“Magic system” is a bit of an oxymoron imo. The problem with having hard rules for magic is that that’s not magic, that’s science. You just end up with a world with slightly different physical laws.

Technology can be interesting on its own but a deep understanding of the underlying mechanics kills the magic. A rock that lets you talk with someone over great distance is magic but if you explain it as manipulating imperceptible vibrations in the air you just have a radio.

I only skimmed this article but seems to suggest that’s not a major concern with their treatment.

Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD±precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.

I think Santa might have overreacted, they just wanted to be able to insure their heath!

This is getting well outside my area but my understanding is that if you were approaching the center of the earth gravity would gradually decrease until you have effectively no net pull at the core. This is because the mass above you is still attracting you too so at the core you’re pulled equally in all directions. Using the same principle you’d essentially be free-floating if you found yourself in a hollow “shell” planet, presumably because the pull from whichever area of the shell is close to you is offset by there being more shell pulling you away.

When I was learning to drive I’d have to go through 2-3 roundabouts just to get out of the residential area I was in so it was hammered in pretty early to always use signals, but there was one roundabout that was always a pain to navigate. Two-lane roundabout, those can always be a pain to navigate but lane markings were good so if you entered the roundabout in the correct lane you’d be naturally guided to your exit.

The problem was that coming in from the nearby motorway you’d have the innermost lane signposted as the 4th exit, practically a U-turn, and the outer lane was “all other traffic”. Even better, that signage was only painted on the road itself so if there was a queue or just a car too close in front of you you’d easily miss it. Inevitably anyone taking a right turn (3rd exit, think left turn in most other places) would only realise at the last second they were being guided to the wrong exit and they’d swerve in front of you, if you were lucky they might signal for half a second first. I commuted to work by car at the time and dreaded that roundabout every trip.

The best part is if you took the next exit which you were being guided to, it led straight into another roundabout so you could make a U-turn with absolutely no risk. If you were in the wrong lane you probably weren’t familiar with the area so you wouldn’t know that was there… But then after that was a retail park so you could clearly see all the parking space and know you could turn around there anyway! Some people would rather crash than take a minute or two to turn safely.

According to this article freefall speed is anywhere from 120mph to 200mph for a human depending on position, that’s roughly 190-320km/h. The radius of Earth is 6,371 km so you’d be traveling one Earth every 40-60 hours. In 80 years you’d cover between 133 and 224 million kilometers (82-139 million miles), traveling an entire Earth 28 to 47 million times. Interestingly this is still only roughly 10% the radius of the solar system, but it would get you to the moon and back 173 - 291 times. Space is big.

With the parachute open obviously you’re a little slower, this article says 16-32 km/h. That’s close enough we can just divide the other estimates by 10, so you’d travel about 13-22 million km (8-14 million miles) or 1% the radius of the solar system.

There’s a very good chance these numbers are a bit off, rough calculations that I didn’t bother to double-check.

Do you really want me to go point by point? Fine.

Let’s break this down. So many unverified, regurgitated strawman arguments.

You literally spent the rest of your comment claiming I said things I very obviously did not.

The arguments work so well because it will take me 20 times as long to respond to your gish gallop.

I made four claims, total:

• Electric cars are heavy and this causes road wear. You made a more specific claim that EVs are 20% heavier than comparable fossil fuel vehicles.
• Car tyres shed microplastics. You literally said the exact same thing in your “rebuttal”.
• It’s not green if your electricity source isn’t green. This shouldn’t be controversial, we’ll cover your attempt at a rebuttal later.
• From a “helping the environment” perspective, non-car transport and infrastructure is superior to electric cars. You ignored this point.

It’s not about “loving cars” when clearly, we’re talking about making a personal choice to do what one can.

An actually reasonable point among the bullshit. You obviously can’t access alternatives that don’t exist.

“EVs are naturally heavy”. Modern cars are “naturally” heavy with safety devices, stronger crash structures, and more luxury devices. EVs are only about 20% heavier when you compare them to something within their actual class. This means not ignoring the Nissan Leaf as an EV. This means comparing a Model S to a Mercedes E450 as a quiet, feature-rich luxury car at a high price point. This means comparing the Hummer to a Ford F-450 as both are hulking slabs that have no reason to be daily driven. While we’re here, may as well dip into the part where EVs are “expensive”. Again, compare them to the proper class competitors and stop pretending the used car market doesn’t exist and doesn’t have EVs for cheaper already.

