• 0 Posts
  • 295 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•An Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at the supreme leaderEnglish
    862·
    2 days ago

    I got an answer from the article. Essentially this guy was a known critic of the government already having spent time in prison for very direct criticisms. So he posted a dot. A completely benign post and then the following occurred:

    “[he] posted a single dot in reply to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s tweet, and that comment was liked far more than Khamenei’s original tweet”

    …and…

    “Iran watchers say the leadership has felt insecure about the high level of dissent in the country for a while”

    So a known critic did the thing you do to your old sibling where you put your finger an inch away from them and say “What? I’m not touching you. I’m not touching you!” and then your sibling is tired of your shit and smacks you very hard.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Ukraine used F-16s to repel Russia's mass missile attack, Zelensky confirmsEnglish
    3·
    8 days ago

    I think anything short of a ballistic missile against a “near peer” IS outdated tech at this point,

    I don’t think that would be an opinion shared by many. Short range ballistic missiles are exactly that. Short range aka “tactical”. One example of an operational US tactical ballistic missiles are ATACMS. These have a maximum range of about 300km. To get anything longer range that is a ballistic missile you go into “strategic” ballistic missiles. The problem with these is we use these for nuclear strikes. If you launch one of these, every country around the world will assume its nuclear armed and could respond in kind. There is no geopolitical concept of “Trust me bro, its just a conventional warhead”.

    The US loves its cruise missiles. Think about how extensively the Tomahawk cruise missile has been used over the last 2 decades.

    but doing rough napkin math gives about an hour from launch to impact. I still suspect the f-16s were more about anti-drone operations but, reasonable.

    Here’s the results of the latest missile attack on Ukraine from a couple of days ago:

    • 3 Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” aeroballistic missiles from the airspace of the Ryazan and Lipetsk regions - Russian Federation;
    • 6 ballistic missiles “Iskander-M” /KN -23 from the Kursk, Voronezh regions - Russian Federation. and from Crimea;
    • 77 Kh-101 cruise missiles from Tu-95MS aircraft from the airspace of the Volgograd region and the Caspian Sea region;
    • 28 Kalibr cruise missiles from surface/underwater carriers in the eastern part of the Black Sea;
    • 3 Kh-22 cruise missiles from the airspace of the Voronezh region. - Russian Federation;
    • 10 Kh-59/Kh-69 guided air missiles from Su-57, Su-34 aircraft from the airspace of the Belgorod region. and from the Mariupol district;
    • 109 strike UAVs “Shahed-131/136” - launch areas of Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Kursk, Yeisk - Russian Federation, Chauda - Crimea.

    Of those 236 weapons launched by russia, only 6 were ballistic missiles). 109 were prop driven UAV (drone). That leaves a whole bunch of cruise missiles and 3 hypersonic missiles.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Ukraine used F-16s to repel Russia's mass missile attack, Zelensky confirmsEnglish
    28·
    8 days ago

    My understanding is that anything newer than a V2 rocket is just too fast for a jet pilot to actively engage.

    Not quite. The part you’re referring to with V2 is ballistic missiles, specifically in their terminal (falling on target) stage. It is very hard and expensive, but not impossible, to counter these. However, only a fraction of what russia is shooting at Ukraine is ballistic missiles. Most are cruise missiles (think mini jet airplanes with wings and jet engines that fly at jet airplane speeds). These can be shot down by other jets or land based missiles pretty easily if there are defenses in place. Lastly is the Shehed drones (think mini civilian propeller plane). These are very slow flying and be shot down by land based guns, other propeller planes with guns, or even helicopters with guns. Russia is also shooting a small handful of hypersonic missiles. These are crazy fast flying from beginning to end of their flight. They’re really expensive and russia doesn’t have many of these.

    That is why the “meta” is countermeasures and computerized systems (e.g. patriot missiles) where the human involvement is to approve launch for liability/Geneva Convention purposes.

    I think human operators are more to prevent shooting down non-combatant aircraft like commercial airline and civilian planes neither of which are broadcasting Friend or Foe signals to air defense operators.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoUplifting News@lemmy.world•6,000 sheep will soon be grazing on 10,000 acres of Texas solar fieldsEnglish
    21·
    16 days ago

    Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?

    You’re correct that they take in the same number of carbon atoms as they eventually exhale/excrete/etc… So, in that sense, they are carbon-neutral.

