What would you have changed from the movies as they were?
I mean, I can’t think of that many deviations from the books off-the-top-of-my-head. Tom Bombadil got cut, but he had a very different flavor from most of the rest of the series. Legolas “shield surfing” was an addition to the movies and was kind of obnoxious, IMHO, but it wasn’t that much of an ongoing thing. There were some changes around Aragorn going through the Paths of the Dead, but nothing there really bugged me.
EDIT: I’m pretty sure that nothing in the books said that the charge of the reinforcements at Helm’s Deep was down that steep of a slope – that’s probably just not practical.
Mmm…it depends. So, one particular example I recall calling for UBI without giving any details and urging people on /r/Europe to sign up for it was at an international level in Europe, and I don’t know what, exactly, the implications of that petition were.
But there are definitely systems of government where petitions do make a difference. The popular initiative exists, and there it’s explicitly part of the process.
I’m not really a huge fan of the popular initiative and referendum – I live in California, which uses both, and I think that some of the policy that I think is most ill-considered in California has gone through via that process. However, it certainly can – and has, on a number of occasions, has – had dramatic impact on the state’s policy, as with California’s unusual property tax situation.
Initiative Statute: Petitions proposing initiative statutes must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 5% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)
The total number of signatures required for initiative statutes is 546,651.
Initiative Constitutional Amendment: Petitions proposing initiative constitutional amendments must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 8% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)
The total number of signatures required for such petitions is 874,641.
At my mom’s place — air-source heat pump, double-paned windows — I can’t hear the thing at all from inside the house, and can only hear it if I go on the side of the house where it’s operating, which doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. You can hear the fan there.
Generally, I haven’t heard people complaining about it in the US. I have seen some people talk about it recently in the UK, which is in the middle of a push to transition to them, and I’m wondering if that’s because townhouses are more-common there, with houses packed closely together.
I understand that you can get noise-reducing enclosures:
There are also water-source heat pumps. I don’t know how the noise differs, but I’d bet that it’s quieter, because you’re moving water through a pipe rather than a lot of air. However, their installation cost is considerably higher (though their energy efficiency is also higher).
There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered “flat” (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]
The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a “Big Rip”[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.
Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip — and we expect one of the two to occur — seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.
The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.
The theory suggests that from the “Big Bang” through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.
In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.
In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.
If you set that to some insane number, I imagine that people can upload large stuff, and as I note below, at least webm files seem to be doable right now on lemmy.world (just that the lemmy.world size cap is going to keep someone from uploading anything of meaningful size). I’d imagine that if you lift that cap to whatever you want – if you want full-length movies, then probably a couple of gigabytes – the users of your instance should be able to upload. They’d click on “image” rather than “movie”, but…shrugs
The Lemmy Web UI isn’t really designed for huge uploads, doesn’t show a progress bar, so it’s probably not going to provide the best user experience, but I’d expect that it’ll work.
If you don’t want to run a lemmy instance, but do want to permit people to just anonymously upload files that they can link to on other lemmy instances, then while I don’t have a particular example ready to hand, I’m sure that there are no shortage of web-based “dropbox” systems that let one upload and then serve files. Just have people reference the file’s URL the way they would anything else.
If you want to run a PeerTube instance, which is aimed at fediverse video sharing, then I’d look at their docs. I’ve never set one up, but I’m sure that they have some kind of documentation.
It’s not particularly confusing, but there are a whole class of paradoxes that rely on the same mechanism – the truth of a statement is being altered by the existence of the statement, because it is self-referential in some way.
I think that the Berry paradox is the first one of these that I ran into, and it’s a little more confusing to most, I think.
I wouldn’t worry too much if you haven’t eaten for a few days. I know of one instance where someone who was seriously obese went on a diet, and aside from vitamins and water, went over a year without eating. I’ve done over a week myself for the hell of it. Unless you’re absolutely emaciated or have some sort of medical condition that creates a need for it, you can probably handle going for quite a while without food.
All that being said, this isn’t to encourage doing it. Just that you’re probably not creating any kind of dire health situation if you don’t eat for a while.