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Comment Re:Little subreddit dictators (Score 1) 103

I called it out on another branch of this discussion but I'm talking about things like, someone posts a question that goes something like this:
"Am I The Asshole for declining a second date with the chick I met on Tinder after she told me she was trans?"

Topics like this are ban honeypots because even getting too close to a verboten position will get you banned by Reddit.

I have seen it. I have been threatened with a ban for expressing the opinion that 8 year old children shouldn't be given sex reassignment surgery.

Reddit is toxic.

LK

Comment Re:Reddit is cancer and a fucking blight on the we (Score 1) 103

Presumably the OP is referring to any number of subs related to women, women who want to date women, or other subreddits where that discussion is completely germane, and yet here you are banging on about beekeeping as though it's somehow relevant in the slightest.

Or general relationship subreddits.

Someone will ask "Am I transphobic for not going on a second date after this chick I met on Tinder told me she was trans?"

It'll be a ban honeypot.

LK

Comment Reddit is cancer and a fucking blight on the web (Score 2, Informative) 103

It's a stupid echo chamber full of stupid people who are chasing stupid agendas.

It's a place where they will permanently ban you for suggesting that there is any difference of any kind between XX CIS women and XY Trans women.

It's a place where you'll be mod bombed into oblivion for saying that you wouldn't want to date a current or former sex worker.

It's a place where honest discourse goes to die.

Seriously, fuck Reddit.

LK

Comment Re: Pricing tickets to heaven is indeed tricky (Score 1) 95

That's the thing about the eco wackos that really burns my ass.

Nuclear is the only viable option for cheap, clean power and they fight it tooth and nail. Solar and wind are great additions but nuclear would give us everything we need.

They don't want that. They're not pushing for thorium power, they're not pushing to update safety standards. They're fighting to shut it all down.

They're not concerned with saving the environment, they're neo-luddites.

Cheap, clean power would do more than anything else within our reach at the moment to improve the lives of everyone on this planet and they oppose it, have you ever wondered why?

LK

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Comment Re:In other news... (Score 0) 84

And, arguably, the current crisis at Tesla is because Musk is playing President rather than being "out on the factory floor".

The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.

No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

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