There’s a guy on the internet who does videos comparing Vancouver real estate with literal European castles of a similar price. “Not livable” money in Vancouver can get you “has gardens and outbuildings with servant’s quarters” in some parts of Europe.
Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.
Yeah, orbital mechanics gets a little bit mind-bendy sometimes. If you’re in a stable circular orbit, accelerating in the direction you’re traveling will actually result in you traveling more slowly because you have moved to a higher orbit, and firing engines to slow down will actually speed you up because you move in closer to the host body and take up a faster orbit.
This is actually a problem spacecraft deal with regularly. If a Dragon capsule is behind the ISS and wants to dock, using its thrusters to accelerate toward the ISS will actually result in it falling further behind. Decelerating will get it closer, though it will then be in a lower orbit. Orbital rendezvous is tough.
Ah, the ol’ Reddit switch-a-roo. Hold my relevant topic, I’m going in!
And my axe!!
I don’t doubt that someone might be thinking that, but I do doubt that any lawyer thinks it’s necessary. As far as I know nobody has ever brought suit against a TV show for a suicide case.
But I’m not an attorney.
If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.
Good question, but if you cancel out only a little bit of orbital velocity, you just orbit in a little bit closer. Without any appreciable drag acting on you, there’s nothing that will keep your orbit decaying. You’ll just be in a smaller, perhaps slightly more eccentric orbit.
It’s obviously a head shot of a person holding their hands in the air like they just don’t care.
Because the Earth is really cookin’, and anything anyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a highly-eccentric yet stable elliptical orbit.
“Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.
(Edit to add: I may have explained this poorly. Basically, if you don’t change your orbital speed at all, any movement you make toward or away from the host body means you just end up in an orbit of the same average distance, but in a more eccentric [elliptical] shape.)
By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.
So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.
Every single one of them look like their eyes are about to roll right out of their heads.
Removed by mod
YES, absolutely! Sam and Dropout are an excellent success story. They make a thing ethically and charge a fair price for it, people who want it pay them for it. If we can normalize that again, the world will work a lot better.
There are a lot of examples recently of respected legacy companies being turned into hollow husks of their former selves (or even going out of business entirely) due to finance bros. Sears, Paramount, Toys R Us, Warner Bros, Red Lobster, Twitter, Reddit (ok maybe stretching the definition of “respected”), and now Boeing, among many, many others.
Will it change anything among that class of people? Probably not. The spectre of Jack Welch still looms large over the business world, incentivizing short-term slash-and-burn flash over long-term productive smolder. The type of person who’s inclined toward this kind of con will still pursue it, and there are enough people of low scruples who will get the dollar signs in their eyes.
But with any luck, it will take the luster off enough that people will stop playing along; and they’ll run out of money sooner or later.
It’s already starting to happen. The Onion was bought back from private equity earlier this summer, and the new owners are taking a lot of steps that no PE would ever consider; essentially they’re just looking to stay afloat, not trying to cancerously pursue unchecked growth.
This is the only correct response.
Look, it’s not my thing, but I have it on pretty good authority that philately is pretty rad.
So I placed a grocery order a few days ago. I really only needed some herbs and spices, but to complete the full order I went ahead and ordered some stuff for dinner next week and a couple of splurge items. (I promise this will become relevant)
Anyway, they were having trouble with a few items, so my order got delayed, and I was starting to get frustrated. I was literally on the verge of canceling last night and just ordering it from a different store. But while I was scrolling Lemmy, I read your comment. And right as I was reading it, the doorbell rang.
And, well…
My thyme is finally here.
Don’t listen to that guy. You’re in for a treat, my friend.
My bank’s website is a pretty boring one, though.
“Dirthat” has some potential