areas... most of my students were not dumb or idiots... but only 5% actually gave a shit about learning. Most just wanted to be entertained or validated in their delusions and pre-existing beliefs about the world, and they got very frustrated when the course didn't do that for them. At least when I taught 15 years ago they were not prone to violence, threats, and intimidation, like they are now.

Now I work in tech...and it's astounding how horrible ignorant most technological 'smart' people are... and how much of their 'intelligence' is just... a quasi religious belief set. I think because tech is 'mysterious' to the general population the 'techies' now considered themselves the high priests of society... saw this going on 20 years ago and now we are reading the point where the corruption, idiocy, and delusions of grandeur have really started to show. I'm not a huge expert in most tech... but the amount of sheer ignorance perpetuated by overconfident idiots in the tech sector is just... mind blowing... and most 'techies' i know legit seem to feel an innate sense of superiority to non tech workers and if you challenge them they throw temper tantrums like children.