Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.

So in theory they could exist anywhere in the universe somewhat close to a star, if the relevant particles in our atmosphere are around that star? That’s what I meant about the density distribution: are they spherically distributed around (all) stars, or are they only present in very specific situations?

These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.

I thought they had a small selection of possible decay products. Not particularly relevant to me at the moment, though.

As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.

I mistyped the mean lifetime, it’s actually 2.2 microseconds. That’s three orders of magnitude different, but from a (non-relativistic) view it would still only travel about 66 centimeters. I’m missing too much information to try to solve the length contraction equation (I don’t know its length, or its velocity) for the observed length. I’m curious here because they’re able to travel on the order of roughly 50 meters into the Earth, and from what I can find they disappear there due to absorption from the many atoms they pass through on that path. So that leads me to a question: If there is not relatively dense earth to get in the way and attenuate the muon, such as if it were produced by a gas cloud beside a star, how far would it realistically be able to travel? Since the muons on Earth “die” from absorption rather than lasting long enough to decay via weak force, they would, in open space, surely be able to travel far enough without enough collisions such that they do end up “dying” by decay.

Thanks for the reply, I am curious here about something that I don’t have enough knowledge to answer for myself.

Your comment doesn’t make any sense.

The fundamental forces are physical forces.

It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.

Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.

That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.

I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.

the worth of the guns and tanks and other things we’ve been giving them that were just collecting dust over here?

Use of reserves motivates replacement. Just because you’re giving them weapons that were produced in the past, and therefore whose (production) cost has already been incurred, doesn’t mean that occurs in a vacuum. With stock running low, contemporary money goes in to replenishing that stock. In effect, there’s no difference whether you send old or new equipment, because both incur costs in the present.

No actual money was involved and so didn’t really cost us anything.

It cost you exactly the amount it cost to produce them. Just because it was produced in the past, doesn’t mean it was free. You paid for it X years ago, and are only now seeing it used. You paid for it. Moreover, you’re now going to pay to replace it.

Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

.io is a ccTLD though and is subject to the whims of the British Indian Ocean Territory. They can, for any reason, remove domains. See what recently happened with Mali and .ml.

They’re obviously not fascist, and you’d know that if you were being honest about it and bothered educating yourself both on what fascism is, and on the realities of the PRC.

Also, it’s not “state capitalism”. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. They’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.

Congratulations citizen! You have been awarded with a 600 FICO score for promulgating sinophobic nonsense. If you also prove that China is the Big Evil, you can get an additional 250 FICO score.

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I don’t think you see the irony in using the dead trope of “Social Credits” when an actual credit score exists in FICO and can be used to deny you housing, loans (and therefore access to education), jobs, and more. And if you think it’s just financial transactions, try looking at what companies like LexisNexis have on you that it coalesces into things like “RiskView”, or how much of a profile skip tracing agencies have on everyone. Then you have the profiles built on you by several government domestic (and foreign) surveillance agencies. And you have the profiles built on you by several big tech companies. Just because there’s not a single, unified, government-sponsored surveillance and consumer rating agency doesn’t mean the tangible effects of such disparate systems aren’t identical to what you claim happens in China (i.e., denial of services and access). It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 different entities controlling parts of the system if the end result is identical.

Call that tin foil hat syndrome or whatever.

Racism. It’s racism and xenophobia.

I am not joking.

You might not be joking but you are assuming. Do you have a link to a statement by a site admin that says explicitly that is what it stands for? Otherwise you’re just speculating, and there are other reasons someone would have chosen .ml besides it standing for that.

You’re not just looking for conversation.

Unless you get a response from the site admins, anyone’s answer is pure speculation. No one is going to be able to say, definitively, why .ml was chosen, except the site admins.

My theory is: .ml domains used to be offered for free. So they made lemmy.ml for free, as it was just a toy project. Then, they upgraded to the paid .ml domain (which is how they managed to avoid the recent free .ml purge).

The “its Marxism-Leninism” could be true, but unless you get an answer from a site admin, everyone asserting that it’s true is talking out of their ass. They don’t know any more than you or I know.

