Ehhh, not really. Conservatives have an odd relationship to the space program.

They like the science things that give them flatscreen TVs, smartphones, and red dot sights on guns. They don’t like science things that tell them Noah’s flood never happened and global warming is real. The science they really, really like is the stuff they can use to beat other nations over the head and say America! Fuck Yeah!

NASA does something that clearly shows America! Fuck Yeah! to the whole world. They need to stamp out the parts of NASA that say inconvenient things about global warming, but you can get humans to the ISS and robots to Mars without any of that.

Ditching SpaceX contracts would leave the US without a manned space program. We’d have to go back to relying on Russia, and that’s not going to happen. SLS is an embarrassing budget buster. ULA is a joke. Bezos doesn’t have a rocket that can get people to the ISS (he might get around to it, someday). There’s a few up and comers out there in the rocket industry, but nobody is ready yet. Falcon 9 is it.

Elon knows he’s safe on this one.

Greetings, my sibling in apostasy!

Yeah, and it’s fascinating to me. I grew up in a high control Christian group (Jehovah’s Witnesses), and their narrative is that the first century Christians were completely united in belief and purpose, and that they are the direct inheritors of that. A more careful reading of the gospels will show there were stark differences in belief among those writers. A quote from Jesus shows up in one that doesn’t in the other because each writer was trying to advance a certain viewpoint that wasn’t universally shared by Christians at the time.

I find this way more interesting than one set of unified beliefs.

All good, it’s a pet peeve of mine. I’ve seen Ratheists try to say Nicea set biblical canon, and when I point out otherwise, they cite the WikiPedia article on Nicea at me. Which explicitly says the council did not set biblical canon. It’s not even like the atheist argument against Christianity hinges on when and where biblical canon was established; it’s fairly easy to make without it.

That’s not quite right. Council of Nicaea didn’t choose biblical canon. They chose the teachings of certain Christian sects over others, which later had an affect on canon.

Energy is becoming incredibly cheap

Not an excuse for wastefulness. The numbers here are so great that a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.

systems like this and the more famous one in Holland MI are generally run on waste heat

That’s fine if it’s available. It’s usually heavy industry that’s providing that. If you don’t have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.

It’s very weird to see so much resistance to this in an anti-car community, as if pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure doesn’t need snow removal too.

What of it? There’s perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths, too.

A Manhattan city block, on the short end of the rectangle, is 264 feet. A typical road lane is 12 ft across. Assume two road lanes and 4 inches of snow, getting 2100 cu ft of snow.

Using this snow weight calculator, fresh snow of that size will be 6,589.4 - 9,229.4 lbs. Let’s take the midpoint of 8100 lbs. That’s 3 million grams. And from here on, I can do the rest in metric.

Assuming it’s at 0C already, it takes 334 Joules to melt 1 gram of snow. It will take 1.2GJ to melt the amount above.

There are electric snowplows being tested in Norway with 1000 kwh battery packs. That’s 3.6 MJ. Quoting the article: "In light to moderate snowfall and temperatures as low as minus five degrees, the truck covered a total distance of 293 kilometers (km) at an average speed of 47 kilometers per hour (km/h). "

Yes, snow plows are more efficient. It’s not even close. You can chop off orders of magnitude and it’s still not even close.

I really, really need people in this thread to understand thermodynamics. Melting ice takes a fuckton of energy.

Maybe these can be useful to hybridize the system, where you plow normally and then melt the little remaining to avoid the use of salt. As a total replacement, no. That’s a laughably bad idea.

The power use is exactly the same. You are melting the same quantity of snow, but over a longer period of time.

In fact, it might be worse to pre-warm, because a lot of power will be wasted into the air.

It takes exactly the same amount of power. It’s just spread over a longer time period.

Assuming people are idiots has gotten me pretty far.

Who’s to say they do?

Yeah, it actually is more efficient to plow. It’s grossly inefficient to melt ice into water.

See this xckd what if: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYf9-xfm6t8

It starts by using a flamethrower (because the series is supposed to be about silly questions taken seriously), but it eventually converts everything in terms of joules. That can be easily converted into the necessary electrical output. Which is a lot of electrical output. Just a sick amount of energy.

Plowing is easily better. But yes, salt is an issue all its own.

It takes incredible amounts of energy to melt snow. Michigan gets most of its electricity from natural gas and still has significant coal fired plants.

This is the most inefficient way to remove snow. There are other options.

Every one of these only makes me say “wouldn’t it be great if we did everything with RPN”?

If we add a novelty bike lane, what’s next? Novelty unicycle lane? Novelty camel lane? There is no end to silly positions on things that nobody is asking for but I can pretend they do. You people need some common sense.

Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping’d clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?

I know you don’t, because people who do don’t make the claims you’re making.

No they fucking don’t, that’s not what routers do. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

And don’t fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.

Skype won’t be supporting anything at all very soon.

What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.

With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn’t work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:

• More expensive to operate
• Less reliable
• Slower
• A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)

This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.

Yes, it’s only tangentially related to static addresses, but it’s all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.

And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT

Your router has NAT. That’s the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.

. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .

Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.

. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .

But they do work better without NAT. That’s somewhat separate from static addresses.

My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn’t connect to him. He couldn’t connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It’s a real problem that’s only been “solved” because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.