The Quixotic Ideas Thread
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@wharrgarbl said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
I'm very near the dividing line so I dunno who I should blame for things
whom
Yes, I know my who / whom crusade is Quixotic.
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@boomzilla :O 300 murders per year in one city? According to this wiki page we only get a third of that nationwide.
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“I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can’t hold our sock-hops.
We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”― P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This"
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
“I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can’t hold our sock-hops.
We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”― P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This"
Somebody appears to have been a wee bit traumatized by Canada pwning the USA and is overcompensating for it.
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@dreikin said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Somebody appears to have been a wee bit traumatized by Canada pwning the USA and is overcompensating for it.
He was probably just drunk or high.
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@dreikin said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Somebody appears to have been a wee bit traumatized by Canada pwning the USA and is overcompensating for it.
He was probably just drunk or high.
Or making it up after the fact.
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Baltimore had a brilliant idea to cut down on crime: Just ask everyone not to kill anybody for say, 72 hours.
See also the "Stupid ideas that have actually been done" thread.
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@dreikin said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@dreikin said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Somebody appears to have been a wee bit traumatized by Canada pwning the USA and is overcompensating for it.
He was probably just drunk or high.
Or making it up after the fact.
While drunk or high, yeah.
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@pleegwat said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@boomzilla :O 300 murders per year in one city? According to this wiki page we only get a third of that nationwide.
who is we ? do you live in the madagascar island?
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@wharrgarbl The Netherlands. Sorry.
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@pleegwat You're just very good at making it look like an accident
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@wharrgarbl They don't need murder in the Netherlands. They've got tulips.
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@boomzilla's lawn ornaments will no longer feel safe when this shows up:
(Instruction manual included)
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@jbert said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@boomzilla's lawn ornaments will no longer feel safe when this shows up:
I am reminded of this game (skip to, say, 1:24 if you're really impatient):
https://youtu.be/dXhiwWcbLaE?t=26
It was a lot of fun.
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The concept of fully autonomous robots fascinates me.
You could make a quadcopter with solar panels on top. Program it to fly away in a straight line, then with a camera and a bit of AI, find a safe place to land and recharge. If you could give it an internet connection, you could see how far it gets. Make competitions with your friends!
Even more interesting: a "parasitic" robot that attached to the underside of cars. With an extra wheel touching the ground it would get all the energy it could want (just hope it doesn't go through rough terrain). The cars would take it on long trips to other cities, and when the car was stopped at a parking lot or traffic light it could detach, quickly roll to another car, and reattach itself.
And of course, forest dwelling robots. So much energy lying around.
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@zecc said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
You could make a quadcopter with solar panels on top.
Drones with solar panels on top have already been done; for a while Google was planning on delivering Internet service through them, which was an interesting idea, but they abandoned that project this year.
They should have done it and called it "Skynet". No way that could have gone wrong.
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@r10pez10 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
I've made this mistake once when creating a phone simulator.
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@zecc said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
creating a phone simulator
Looks nothing like a phone.
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Quixotic idea of the day: rather than complicated taxes to slowly take everyone's money, the government should simply take all property every 50 years.
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@pjh
No ?
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That should be fun. They already have programs where the power company will remotely turn off people's air conditioning in order to keep up with power demand. How many new power stations are they planning to build, I wonder?
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@boomzilla why here, not in the good ideas thread?
Despite the way it described in the ungrammatical poison-pen article you cite, this is a good and timely idea.
There will be a problematic need for more power plants - but that's going to happen anyway (by many accounts the North American electricity infrastructure is pretty crap and long-overdue for an overhaul). Increased electric car usage will mean a vast number of large batteries connected to the grid - which can balance out peaks in demand and create a grid that can far more efficiently exploit the erratic power provided from renewable sources.
The article crassly emphasises that that electric cars are expensive. Well duh, so were combustion engine cars when they were just the playthings of the rich. It might take an initial legislative push to create demand and generate the economies of scale that will bring the price down, but that can and will happen and when it does it's better to be leading the pack.
I don't get why this type of environmental measure isn't welcomed by business - it's a vast new opportunity entailing huge and lucrative infrastructure investment and new consumer spending. Capitalists ought to be champing at the bit to get in on the action, but perhaps the 'free-market' establishment is too dominated by buggy-whip manufactures who fear any sort of disruption?
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@japonicus said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Despite the way it described in the ungrammatical poison-pen article you cite, this is a good and timely idea.
Research where our electricity comes from, then try calling this an "environmental measure" again with a straight face. In the United States, electric cars are worse for the environment than gas-powered cars.
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@heterodox at least in summer California isn't doing badly. It seems reasonable to assume that, overall, renewables will continue to increase, despite Trump's best efforts.
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@japonicus said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@heterodox at least in summer California isn't doing badly. It seems reasonable to assume that, overall, renewables will continue to increase, despite Trump's best efforts.