    But that doesn’t mean they’re climate-neutral, because when you combine carbon atoms with 4x hydrogen, you get methane, which for physical reasons has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. And ruminants (like sheep and cows) belch out lots of methane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant#Ruminants_and_climate_change

    I wondered if you were going to go the methane angle. Like most of the points here, you’re not wrong, but focusing on it negates the overall good.

    That’s why even people who would immediately choke to death, if they ate a vegetable, could still help out on the climate front, if they switched from beef (and mutton) to poultry and pork. See this graph, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints

    But every conversation has to be injected with this message?

    And yeah, reading through the article, I’m happy that it’s being used for solar, I’m happy that if we’re already raising sheep, they’re at least being used relatively efficiently, I’m even happy that the sheep are living a relatively happy life.

    What I’m less happy about, is that OP vegan was pretty spot on. They’re raising additional sheep for this endeavour. And no one had the expert knowledge to ask, if the belching sheep maybe somewhat undermine the climate advantages of solar.

    Because that wasn’t the choices. It was mow with fossil fuels or mow with sheep. This is what becomes so tiresome about the vegan injection. Yes things can be better. Yes this isn’t perfect. No, veganism isn’t the only way to achieve improved results.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoUplifting News@lemmy.world•6,000 sheep will soon be grazing on 10,000 acres of Texas solar fieldsEnglish
    41·
    16 days ago

    Different vegan here. I’ll be blunt about it: There’s facts about animal agriculture, which are uncomfortable, if you’re not vegan.

    Thats just it. This isn’t an article about animal agriculture. Its an article about solar power first, and reduction of carbon from mowing second. Both of these are good things! What the OP vegan did was look past all of that positive to try an extra a negative from it.

    Actually being ignorant about them rarely happens as a conscious decision,

    Strange phrasing, but I believe you’re describing “willful ignorance”.

    it’s more a matter of it just not making for a great smalltalk topic when you’re not vegan.

    That can be true of lots of distasteful, but necessary topics necessary for life. I don’t usually engage in small talk about mortuary science, sewage treatment, or surgical removal of tumors, but all of those are certainly incredibly important to life as we are biological animals ourselves.

    Animal agriculture organizations will also gladly add to the confusion, by talking only about CO2 emissions, when they should be talking about CO2-equivalents. This post has too little info to really know what’s going on, but it happens that people think grazing animals are 100% climate-neutral, so it mentioning lots of grazing animals and a reduction in emissions also had me wondering, if that is actually true.

    Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?

    This sounds like a “perfect is the enemy of good” situation. Saying using sheep used here to eat the grass around solar panels is not good enough encourages abandoning the idea and going back to fossil fuel based mowing. Or worse, that this is a “problem with solar” and “solar should be abandoned”.

    If you google the title you find this article which is the one I assume OP used.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldtoUplifting News@lemmy.world•6,000 sheep will soon be grazing on 10,000 acres of Texas solar fieldsEnglish
    198·
    17 days ago

    When I saw your post, I initially dismissed it entirely and thinking how embarrassing it was for you to take a story that does produce a positive net benefit for climate and try to turn it negative from a completely unrelated view. Obviously I assumed from your statements that your opposition was due to you being vegan. A 5 second view of your post history confirms this. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and understand where you’re coming from and what you want to accomplish. It got me thinking about what your thought process was when you posted here on this story. I have some questions about your motives and methods I wouldn’t normally ask, but you’re putting yourself in the spotlight for your cause so you might be open to a discussion. If so my questions are:

    • You clearly support veganism, and I assume you would want others to adopt it too. Did you think your delivery here here would make omnivores suddenly abandon their diets and adopt yours? Did you consider that your message (while containing some accuracy) would actually turn people off from veganism because they didn’t want to be associated with people that do what you did here and crap all over otherwise good news?

    • How did you decide to just inject your veganism into this story? What criteria did this one meet that you thought “this one, this one needs to have passive aggressive veganism representation”? Was it just random that you saw this one and weighed in with veganism or do you spend lots of time scouring for all stories that don’t have an unrelated vegan view and then you inject one? It makes me wonder how effective that is for your movement. Or is this more of a act of martyrdom? Are you “fighting the good fight” whenever and where ever it can be?

    If your overall goal is reducing livestock agriculture have you considered your highly negative approach actually working against your goal? Alternatively, are you intentionally cultivating the negative stereotype against vegans for some reason I don’t understand? If so, can you explain so I can gain understanding?