When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.
I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.
Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.
Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?
Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
You can buy pretty much any show you want to watch, without ad breaks, anytime you want on Apple TV store and Google Play store.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
I think the best move is now to go back to watching TV: more broad access to channels, also has ads which are (to some degree) skippable. I do not get why streaming had to go full way to being worse than TV.
I don't know, if you want a cable tv package, where I live, that's even remotely good you're looking at $1250 a year. We have four streaming services and that's still cheaper and I then also have streaming music include.
So--first thing's first. Scientists know Dark Matter is not complete. Consider the progress we've made from the Copernican model of the solar system, to the Kepler model, to Newtonian gravity, to Einstein's theory of gravity. Right now, our understanding of Dark Matter is at the Kepler stage. We know what it's doing. We do not know why it is doing it.
But we have plenty of observations to lead us to what dark might be and what it definitely isn't.
Any theory of dark matter needs to explain all of the following:
1. The Virial Theorem, galaxy clusters, and the speeds of galaxies in clusters. (both MOND and CDM both do a good job of explaining this)
2. Galactic rotation curves. (MOND and CDM both do a good job of explaining this)
3. Accoustic Baryon Oscillations. (ABO) Immediately after the big bang, everything was ludicrously hot. The most powerful force in the universe was the wash of gamma rays everywhere. These gamma rays carried electrons around. The electric fields of the electrons carried the protons around. (the light dominated phase) As the universe cooled, this flipped; the protons were carried around by momentum, which brought the electrons with them, which mediated the light. (the matter dominated phase, where we are today) During the light dominated phase, sound waves pulsed through the universe, causing dense regions and underdense regions. When the universe flipped from being light dominated to matter dominated, these regions were frozen in time, and we can see them directly in the CMB. (cosmic microwave background) We can analyze the properties of these pressure waves to determine what the properties of the matter and light in the universe were. These waves demand some sort of dark matter. CDM explains these observations, MOND does not.
4. The Bullet Cluster. The Bullet Cluster is a collision of two galaxy clusters. We can measure gravitation lensing and light to determine where the dark matter is and where the regular matter is. The bullet cluster demonstrates that these two properties are not the same. There is matter which has gravity and gravitational lensing, but that we can't see. CDM explains these observations, MOND does not.
5. Ultra diffuse galaxies with very little dark matter. Not all galaxies have galactic rotation curves which require some extra sauce to explain the movement of their stars. Some galaxies are explained perfectly by the matter that we can see in them. So we need dark matter for most galaxies, but some galaxies need to be dark matter free. These galaxies falsify MOND.
6. Leading spiral arms in barred spiral galaxies. The large majority of barred spiral galaxies have their arms trailing from their bars, but a very small number of them have arms which lead in front of the bars. Computer simulations show this happens naturally with CDM, but MOND or dark matter free spiral galaxies don't have a mechanism to cause this to happen.
7. Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. Most MOND formulations predict gravitational waves travel slower than c; all of those formulations are wrong.
There is a genuinely absurd amount of time, effort, and money that has gone into explaining dark matter. It is not a band aid, we haven't just added 1 to moved on. Everybody is pouring over every step of the algorithm trying to figure out why it's giving us the wrong answer. CDM is the leading hypothesis right now, because it explains all of the observations, and is not falsified by any of the observations. MACHO is/was another theory; it has gone out of fashion because it does not explain all of the observations and makes predictions we do not observe when we check for them. MOND is out of fashion because it is falsified by the data. MOND is still in fashion among a particular brand of people who just want to have their names in the history books; if someone did prove MOND, the history books would all have lists that go "Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, ."
But for Pete's sake it's not as if people have their fingers in their ears.
explanation of acronyms/terms:
1. Dark Matter. Dark Matter is the observation that the universe acts as if there's a lot more matter in it other than the stuff we can see. Basically no one says that Dark Matter isn't real; that would imply that the observations are wrong.
2. MOND. Modified Newtonian Gravity. MOND is a family of models which aim to explain the dark matter observation. Instead of using F=Gm1m2/r^2 to determine the force of gravity, we have better math, that gives a different equation, that accurately explains Dark Matter. When you say "physicists discover a much more logical explanation" that's what you're talking about.
