i would just explain it as "straight lines in space that transport information. so you know what's happening in another location as long as there's a straight empty line between you".
yeah marketing meetings are especially bad. my take is that the inherent dishonesty in marketing should make any honest sane person revolt against it. you're stuck in a hard place because you have to play the game of "lying to the customer" along with them.
lol your brain is on a rollercoaster and doesn't know where up and down is in that moment. so you confuse the light with darkness and want to drown yourself into it.
ah interesting. on a rather unrelated side note, i've been thinking about how to source food on mars. i came up with this idea to use spirulina algae as they are calorie-rich.
they could be grown in a plastic bag outdoors something like this, not requiring big bulky greenhouses:
anyways they have low fat content. so how to source fat? i'm still looking for a good option. it's interesting to see that apparently, already back in roman times, a source of fat was considered highly valuable. maybe because it's always more difficult to source fat than carbohydrates and proteins?
also as a piece of advice, i would avoid laying in the bare sun on the beach like this. sure, there's suncream to make it less painful but i still think that it's better to be under the shade of a tree or sth.
i have a damn good reason but i'm not gonna tell people because my whole life i've faced rejection for who i really am because other people are superficial assholes who fail to comprehend something meaningful when they see it.
true, but i would still say that living with friends is better than living with parents, for mental health. at least if your parents are as shitty as my mother was.
there's no shame in living with friends. in fact i think that we'd all be better off if we lived in 10+ people houses/apartments with people that we actually like.
Then there’s the Final Mile problem - how would people get around once they got somewhere?
yeah that's a real issue. you need public transport within a city before you can meaningfully build inter-city rail. because otherwise, you arrive in another city, and now what? you call a taxi? at that point you might just want your own car.
what you're not appreciating here is how extremely dynamic the situation in the US is. in china, you have cities which have existed for 2000 years with rather stable population, so you can map out a city and know where the streets are, and build public transport there. in the US, cities can rise and fall within 20 years (check out the rust belt cities). so it doesn't make sense to build infrastructure "for the ages", because you can't plan ahead that far. so we end up with short-term planning, which is why the housing is cardboard and the mode of transport is cars.
for one, china has bullet trains but whether they're economical is a whole other question. china often does things just to provide jobs to people, so it doesn't have to pay off. i'm not sure whether it actually does pay off economically but in the US these things are probably looked at more profit-oriented.
in the US you have a very strong car lobby which in turn is backed by fossil fuel lobby. why do you have such a strong fossil fuel lobby? because historically, it was the only significant source of power (apart nuclear which was shunned for other reasons) so obviously they're a natural monopoly. this is changing today but only slowly.
cars provide individualism and more "GDP per person". why? because it is more expensive to make 1 car for everyone than to make enough trains for the whole area. because if more people own private stuff, obviously they pay car companies more, which make car company shares go up more and also pays wages to the car factory workers. this is politically more popular than go for the less-expensive public-transport in cities+suburb option.
also "individual freedom" (rugged individualism) is a american core value due to the political ideology that was brought over from the english people back in 1618 ("nobody should be able to tell you what to do, and you don't have to adhere to state-wide policies"). the consequence is, instead of everyone using 1 subway system, everyone "chooses" to own their own car.
