This was a fun one to look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

It looks like the number of valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10^40 to 10^44, and the number of atoms in the Earth is around 10^50. Yeah the latter is bigger, but the former is still absolutely huge.

Let’s assume we have a magically amazing diamond-based solid state storage system that can represent the state of a chess square by storing it in a single carbon atom. The entire board is stored in a lattice of just 64 atoms. To estimate, let’s say the total number of carbon atoms to store everything is 10^42.

Using Avogadro’s number, we know that 6.022x10^23 atoms of carbon will weigh about 12 grams. For round numbers again, let’s say it’s just 10^24 atoms gives you 10 grams.

That gives 10^42 / 10^24 = 10^18 quantities of 10 grams. So 10^19 grams or 10^16 kg. That is like the mass of 100 Mount Everests just in the storage medium that can store multiple bits per atom! That SSD would be the size of a small large moon!

I went to business school in the US about a decade ago (stayed full time engineer and happy about it) and I can absolutely see business schools unironically studying the process of privatizing and offshoring prisons as it relates to other more ethical and humane enterprises.

USian here, and totally agree. The willful ignorance is stunning to behold.

But help me with my potential ignorance here - is this meme also suggesting that ordinary citizens of other developed countries know about these things? Do high school history and social studies classes have a day or a week that discuss US imperialism & shady dealings of recent decades?

My impression has always been that people in other countries read about this awful shit in the same places I do online, and that the differences in mainstream knowledge are about much more basic stuff like coal and climate change being bad while healthcare is good.

Remember, the #1 search on google on Election Day was “did Joe Biden drop out”

Jesus fucking christ. I have not read that before, but it is the most believable thing I’ve seen all week.

I’ll look it up tomorrow. I am always curious, but I cannot handle having this fact confirmed to me right now, lol.

I’m literally a yankee, as in a lifelong resident of the area north of the Mason-Dixon line and I’ve visited several historical civil war sites over the decades because they’re among the inexpensive points of interest within several hours of here.

I think you’re both kind of right. Everything the previous comment said is correct IMO about it starting with a negative connotation and people in the south probably hating it. But modern online usage feels pretty respectful too. Even in a professional setting, if I were on a typical call and somebody from Europe referred to somebody thousands of km (or miles, lol) away on the other side of the US as one of the yankees/yanks, I don’t think it would even register as something I’d remember. (well NOW it will because of this comment, thanks lemmy! :D )

Plus more recently, those of us who do wild shit like pay attention to the outside world don’t exactly take offense to people insulting this fucked up country/government/culture/etc. We’re right here agreeing with you. So something like “yankee” doesn’t stand out much when you read somebody across the world write “fuck all USians” and you think to yourself “…I can see that. That’s fair.”

Man, with the Linux users on one side and daddy Microsoft high on the cloud, C: don’t get no respect!

Insert “use Linux” joke. But I’m absolutely serious when I say that using my company’s M365 stuff using the web versions in Firefox on Linux is pretty pleasant.