3. CDM. Cold Dark Matter. CDM is a family of models which aim to explain the dark matter observation. CDM implies that Dark Matter is explained by particles. CDM implies there is some sort of particle of family of particles which interact with normal matter via gravity as normal, via the electromagnetic or strong nuclear force not at all, or via the weak nuclear force super weakly or not at all. CDM interacts with other CDM particles via gravity as normal, but only weakly via either the weak nuclear force or some other as-yet undiscovered force. People often use the terms Dark Matter (referring to the observation) and Cold Dark Matter interchangeably.
4. CMB. Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. After the Big Bang, the universe was opaque. Light would be absorbed by the stuff in the universe and then re-emitted. During recombination, the universe became transparent. The last moment of the various bits and parts of the universe switching from being opaque to transparent has the entire universe glowing in microwaves. This moment is captured in a snapshot, known as the cosmic microwave background. As we understand the CMB better, we learn a lot--a lot a lot--about the early universe.
My pet (wrong but fun!) theory is some sort of lensing effect could effectively "confine" gravity within the galactic plane. This changes the large-scale propagation law from 1/r^2 to 1/r,[0] exactly what we observe in galactic rotation curves, while avoiding the cushy halo problem.[1] So far so good.
Globular clusters should spherically self-lens too, explaining apparent CDM.
However it does neatly explain these ultra-diffuse galaxies. They're not sufficiently dense to self-lens so they can't "get the flywheel going" to ramp up their stellar density and self-gravity-lensing, to shape the large scale structure.
In effect, these ultra-diffuse galaxies would be right on the edge of "failed galaxies," in the same way Jupiter-size objects are sometimes considered as failed stars.
--
EDIT I admit CDM irks me because it has (effectively) unlimited tuning parameters, and what's more, you can tune them differently per object! As the history of science shows us, Here There Be Dragons...
It seems that having some galaxies without dark matter is also pretty bad for CDM. Why would CDM be absent in those cases? Without an explanation, isn't it bad for CDM (as well as MOND)?
Nobody wants a theory where exceptions can be hand-waved away as "Oh, that galaxy must not have DM" or "That galaxy has too much/too little/different balance/etc".
Great post. Very interesting though the physics is well above my head.
> if someone did prove MOND
How could MOND be proven if it is disproven? Is there a chance it is not really disproven, or you mean the equations for forces might still be modified in a way that fits observations? Or that it could be MOND plus something else?
> When you say "physicists discover a much more logical explanation" that's what you're talking about.
I wonder what is illogical or band-aid feeling about matter that interacts with gravity but not other forces though. Why would all types of matter interacting with electromagnetism and strong nuclear forces be logical
you left out 'other', which is important because our capacity to observe what is happening and test theories as to why, when measured against the scale of discrepancies, isn't that great, and I think it is just good policy to point out just how maddening it is to have missed most of the universe in our observations of it, and how by default this gap places ALL of the rest of our theorising on the shakiest of footings, hence as you point out, the frantic efforts to figure it out from observable evidence, as there is zero possibility of selling the idea of another collider that is yet one order a magnitude bigger than the last.
Though I think that there is solid support for very large space based telescopes where this kind of science could ride beside other more popular missions, as photons are photons, and no one is going to argue about how precisly they are measured or defined as long as there are pretty pictures of things no one has seen before.And if the optical platform needs to be stabilised to prevent the shaking caused by gravitational waves, so be it;)
> Immediately after the big bang, everything was ludicrously hot. The most powerful force in the universe was the wash of gamma rays everywhere.
Classic obfuscation method. That remaining static noise gave it away. Somewhere out there is a Savant who reads it like Tank and Link read the Matrix' machine code--blonde, brunette, redhead.
Microsoft has absolutely gone to shit in the past ~year. Github, Teams, Windows, Azure, Exchange, it's all been fucking trash. Github was running at 80% uptime for a few months, and if they're telling me they're at 98% or whatever now, then they're cooking the books, period. There's no way they're even that reliable.
What's going on at Microsoft? Are they just copy-pasting their github issue reports into copilot and hitting send it without doing code reviews?
Everyone got laid off. Massive cost cutting across all orgs. Engineers are now evaluated on AI usage and pull request frequency, and not bugs fixed or performance improvements.
About four years ago I did interview loops at GCP, Netflix, and Azure at the same time. The latter was a “hiring event” so all my interviewers were from different teams, either managers or TLs.
It was the interview equivalent of the multi-headed dragon meme, where the last one looks absolutely stupid. The contrast was insane, microsoft was an absolute shit show compared to the other two companies in terms of talent, personality, organization and more.