[Scored out everything irrelevant because, as you said, “regurgitated strawman arguments” and “gish gallop”]

You agree with my claim.

“cause significant road wear”. They don’t. They’re not special. The additional roadwear is not significant because none of these cars, EV or not, are doing anywhere near the damage caused by commercial trucks. I bet your residential roads don’t have rutting unless they haven’t been repaved in 40 years. Rain/snow/UV degrades non-commercial roads faster than any normal personal traffic can.

Partially true. Commercial trucks are heavier than EVs and cause more wear and “intense” freezing cycles can reduce road lifespan by up to 20%, but residential roads are repaved “every 15 to 30 years” (potentially unreliable source, they sell concrete) but cycle/footpaths need repaved so infrequently it’s difficult to find anything more specific than “as needed”/“when damaged” in a 5 minute search.

“shed microplastics” not significantly more than any other car, especially since most EVs come with hard eco tires that last longer. All tires shed microplastics.

This is you agreeing with what I said.

" are only clean if their electricity source is clean". Not only is this false from a “only research as far as I can touch”, […]

No, this is true from a “I have more than one braincell” perspective. Non-clean energy source = non-clean energy use.

[…] this entirely ignores the energy used and pollution created for gasoline production and distribution. 10 years ago, in the US, a Model S charged by the dirtiest coal factory was responsible for emissions per mile comparable to a car that got about 35mpg. That was better than typical highway efficiency. That is still better than current city driving efficiency. Wanna guess what the comparable emissions ate was for if it was charged in the purely hydropower Niagara region? 260mpg equivalent. Grid power generators are far, far more efficient than a gas car. The power company doesn’t enjoy wasting money, so they’re tuned to run at specific generation levels as efficiently as possible for money’s sake. It doesn’t just apply to the grid, either. A personal generator, again, tuned to run a specific output, exceeds the efficiency of a gas engine revving all over the place to shift gears and move the car it’s attached to. That disingenuous meme picture of the ev charging by diesel generator in the Australian outback was completely false in every aspect (wattage, fuel consumption, and obviously resultant mpg). How do we know? Because it was taken by a bunch of EV nerds that were specifically testing it. They netted about 50mpg on diesel with a personal generator. Again, economy of scale will outperform that further.

[Scored out everything irrelevant because, as you said, “regurgitated strawman arguments” and “gish gallop”]

This is absolute nonsense. Saying that non-green energy sources make your end product non-green is the exact opposite of ignoring fossil fuels, fossil fuels are a non-green energy source. If you’re burning fossil fuels you are by definition not using clean energy.

“only clean if … infrastructure is clean”. You’re implying the current petroleum infrastructure is clean.

Here you just outright lied.

Your implying oil wells don’t leak and spill, they they don’t burn off waste products, that the product is shipped without use of energy and fuel for pumps and trucks, that it’s distributed from the pump without energy, and that gas stations are naturally-occurring geological formations. I specifically ignored this part in the prior section because, through and through, with a hands-on-only investigation, EVs were still more efficient on a per-mile basis than a gas car. They only get better when you’d actor in all the expenditure of fuel for petroleum distribution. For another tangent, this applies to the claims about how dirty lithium mines are. That only makes sense if you pretend we don’t have continuous petroleum disasters and “acceptable levels” of spills and runoff.

And now you’re building a narrative around your lie, nice one.

“electric cars are to save car companies”. Great, that’s capitalism. EVs only “save” car companies if people buy them. People are. Any vehicle they make is to “save” the company because if they don’t sell, they don’t profit, they don’t survive. That argument makes no sense. They’re not donating the majority of their gas cars.

I have no idea what point you’re trying to make here but it seems like you’re agreeing with me? Electric cars are to save car companies because their greenwashing gets them sales. People moving away from fossil fuels would use public transport or alternative infrastructure, putting pressure on local governing bodies to improve that infrastructure, making cars less appealing, leading to a death spiral. EVs let the car companies claim to be green so people keep buying their cars. That is, indeed, capitalism.

Your comment is “controversial” because you made baseless claims.

You did not provide a single source and everyone can see just by reading one post up that you’re making shit up.

