ChickenLadyLovesLife

historical accuracy in movies

It would be nice to have this occasionally.

I just tell people what team I'm a fan of (Cleveland Browns) and they back away slowly with a look that combines horror and pity.

it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to

I got pushed out of the industry right before COVID hit, so I haven't ever dealt with AI. I'm a school bus driver now, which is infinitely more satisfying than programming since I get to drive a big Tonka truck around and gaslight children all day. The only downside is making 1/6 of what I used to make so this is not really a viable alternative for most people. At least I get subsidized health insurance.

There's a ton of new housing construction where I live (Philly suburbs) but it's almost entirely these $800K "town" houses (in the middle of a fucking field). One of the main companies building them is named "NV Homes". I wondered who the initials "NV" stood for until I got it: "Envy" homes. It's depressing to imagine people borrowing a fucking million dollars to buy a big cardboard box because they imagine other people will be jealous of them.

Your dad did the right thing. I got mine 95% done at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and arthritis basically everywhere, just for the honor of paying $100 a month to park it at a U-haul lot. I know how to weld and rivet now, just as useless as the bus.

Skoolies for me. A few years ago I bought a used school bus and started converting it into a motorhome. I made an account at the main forum (skoolie.net) because there were people there that actually knew useful stuff, primarily about metalworking (which I'd never done before) and the mechanical aspects of bus ownership (which I still don't know shit about).

Surprisingly (or maybe not) skooliers heavily tend towards being right-wing, trump-loving, gun-toting, immigrant-hating wankers. There are exceptions but they always end up being driven away. The thought of going to one of the annual skoolie gatherings is nightmare fuel for me.

OK, electric planes are fucked then. No wonder they're resorting to "$5 of electricity" clickbait bullshit.

Well, feel free to correct me on my math here, I'm no battery expert. Google says a 100 kWh battery typically weighs between 1000 and 1500 pounds. Since we'd need 6618 kWh for the hypothetical trip from Cleveland to NYC, that means we'd need 67 x 100 kWh batteries which would weigh between 67,000 and 100,000 pounds. Google also says the typical fuel load for a 737 is around 50,000 pounds, so the relative overage from batteries (since obviously you wouldn't need to carry any fuel) would be 17,000 to 50,000 pounds. This would roughly give you a passenger capacity range between 120 and nobody. Even worse if you consider the need to have some reserves of power for unexpected circumstances. There's also the problem mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the batteries don't become lighter as they're discharged, so your landing weight is the same as your takeoff weight.

So yeah, battery weight is the core problem. But if battery weight comes down by "just" 50% (and I have no idea if that's on the horizon or not) then electric aviation becomes quite viable.

My dad died last fall and when I called the funeral home to arrange for his body to be picked up, their answering service was fucking AI. However angry you think that might make you feel, it's worse than that.

I'm a retired programmer and I always regretted not getting into AI (like, developing it rather than making use of it) because I think I could have made significant contributions. Now I'm glad I never did because I'll never have to deal with the guilt of having made Terminator a reality.

I'll just have to deal with Terminator is all. :(

Microwave beams from satellites. What could go wrong?

Actually dragging (or wheeling in) a wire or having a wire car supplying the plane with electricity during takeoff would work too.

After doing more of the math, I realized that the energetic cost of takeoff is quite a small fraction of the overall cost. So the only real benefit of the catapult would be to reduce the size and weight of the propulsive machinery on the plane. So externally providing just the electricity wouldn't be much of a benefit.