The idea that the velocity of a person walking forward on a train is simply the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking with respect to the train is called “Galilean relativity”.

Einstein realized that Galilean relativity has a big problem if you take for granted the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of reference frame, and people had a lot of reasons at the time to suspect this to be true.

In particular, he imagined something like watching a train passing by him, but on board the train is a special clock which works by shooting a pulse of light at a mirror directly overhead which reflects back down and hits a sensor. Every time the light pulse hits the sensor, the clock ticks up by one and another light pulse is sent out. People usually call this the “light clock thought experiment” if you want to learn more about it.

Anyway, Einstein realized if he was watching the light clock as the train passed by him while he’s standing on the station, the path the light beam traces out will take the form of a zigzag. Meanwhile, for a person standing on the train, it will just be going straight up and down. If you know anything about triangles, you will realize that the zigzag path is longer than the straight up and down path. So if everyone observes the speed of light to be the same exact thing, it must be the case that it will take the light a longer amount of time to traverse the zigzag path. And so the person standing on the platform will see that clock ticking slower than the person on the train will. This phenomenon is called “time dilation”.

From this point, you can apply some simple trigonometry to figure out just how much slower things would be appearing to move on the train. And it turns out that the velocity the person watching the train observes the person walking on the train to have is not the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking on the train. But rather, it’s something like that velocity, but divided by 1 + (train velocity)•(walking velocity)/c^2, where c is the speed of light (and this is called “Lorentzian relativity” if you want to read more about it).

It’s important to notice that since trains and walking come nowhere close to the speed of light, the value you’re adding to one is very small in these kinds of situations, and so what you’re left with is almost exactly the same thing you would get with Galilean relativity, which is why it still is useful and works. But when you want to consider the physics of objects that are moving much much faster, all of this is extremely important to take into account.

And lastly if you wanna read more about this stuff in general, this is all part of “the theory of special relativity” and there’s probably helpful YouTube videos covering every single thing that I’ve put in quotation marks.

is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly

Maybe somebody should make the argument that random businesses benefiting from prison labor is not only unethical for the prisoner, but also for the people that they owe restitution to.

so like I am not making any comment on anything but the legal system here. but it’s absolutely the case that you can win a lawsuit on purely circumstantial evidence if the defense is unable to produce a compelling alternative set of circumstances which can lead to the same outcome.

in civil matters, the burden of proof is actually usually just preponderance of evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. in other words to win a lawsuit, you only need to have more compelling evidence than the other person.

Mozilla could solicit donations for the development of Firefox while also still being able to rely on commercial funding sources if they restructured the Firefox project so that the core technologies underlying it (stuff like Gecko and SpiderMonkey) were actually developed by the Foundation instead of the Corporation, while the Corporation could package all of those pieces together into a complete software product with branding. The way things are now, though the entire browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation and so its development can only be financially supported by Mozilla Corporation selling products or engaging in business deals.

Let’s just suppose for a second that this really was unnecessary. is it the patient’s fault or the doctor’s? Truly the most insane thing in all of this is this expectation that the patient should be on the hook for unnecessary medical expenses when they quite literally are the least informed of all the parties in the situation.

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I am not referring to the politics of any of these media outlets when I say they are non-capitalist, but their ownership structure. I don’t disagree that the guardian has a major status quo bias, but at the end of the day, it is wholly owned by a non-profit trust as opposed to shareholders (aka capitalists in the pure economic sense of the ward)

some high-quality non-capitalist media organizations and businesses:

ProPublica, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, NPR, PBS, Associated Press, Texas Tribune, Mother Jones, the Intercept

The most amazing part is not even that long ago, everyone agreed this is how it worked, even the business owners. I remember recently watching the 1923 silent film “Safety Last!” starring Harold Lloyd. I was very struck by a particular scene in the film where the owner of the store Harold Lloyd works at says:

“I’d give $1000 for a new idea that would attract an enormous crowd to our store. Something is wrong with our exploitation! We simply are not getting the publicity that our position in the commercial world calls for.”

This character is not presented as some kind of villain or saying something wrong. He’s just talking about how everyone understands business to work, by exploitation, which has always simply meant taking advantage of some kind of opportunity, even when people like Marx talked about it.

in a practical sense you’re completely right. However in a legal sense, I am not sure implementing ActivityPub on your website and not restricting federation doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to still impose legal conditions on access to the data that your website is hosting. I am not sure that the nature of the protocol completely absolves you of liability.

to be extra clear. I am not making any kind of claims here. I’m only saying that I am not sure the answer is a simple one

it was definitely happening several hours ago at least. I asked for it to tell me what the full name of a baby would be if the musician who made the song neon named his child after the most famous king of the Torah. as soon as it wrote out the word “David” the session would just end with the error message “I’m unable to produce a response”

Its actually insane that the guy who owns the most valuable electric car company in the world would have a problem with climate diversification

do you ever think about how the original paint that Da Vinci used to paint the Last Supper faded away hundreds of years ago?

The public needs to understand that this is literally people trying to take away some thing that belongs to the public, without having to even pay you for it