So there's been some talk about China's massive decrease in oil imports starting in March. There was no official explanation offered by them, but estimates have been made that China has strategic reserves that could last at least 1 year, more than all other strategic reserves combined. Various theories have been floated about why they decided to do this. The most plausible one being that global economic disruption is not in their interests currently due to how much their economy is interconnected with global consumption of their goods.

There's some other implications from this move, but I think one that hasn't been discussed in any of the analysis I've seen is that China is strategically walking the capitalist world up to a oil energy cliff. By making this move without any fanfare, it has allowed capitalist markets to remain irrational and willingly oblivious to the approaching depletion of oil reserves. This baiting of capital markets is an interesting concept to consider. China remains the steady hand of the global markets over time while steepening the shock curve for their only "viable" economic rivals.

This is a pragmatic short-term play with an eventual snapback that accelerates their indispensable qualities across many sectors. If the US calmly walks off the cliff (as seems to be exceedingly likely by each day that passes), this can neutralize not only their economic power but also their military ability to function.

There's a lot of different angles that can be considered beyond this one, but I thought this was an interesting perspective to consider. What do my fellow hexbears think?

Solarky SunV car has a retractable solar panel that can charge it up. It's not much more than just an adequate city car, but it could be an effective solution for many people across the world. It weighs only ~600 kg and has a ~10KwH battery pack with a max speed ~80 kph.

I'd really like to see something like this scaled down even a bit further into the spectrum between a small city car and a open-air cargo trike with the solar charging capabilities.

August 6, 1961 - First image, color images and movie of Earth from space taken by a person, by cosmonaut Gherman Titov – the first photographer from space.

Short video about Gherman and Vostok 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqweoLwP6w

Less than four months after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering one-orbit flight, USSR stunned the world with yet another space first on August 6, 1961. This time, Yuri's backup, Gherman Titov, spent a day in space aboard the Vostok-2 spacecraft. The record-breaking mission looked even more startling at the time when NASA planned a 24-hour flight as the ultimate goal of its Mercury project, to be achieved in the sixth piloted launch.

At the time, medical specialists and other experts insisted on the mission limited to three orbits. Their main argument was that the first three orbits were overflying southern Russia, with the landing site drifting westward with each subsequent orbit. Between the 8th and 13th orbit, the landing would fall into the ocean. After the 13th orbit, the landing would be again possible in the USSR, however only in inhospitable and remote regions of the Soviet Far East covered with taiga, rocks and tundra.

Only after the planet would make a full turn below the spacecraft in 24 hours after launch, would the landing opportunity shift back to the European part of Russia. However the commitment to a day-long mission presented serious medical concerns.

Titov also had a professional Soviet-built Konvas movie camera aboard, which was modified for space flight and could record on black and white and color film. The cosmonaut also received a small optical telescope with magnification from three to five times.

https://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok2.html

Titov’s life was steeped in a profound love of literature, and his words have a power that other spacefarers have rarely matched, before or since. His recollections are both poetic and succinct. “I had the feeling that our Earth is a sand particle in the universe,” he wrote , “comparable to a particle of sand on the shore of the ocean. It was strange to have a black dome above me and our earthly blue sky below. The Earth flashed as a multi-faceted gem, an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world…framed in a brilliant, radiant border. The colors were extraordinary—vivid, yet tender—and the light streaming through the cabin carried a strange shade as if it were filtered through stained glass.”

• from 2007 book "Into That Silent Sea"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-first-photographer-in-space-44654847/

a rom-com of sorts that's actually pretty good

also fair warning it's pretty dark in some parts but quite wholesome overall

Hope those queer people (drones?) find cool terrorists to blow to hell. Blahaj becoming hexbear2…

Guessing this is related to the initial federation days, but any clarification or lore is appreciated.

only the highest quality version of this meme exclusively for

O poopiful for spacious balls
For amber waves of piss
For poople mounds on testicles
Above the poop-filled floor

Pig poop his balls on thee
And brown thy balls in pooper-hood
From taint to shining cheeks

So I've been dabbling in the LoRa Mesh networking world for a few months. The meshnets are created between Long Range radios (LoRa), and there are two common protocols/software layers used: Meshtastic (MT) and Meshcore (MC) for basic text messaging. The radios use public frequencies (915 Mhz in the US) that can propagate over many kilometers if there is line-of-sight between two nodes. Generally the same hardware can be firmware flashed to support either option (but not both at the same time).

Meshtastic is the earlier version, and it is very much focused on a non-hierarchical network topology. With MT, every node is also a repeater/router. Now this can be configured in many different ways per device, but the main idea is that the meshnet is fluid and adhoc. This makes sense in some contexts like off-grid coordination, search and rescue in remote areas, stuff where the meshnet is made up of a small number of nodes that are mostly moving independently in a localized area.

Meshcore differently uses dedicated repeater nodes along with the end user "companion" nodes (same hardware with different firmware). So the meshnet is made up of these repeaters (generally fixed in place) that relay messages between companion nodes that do not repeat by default. It is much more suited for urban and suburban contexts where there are more users and many fixed repeaters across the area.

There's a sort of case study from the San Fransisco Bay Area where the early adopters initially tried to create a meshnet based on MT, but later transitioned in mass to MC because it just worked better for the context of the area and use cases.

This reddit comment summarizes their experience:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonomacounty/comments/1rmuuvq/comment/o93ogmh/

This is all just to give some context to my main purpose of this post: different network topologies and organizing principles and how they work in different contexts.

In many ways the guiding philosophy of MT is based in a fairly strict understanding of the anarchic perspective. This can be really useful to prove out how a flat org structure can work at a small scale. The problem arises particularly for MT in that when every node is also a repeater/router the airwaves start to get saturated pretty quickly as the number of nodes scales up. The frequency space is the common resource that the meshnet has to manage effectively and efficiently to function.

MC resolves this issue by introducing a minimum of hierarchy with dedicated repeater nodes. This reduces the overall saturation of the common frequency space pretty well, because the companion nodes (users) don't usually reach too far on their own. So by having these repeater nodes in strategically fixed positions around the geography for line-of-sight coverage, you get a network topology that is a bit closer to the traditional cellular network. It also uses some thoughtful routing algorithms to reduce unneeded message propagation noise. Part of this relies on "paths" messages take across the repeaters. If one node is sending direct messages to anther node in range, then repeating is not warranted. If the other node is at an unknown path, MC defaults to a "flood" routing mechanism while trying to send the message. Once a path to the other node is found, it becomes the default for subsequent messages until that path fails, then it reverts to the "flood" routing again.

TL;DR:

It's an interesting illustration of how adhoc fluidity can be very functional at a smaller scale, but as the scale grows it is often necessary to implement some minimal level of justified hierarchy to keep things functioning effectively. It's also a nice reminder that technology is socially embedded, and understanding the sociological aspects of its context and use cases is very much a dialectical process.

Is this something?