You pushed the propaganda of conservative groups,

Please point me to any conservative group which promotes public transport and proper pedestrian or cycling infrastructure. I can see “EVs are greenwashing” being an oil lobby talking point but they’d push in the opposite direction. I’m not in the US so the only prominent US-based pro-EV activist I know is Musk, correct me if I’m wrong but I’m fairly certain they’re very right-wing.

notorious for making arguments that affirm feelings, without asking for facts, based on what their group can experience directly. You’re attacking individuals who do not have the power to suddenly rebuild a town into a pedestrian dream. You’re making it a class war between car drivers satisfied with the status quo and car drivers who support change when they’re both the same class. You’re making the argument that since a little change only helps a little, no one should do anything at all. That attitude keeps us in the same place. Forever.

Again, that only happened in your head. My claim, which I for some reason have to have to restate once again, was that public transport and walking/cycling are far better than EVs from an environmental perspective. I did not attack anyone, I did not call anyone out (except people claiming that EVs are helping the environment), I didn’t even say you should never use an EV if your only choice is to use a car. I simply stated the fact that alternative modes of transport are better.

I also believe you’re wrong when you say individuals don’t have the power to pedestrianise a town, though that does seem to be an honest mistake rather than the bullshit you’re spewing in the rest of your comment. A small number of activists is more than enough to push for pedestrianisation, and while it might not be instant (neither was ripping all that infrastructure out, which I believe happened in the US around the 1960s?) it can be done relatively quickly. Paris is the most recent posterchild for this transformation, I think, they’ve been phasing out cars for about a decade and recently voted to pedestrianise 500 streets with a timescale of 3-4 years. Pretty fast for a change in infrastrcture imo, and definitely shorter than EVs have been trying to get a foothold.

Edit: For completeness, here’s a definition for Gish Gallop, everyone can judge for themselves whether that applies more to my single paragraph or your novel you demanded I respond to point-by-point. I literally had to cut out your final paragraph because I hit comment size limits.

Okay, that’s a lot of words but the entire premise of your “argument” is clearly wrong. Where did I say “compared to fossil fuel cars”? Why not at least compare to one of the alternatives I specifically called out? Is it because you’d look stupid claiming cycling pollutes more than electric cars?

It was very clear I was suggesting swapping away from car infrastructure altogether, not staying on fossil fuel powered cars. The only way I’d see any confusion whatsoever on that point is if you’ve only ever experienced very heavily car-centric infrastructure.

How can your reading comprehension be so bad that you think I suggested burning fossil fuels is clean? Jesus fucking christ.

I didn’t object to the concept of electric cars. I objected to claiming it’s “to help the environment”. Stabbing one person is less bad than stabbing two but if you’re going around stabbing people you’re not reducing knife crime.

I have no objections to reserving charging spaces for cars that need charged, but I definitely disagree with framing electric cars as for the environment. They’re naturally heavy vehicles which causes significant road wear, sheds microplastics via tyre wear, and only uses clean fuel if your electricity source + infrastructure is also clean. Electric cars are to save car companies, public transport and walking/cycle infrastructure is to save the environment.

Edit: No idea why this would be controversial, you guys must love your cars. Even if you’re driving having proper non-car infrastructure still helps you out too. If people don’t need to use their cars they won’t, if other people aren’t driving you’re not stuck in traffic.

I had to contact Spotify support recently because they pushed an update which broke their Linux client, had to go through a “live chat” with a useless bot before being put through to a human. That human dumped the error and explanation I gave them into an LLM and just pasted that output to pretend they knew what was happening, then spent an hour ignoring that entirely and asking nonesense questions supposedly to identify the issue which was already clearly identified. Their only recommendation was to post on the community forums (wtf?), unsurprisingly nearly a week later it’s still broken. Last time I had to post on the community forums was two years ago for a regression bug raised two years before then, no attempt has been made to fix that one either but at least that doesn’t literally prevent you from using the service.

Not quite as bad as when I spent months calling my energy company because they tried to fraudulently charge over £2,000 (I forget the exact numbers) to my account after I called about a nonsense bill (turns out they were trying to get me to pay my neighbor’s bill?). They made absolutely no attempt to fix that. Unsurprisingly everything was fixed instantly when they took long enough that I could escalate to a legal issue. They didn’t get fined nearly enough for that one, they’re definitely stealing from other people in the same way.