If you support the death penalty then you believe either:

• The government’s judgements are infallible and it would never falsely execute an innocent person, OR
• You are okay with the government executing an innocent person.

I definitely don’t think they’re infallible, as there are loads of cases where people are exonerated only after serving decades in prison, or after their death. And I’m definitely not okay with the government executing an innocent person.

• Decreased performance, as DRM is often hooked deep into event loops and adds non-negligible overhead.
• Decreased privacy, as DRM often requires pinging an external server constantly.
• Decreased security, as DRM is a black-box blob intentionally meant to be difficult to peer in to, and has been the target of attacks such as code execution vulnerabilities before.
• If you own a game but don’t have an active internet connection, DRM may prevent you from playing the game.
• If you own a game but have multiple computers, DRM may force you to buy multiple licenses when you’re only using one copy at a time (c.f., a physical CD with the game on it).
• Eventually, a DRM company is going to go out of business or stop supporting old versions of their software; if you want to play an old game that had that DRM, you won’t be able to even if you own the game.
• &c.

DRM exists to "protect’ the software developer, i.e. protect profits by making sure every copy has been paid for and to force people to buy multiple copies in certain cases. DRM never has and never will be for your (the consumer’s) benefit.

No point lying. If you check the modlog plenty of his comments get removed. You can check for yourself.

I’ll just summarize my point: if you think you have educational value in your comments, that value is nil if the comment gets removed.

As someone who largely agrees with the content of what you have to say, your delivery is absolutely disgusting. You litter every comment with personal attacks, insults, and are needlessly offensive. I genuinely don’t know if you think that aggression helps get your point across, but it doesn’t. And, considering how many of your comments get removed by mods for that insult and disrespect, you should realize that even if you personally think it’s constructive, the mods don’t. If you think the content of your comments is valuable, don’t you think it’d have more value if it is left up for others to see, instead of having it removed where nobody can learn from it? If you resort to this namecalling and aggression so much, and the comments get removed, they’re of no value. As an outside observer, by reading your comments, I’m less likely to trust what you have to say, and instead would assume you have a set agenda that you won’t stray from. Your behavior detracts from your trustworthiness.

• Chinese Communist Party
• Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang
• China Democratic League
• China National Democratic Construction Association
• China Association for Promoting Democracy
• Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party
• China Zhi Gong Party
• Jiusan Society
• Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League

Thank you, I’ll look at that. It might be my misunderstanding of a technical term, but I don’t see the logical sequence that makes it apparent that socialist countries can’t engage in imperialism/colonialism.

I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of attempting to answer the very direct confusion I’m having. You’re doing a lot to make sure it’s obvious how capitalism can and does result in imperialism, which frankly I’m mostly in agreement with. My issue is that you’re asserting that socialism can’t lead to imperialism. You’ve still given no reason that this is to be the case except for this attempt:

Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people by moving past a society based on exploitation. This is why it wouldn’t engage in colonialism.

And I agree that, by definition, it’s a society based on the betterment of its people. Stress should be applied there to its people. I’m not justifying imperialism at all, but it’s a pretty obvious argument that by subjugating other nations/peoples and exploiting them, you can make the lives of your people better. Perhaps you’re trying to say that the type of leadership and ideology that creates and maintains socialism would also be ideologically against imperialism, but that seems more pragmatic than theoretic. You’re saying socialism can’t engage in imperialism by definition but the most I’d give is that it doesn’t engage in imperialism in practice.

I don’t see how that follows.

Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism.

Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people; in theory, why can’t it engage in colonialism to bring in resources to benefit its people?

There is definitely no other way.

Its obvious how capitalism leads to imperialism, but it’s definitely not obvious how that would be the only way to arrive there.

Any elaboration you can provide would be great because you’re acting as if it should be obvious why what you’re saying is true but it absolutely is not.

You didn’t answer what I asked.

You said that capitalism by definition leads to imperialism. I asked how socialism by definition precludes imperialism.