It's possible, I do see that solar records are being broken, but the problem is we have nowhere to store it at the moment and the greatest power demands are at night when the sun isn't shining. The problem of storing energy is a huge one, especially when our highest efficiency batteries require rare earth metals. The mining of those metals has some rather horrific environmental and human impacts, when you look into it.
If you look at the past predictions of the future (flying cars, etc.), it becomes apparent that we thought by now we'd be in an age of effectively unlimited energy. Instead we're in an age of effectively unlimited information, like our Civilization player simply picked a different tech tree.
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@heterodox said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
like our Civilization player simply picked a different tech tree.
Yeah! Screw our Civ player overmaster!
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@heterodox said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
It's possible, I do see that solar records are being broken, but the problem is we have nowhere to store it at the moment and the greatest power demands are at night when the sun isn't shining. The problem of storing energy is a huge one, especially when our highest efficiency batteries require rare earth metals.
Increased use of electric cars can actually help there, because most of those cars will be plugged in most of the time and their batteries can potentially feed back into the grid to buffer generation and demand.
The mining of those metals has some rather horrific environmental and human impacts, when you look into it.
Yes, the current dependency on grotty mining processes and exotic materials (for both solar panels and wind turbines) is a problem. I doubt that it's insurmountable - and increased demand will focus research and finance toward finding better options. (e.g. I hope there's some mileage in sodium batteries)
If you look at the past predictions of the future (flying cars, etc.), it becomes apparent that we thought by now we'd be in an age of effectively unlimited energy.
Yes, any prediction that looks far ahead is almost bound to be embarrassingly wrong, but electric cars and renewable energy are not pie-in-the-sky - much of the basic tech is proven and just needs some refinement.
The energy problem is harder to crack than it seemed for people from the 1950's atomic free-energy fantasy, but regardless of views on the urgency of climate change, fossils fuels are still a bad option that will run out (and will become very expensive long before they're fully exhausted). We have to go down the renewables route some time - better sooner than later, while we can still afford to solve the problem.
Instead we're in an age of effectively unlimited information, like our Civilization player simply picked a different tech tree.
But continuing that analogy (one that I quite like :) ) in Civ you often end up maxed-out on all the tech trees by the end of the game - things stay balanced.
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@tsaukpaetra said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@heterodox said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
like our Civilization player simply picked a different tech tree.
Yeah! Screw our Civ player overmaster!
It's not his fault. Whoever designed the universe didn't balance the difficulties right.
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@japonicus said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
why here, not in the good ideas thread?
Because it's not a good idea.
@japonicus said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
I don't get why this type of environmental measure isn't welcomed by business - it's a vast new opportunity entailing huge and lucrative infrastructure investment and new consumer spending. Capitalists ought to be champing at the bit to get in on the action, but perhaps the 'free-market' establishment is too dominated by buggy-whip manufactures who fear any sort of disruption?
Plenty of cronies already are. Also look at the rush to cash in that brought us such success stories as Solyndra. The answer is that most of the technology isn't quite ready for all that. Gasoline is just too superior a fuel.
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@japonicus said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
The energy problem is harder to crack than it seemed for people from the 1950's atomic free-energy fantasy, but regardless of views on the urgency of climate change, fossils fuels are still a bad option that will run out (and will become very expensive long before they're fully exhausted). We have to go down the renewables route some time - better sooner than later, while we can still afford to solve the problem.
I've said it many times: We're not in any danger of running out in the near future. That's a good thing, because the renewables technology just isn't ready to replace fossil fuels yet.
Also, I suspect that gasoline won't actually go away, but we'll manufacture it from algae or something instead of refining it from petroleum.
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
That's a good thing, because the renewables technology just isn't ready to replace fossil fuels yet.
Maybe not "replace" since we can't store enough energy yet, but it's definitely close to "replace during the day".
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Maybe not "replace" since we can't store enough energy yet, but it's definitely close to "replace during the day".
Which shortfall is pretty significant, since you're basically talking about doubling infrastructure. I'd rather let some others pioneer this stuff on relatively small scales and let them be stuck with the energy equivalent of, say, the US phone system.
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Tilting at wind:
...and presumably wanting to make gigantic windmills or something. Who knows?
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
How many new power stations are they planning to build, I wonder?
What, you're serious?
My first thought when I heard that on the radio was "well, the trucking companies are screwed". FEDEX: We'll get it there eventually. etc.
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Please enter 4 digits of a credit card number.
We're not picky about which 4 digits.
Or which credit card.
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@ben_lubar said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Please enter 4 digits of a credit card number.
We're not picky about which 4 digits.
Or which credit card.٣ VI 0xA 四
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@pjh I see your credit cards use the "Linux file name" standard of allowed characters.
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@pjh I see your credit cards use the "Linux file name" standard of allowed characters.
The spaces? I put them in to make it more readable...