Before that it was Microsoft, there was some issue with my Windows installation and their solution was to wipe my entire drive including all my data.

In my experience customer service lines aren’t there to help you, they’re there to piss you off as much as possible so you stop using their product or service. I have honestly no idea why companies choose to pay for that but it does explain why they’re happy to use LLMs; they could not care less about actually helping customers.

I suppose I should bring up some positive stories about customer service lines but there really isn’t that many. When I was young Steam support once helped me regain access to an account I’d locked myself out of, that was nice. From what I’ve heard Steam support isn’t great any more either though.

Dawn

For me it’s the scale and perspective that stood out first. Both people are the same size on-screen but the one on the right is also supposed to be closer so they’re actually huge, but they also have a tiny chair. Both chairs are also pointed away from the TV which is as big as a person, but they’re also somehow not facing each other so the closer person still has to turn around. The seat on the left would have to be pushed right up against the wall but they somehow managed to fit a lamp behind it too.

It just feels very strange as someone with first-hand experience of 3d space.

It’s a 1st level spell so you can get it through a feat or by multiclassing into cleric for one level.

Most people think they’re middle class and it’s easy to punch down, that’s really all there is to it.

When I was young I remember asking my parents “are we rich or poor?” and I was told we were middle class, it stands out because at the time I didn’t know what that meant. Looking back we were absolutely working class. We were in one of the worst parts of the city and literally just the corner was a street well known for gang violence and crime. The one time I called the cops after being attacked there when they arrived they made sure they were parked in view of security cameras and even called to have sure the cameras were on then and working. Also the only “help” they have was telling me to do it because it wasn’t worth the effort.
We were only slightly better off than everyone else living there, we actually owned our home when many of them were in council housing.

With Xanathar’s downtime rules you can make one cantrip/1st level scroll per day, double that if you’re a 10th level scribe wizard, so in three days you can make up to six Cure Wounds scrolls. Only 12.5g each for a scribe wizard too.

Fly’s graveyard?

Unlikely, there’s much less money in bikes than in cars and fuel so not as much to bribe with. Even contractors building the infrastructure get more constantly repairing roads with heavy vehicles than a one-time bike lane install.

Brown nosing only gets you so far, the only way to get anything done under a corrupt government is to enrich those in charge.

You have to pay for health insurance? When I heard US residents had to get insurance through their work I assumed employers would actually provide the insurance, not just give you the chance to pay for it yourself… We have free healthcare here and my employer still for some reason provides us with free health and dental insurance.

You guys need a revolution. You’re getting charged more because that’s what you as a country allow them to do.

“Jaywalking” is mostly a US thing made up by car companies to victim-blame pedestrians when they were killed by cars so they could avoid regulation themselves. Where I am we were taught very early in school how to safely cross a road safely, and pedestrians waiting to cross or already crossing a road generally have right of way even when no signals exist. It’s only an issue in backwards countries where cars have more rights than people and cities are designed for them instead.

I cross without a signal daily because otherwise I’d have to walk all the way around the block to get to a crossing going the opposite direction from where I’d want to go then find a way to circle all the way back at other crossings. That would make leaving the house more than a little inconvenient, especially since everything I’d need is in walking distance so I rarely drive. To my knowledge I have not been killed by a car a single time.

Edit: Thanks for the downvote, doesn’t change the facts.

The very word jaywalk is an interesting—and not historically neutral—one. Originally an insult against bumptious “jays” from the country who ineptly gamboled on city sidewalks, it was taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, notes historian Peter D. Norton in his book Fighting Traffic. “Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong,” he writes. “Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces, where practices that endangered or obstructed others (including pedestrians) were disreputable. Motorists’ claim to street space was therefore fragile, subject to restrictions that threatened to negate the advantages of car ownership.” And so, where newspapers like the New York Times once condemned the “slaughter of pedestrians” by cars and defended the right to midblock crossings—and where cities like Cincinnati weighed imposing speed “governors” for cars—after a few decades, the focus of attention had shifted from marauding motorists onto the reckless “jaywalker.”

Tom Vanderbilt, Slate.com

Brine pools, it’s much saltier water which doesn’t mix with the water around it.