2025: Let's try again

Compared to Zimbabwe? Are you sure? (Are you using the same X for Luxembourg than for ZImbabwe?)

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I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about still living in Luxembourg with the percentage of the median from Zimbabwe?

Or are we talking about which street would be nicer to sleep on, the streets in Luxembourg or the streets in Zimbabwe when you can’t afford rent?

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in November

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60% of the median salary is about 2100€/month in Luxembourg and 140€ in Zimbabwe. Are you claiming that living conditions in Luxembourg with 2100€/month are as bad as with 140€/month in Zimbabwe?

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60% is quite a high percentage.

I’m comparing what I would say is actually quite poor, like being on social welfare, unemployments benefit, which is probably going to be half that, or people with less than that.

I’m just saying that taking X% of the median isn’t going to scale well as you decrease X.

At some point you’re just going to be on the streets in both countries, you probably won’t be able to even sustain that income, in whatever form it’s arriving in, and then it only really matters what the weather is like, or how charitable people or the government services are.

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Yes, things become difficult to compare under a certain threshold. In Africa people would live in a slum, but in Western Europe, slums are almost nonexistent so people would sleep in the street.

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@Conrad_Melville mentioned antimatter a couple of days ago in an SF book related post and, as luck would have it, this came out the next day:

The possibility of the practical application of “antimatter catalysed nuclear pulse propulsion” within the coming decades! :saluting_face:

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Yeah I don’t think any part of that video even hints it bar the clickbait title. I believe toward the end he said centuries to millenia just to even produce enough antimatter.

That’s for the fully fledged antimatter engine. The “antimatter catalysed nuclear pulse propulsion” is the smaller and more feasable combination solution where we can use some micrograms of antimatter to help with the ignition of “normal matter” nuclear engines. (timestamps 15:40 till 18:10)

It’s not really a convincing argument when he says in our lifetime (well some of us).

I don’t know I get it, lots of things have been moving at faster than predicted pace, but he didn’t exactly say NASA or ESA or SpaceX have a grant or are putting money towards building it and hence that’s why it might be viable in the next X years.

It just seems like hype for a video sponsor and ad revenue more than a prediction.

But that’s just some modern day cynicism with some things on youtube from me :slight_smile:

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That’s why I said “coming decades”… who knows when exactly that will be and I cannot say “in my lifetime” either because I am middle aged and none of us has “a contract with God” as the local saying goes, to know exactly when their lifespan ends. :sweat_smile:

By they way, just out of curiosity, I just checked and the presenter of that video is actually 52 years old! I wouldn’t have guessed that he is more than a decade older than I am.

Clearly some research teams and labs are working on the issue, but it is rare for such cutting edge technology would ever get such “big funding” unless it was near a breakthrough to some tangible profit or practical application. Which is a conundrum… unless you get close to being practical, noone wants to risk serious time and money on your “high tech project”, but at the same time if noone risks the time and money, you can never get close to producing a practical product anyway. :thinking:

So, I agree with you scepticism, but I’d like to think that even the fact that there are people that are working on such cutting edge ideas is a very good/cool thing.

edit:
Though come to think of it, I just realised when that kind of idea will get some big money… when the military realises that this could mean faster, smaller and yet more explosive missiles… :roll_eyes:

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I mean yeah definitely. Even if they didn’t have space travel in mind and were researching to understand anti-hydrogen or something.

I suppose

is true, and more so for things with military applications.

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Yeah, I’ve watched that just a few hours earlier today :frowning:

See also … just two pages shown when I asked the all-knowing, all-seeing Trash Heap¹, “how much microplastics in an adult human body?”:


¹ No, not Marjory from Fraggle Rock (You do remember Fraggle Rock, do you?), but …

From List of Fraggle Rock characters - Wikipedia

In the German version of the serial, Marjory is given the moniker Allwissende Müllhalde (engl. all-knowing Trash Heap ). In the German-speaking world this is still used as a common synonym for search engines and other sources of information on the Internet, e.g. Google and Wikipedia.

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Things are not going well, in terms of polution of what we eat and drink… in one of my olive fields there is a water leak from the main drinking water supply. Predictably, the municipality did nothing (the damage exists since July) and a lot of water was wasted from the resulting fountain of the supposedly potable water. And I say “supposedly” because this is what that water did to my olive tree:

It turned it into a calcified modern art exhibition… :roll_eyes:
Half of it is under a coating of “salt/sediment” which flakes off if you chisel it.

I have been drinking bottled water for years because I was very suspicious of the local water supply and that confirms it… unfortunately we are caught between two bad choices, but I think I’ll take my chances with the microplastics from the bottled water. :confused:

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I started a while ago to reduce my exposure to microplastic but it’s often very difficult to buy food that’s not packaged into plastic, or to find clothes that consist of 100% natural fibers. And this is not going to improve.

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Microplastic, PFAS… it’s crazy that we’re smart enough to poison the whole globe, but not smart enough to not do it.

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It’s because the smart (and egoistic) people are in charge of big companies rather than the wise (and selfless).

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Can’t just blame the producers, the consumers buy all the stuff and the politicians make the rules.

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And (at least in some countries) people make the politicians.

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