According to the USDA,

Microwaves penetrate the food to a depth of 1 to 1½ inches.

What’s the diameter of a hamster?

I don’t know what to tell you, you can believe whatever you like. It doesn’t matter to me. But this is one of the dumbest discussions I’ve ever had, so I’m done. Declare yourself “winner” of the discussion if you like.

You will find it is entirely dependent on the size, thickness, and density of the food you’re heating.

Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.

Maybe we’ll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.

Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland’s. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland’s.

Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.

The first half of your comment I agree with completely.

And even the second half I think is basically accurate, but it may also miss the point.

but even if you magically disappeared every gun in the country, the problems that mess people up so bad they get violent would remain.

So yeah, I think people would still get violent, for sure. The question is, how many people can they hurt when that happens? I mean, I recognize the impossibility of this, but if you could magically disappear every gun in the country, we would pretty quickly see a very different society begin to emerge. For starters, there would be much less murder across the board, less gang violence, less domestic violence, fewer murders by cops, no school shooting, probably even fewer suicides. It wouldn’t fix everything, but it would definitely have a huge impact.

But there would be additional effects too… The relationship between cops and the general public would begin to change drastically. There would be much less anger toward the police and the police would have fewer reasons to fear the public. The current cop policy of shoot first if you feel threatened is both completely unacceptable and simultaneously totally rational (if they assume anyone could have a gun). But without guns in people’s hands, (including the cops’) we’d have a completely different dynamic in so many otherwise dangerous situations.

All that said, you’re right that economic inequity will always lead to social interest and violence. So like I said, this wouldn’t solve everything. But on the other hand, getting rid of guns entirely wouldn’t be a bad way to go, it would certainly heal more than it would hurt.

Well there are a lot of factors defining how much usable material we could get, and how hard it would be to do it.

Yeah, about 98% of the sun is hydrogen and helium, with other elements making up the remaining 2%.

The machine used to generate the magnetic field would likely be a ring rather than plate, with the goal being to bend the trajectory of any matter that passes through the ring just a little. In effect it would work a lot like a lens, that could focus matter passing through it into a cone of trajectories, with collection happening at the point of the cone, possibly a point at a much higher in orbit. (This does introduce some complications in the different orbital speeds for the ring and collector, but without getting into it, there is a solution for that, it’s not the hardest part of this idea)

And how much you can capture depends a lot on how close to the sun you can put your magnet field ring. If it’s stationed closer to the sun it shrinks the size of the sphere you’re trying to cover. So if your ring could survive at 0.2 AU from the sun (about half the distance of mercury’s orbit), a ring of the same diameter would cover 25 times more area of the sphere than if it was stationed at 1 AU.

So your 59.5 tons collected turns into 1487.5 tons, 2% of which is 29.75 tons of usable material (which I’ll be honest, is not great considering the magnitude of the construction project). It’s probably a better deal if you’re using the hydrogen towards fusion power, but it’s still not great.

The good news is that it scales well, the larger you make the ring, the better your ratio of materials gathered vs materials needed to build the ring, which makes the optimal diameter of the ring about the same as the diameter of the sun. So… yeah, this is not a project in our immediate future.

But you’re incorrect. Microwaves penetrate through many substances fairly well, mostly passing through them. The microwave ovens we use to cook are tuned to resonate with water molecules, and as a result the waves interact more frequently with those molecules. But in general, the waves just bounce around until they do interact with something, and it could be any particle within your hot pocket that it interacts with, not just the surface.

All that is to say, microwaves do heat all throughout whatever you put in. Now, these waves can also excite particles and moisture in the air within the oven, and there is convection between the air and your hot pocket… But air is less dense than food, so convection will be secondary heating at best, and cooling at worst.

we don’t even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.

Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.

It’s been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here’s the quick version:

The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth’s hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don’t separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.

And it’s a lot of matter that could be collected this way… The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars’s moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.

And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn’t help myself. 🤓

Look around, how many people here start a conversation by insulting other users? If you actually took a tally, counted them up, you’d see it’s fairly uncommon.

No, we are not all assholes.

And that’s the kind of community I want out of Lemmy.

I mean, that you’re a bit of an asshole.

Exactly, petitioning steam doesn’t help, their hands are tied. It’s the behavior of the payment processors that needs to change. If they wimp out over every complaint, then we all live at the whims of the whiniest prudes in the world.

Why would we help

Let me stop you right there… You do not make Lemmy a better place.

I don’t think I can say it any clearer than that. That hostile attitude is a detriment to the community. And please don’t say “we” when you really mean “I”, you don’t speak for everyone.

I mean, she’s leaving, which would deprive them of her taxes, it’s the most she can do.

There are a lot of spatulas I wouldn’t use to flip a pancake though.

Then chain yourself to a tree.

It sounds to me like your solution is violence, but that’s actually a bad idea. Of course I can’t actually argue for or against this “idea” you totally have, because you haven’t stated it.

Although when you come out swinging with insults right out of the gate, it kinda reveals a lot.

Thanks, that was a great explanation!

Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.

I love that. I still have the very first computer I ever bought, a Power Mac G4 I keep saying that some day I’ll modify the case to house my current PC.

My favorite feature of that case was the latch you can see on the side, you pull the latch and the entire side opens downward, no screws. .

Oh man, Noctua fans fit perfectly with this ironic high performance/vintage garbage dynamic! Good call.

When the fleet carriers came out, I think I had mine in a week. Of course, I didn’t keep paying it off, I never really saw the point of them.

You just need to find a good freight loop. It’s actually pretty fun running cargo with no shield (but extra armor). I had an imperial cutter customized for cargo hauling and if done right, you made money at astounding rates.

It took a while to locate, but I found a loop between three stations that allowed me to essentially buy low and sell high at every stop on the route. Though one leg of the route was all cargo transport missions, and they always invited interdictions. If done right you can drop out of FS and then jump right back out before the other ship gets their bearings. With a ship that big nobody can stop you.

But it was scary a few times. I may have lost it once or twice…