Aircraft carriers are not particularly well suited to be supplied by cargo aircraft.
The largest cargo aircraft with the strengthened landing gear, arresting hook, and catapult attachment used to be the C-2 Greyhound. It had a range of approximately 1,500 miles with a 10,000 pound cargo. It was retired on July 28th, 2026. The C-2 has been replaced by the CMV-22B Osprey. It has a range of only 1,150 miles and a more limited cargo capacity of only 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds isn't nothing, but it's not a lot either.
There's not a lot of stuff within 1,150mi of the Arabian Sea. Your two options are one of the US bases in the southern Persian Gulf (Kuwait is too far) and Diego Garcia. Neither are ideal. In both cases you're doing a transfer out in the field.
On the other hand, the C-5 Galaxy can carry 120,000 pounds to a range of 4,800 miles. You can fill it with food in the continental US, fly to Hickam AFB in Hawaii, refuel, and fly the rest of the way to Guam. On the return leg, an unladen C-5 can fly directly to the 22nd Airlift Squadron's home base California without a layover.
The C-17B Globemaster is smaller than the C-5, although it's nearly as capable. With a 160,000 pound cargo, it has a range of 3,200 miles, (the C-17A has a shorter range) which is just short of the 3,800 miles to get from Hawaii to Guam. I don't know how much cargo it's capable of carrying 3,800 miles, but on the order of 100,000 pounds is a reasonable guess. It is also capable of an empty flight back to the US without a layover.
Mostly tensioned cables carrying hoses (liquids especially fuel being the highest volume / limiting factor), some palletized transfer over cables, and some helicopter lift (because the flight pads/decks are already sitting next to each other while everyone is waiting for fuel to finish).
I've watched some videos showing UNREP and they're fascinating. It takes a lot of skill to keep the ships parallel. There was a collision earlier this year between the resupply ship and the recipient.
> Also, the Navy is using Ospreys to resupply submarines at sea because they have the range and helicopters don't.
Afaik, modern submarines handle terribly on the surface, so I imagine direct ship-to-ship UNREP is rare. Also, too much cost risk from a collision.
Per YouTube, it's mostly vertical replenishment. Helicopter for short range. Osprey for longer. Floating pallets pushed out of the back of a C-17 at max range.
I'm sure the packing is intricate for something that's going to be air dropped, then floating, then has to be broken down on an unstable floating platform and conveyed inside through small ports!
Spot-on and thanks for sharing that video too. Aircraft carriers aren't really designed to be replenished by large aircraft which would instead be used to replenish sites like Guam with large enough runways and, frankly, the need if something went wrong due to the population size, remoteness, and inability of everyday residents to do anything about the situation.
Another pending example is the 2035 retirement of the E-3 AWACS and its replacement by the much less capable E-2D. There are/were other more capable options on the table, including the E-7 and the E-10, both of which have been canceled.
The Osprey is air refuelable though, isn't it? Each flight is roughly one pound per person on board.
It's also roughly 2800 nautical miles from Kuwait to Diego Garcia, so regardless of where the carrier group is, it should be at most a ~6 day round trip at 20 knots for a supply ship from the closest of the two.
That assumes there is no way to airdrop watertight pallets of food (e.g. steel drums loaded with cans and MREs) into the water, then retrieve it with RHIBs or helicopters.
I can't speak to how much cargo was on board, but I did a Hawai'i to Guam leg on a C-17B that was carrying palletized cargo.
One of my better Space-A experiences. Crew was great, flight was smooth. I preferred it over the KC-135 leg, despite the more spartan conditions. The aircrew let us toss out sleeping bags and packs in the aisles between cargo and get some sleep.
I thought it was well-known that unmodified C-130s (Look ma, no hook!) can land and take off from US-sized carriers successfully. Ergo, in a pinch, everyone will be getting their chicken nuggets and canned corn.
No, in a pinch, you're just beclowning yourself with your utter ignorance of carrier air operations.
They're not striking the entire air wing below just so one C-130 can land and take off, and that's assuming a stunt pulled by one elite test pilot was replicable by a bog-standard junior C-130 pilot.
Giving how static bases (including airstrips) have become vulnerable, i think we may yet to see those flying boats coming back as a way to support Navy fleets which historically were relying on the static bases.
That could be a different navy concept if surface carriers go extinct. You could have submarines and (possibly submersible) seaplanes, and submarine-launched UAVs.
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.
I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.
Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.
Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?
Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
reply