esc27

@esc27@lemmy.world

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esc27 ,

I question the salt in boiling water one. Sure it probably doesn't change the temperature or energy required but shouldn't it aid in nucleation to make the boil more bubbly?

Or are the existing impurities in most tap water such that salt doesn't add anything meaningful?

esc27 ,

One thing I'm learning from these types of questions is that knowledge isn't power, money is. There is precious little I could do with future knolewedge outside of personal/family matters without first using that knowledge to make as much money as possible.

esc27 ,

Pennsylvania over a decade ago. Somehow I had managed to get on the wrong side of the freeway and when i realized (very little directional signage and no GPS), I took the next exit to find there was no corresponding on-ramp to get back on the otherside.

After some wandering I found a gas station, bought a map, and took side streets until I could get back on the main road.

esc27 ,

How many carpenter bees even have a youtube channel. I bet not even one has uploaded a video covering alternatives to the Festool Domino.

esc27 ,

After nearly a year on lemmy, I'm guessing it was capitalism or maybe microsoft.

esc27 , (edited )

My pet conspiracy theory that California does not exist. It was invented by democrats to pad their electoral votes. Any one who has traveled there actually went to a staged area in Oregon. Anyone who claims to live there is either brainwashed or in on it. Maps, globes, etc. have all been altered. Satellites have special software that adds California to its images. Spacecraft windows are actually screens that digitally alter earth to add California.

Once you consider that California is allegedly the location of Hollywood and movies often create convincing, fake worlds, it makes sense. Hollywood was created to take advantage of the tech developed to fake California and continue funding the conspiracy...

esc27 ,

There is always money in the...

esc27 ,

Seems like if they really cared about emergencies they would require car radios to support the actual weather band frequencies as well.

esc27 ,

I'm wondering if this is happening with people as well. If some of these could be written by humans who subconsciously picked up AI phrasing by reading to much AI text.

The hidden potential of bicycles ( www.resilience.org )

The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car....

esc27 ,

That 1,600 hour number seems weird to me.

Looks like they took AAA's annual estimate of the "true" cost of a new car $12,182 (https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-costs-boil-over-12k/) and divided by the federal minimum wage of 7.25 to get ~$1,680 or "more than 1,600)

Median weekly income in the US is $1139 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf), which at 40 hours would be $28.47 per hour. or, 428 hours a year to pay for the car. Granted that is taking a broad median stat and assuming it equates to 40 hours of work, but that's sort my problem. The whole exercise is just one assumption piled on another from the original AAA number to my own math...

esc27 ,

AAA appears to include insurance and that would cover some of those medical and legal fees. But that's sort of my problem we can pull all sorts of numbers into this and push the stats around. Just the infrastructure costs of highways and bridges alone would extremely favor bicycles, but that would also require ignoring all the other use cases for roads (shipping, ambulances, etc.)

I don't doubt that bicycles are much cheaper and much better (overall) economically compared to cars. I just doubted the numbers and methodology of the source.

esc27 ,

I was thinking more along the lines of Jolene myself…

esc27 ,

Bonsai kitten

esc27 ,

So lead, plastic, and PFAS are fine but fluoride is where they draw the line…?

esc27 ,

Many would leave lemmy entirely. Either because they barely used lemmy anyway or the communities they were most invested in were lost.

Some would fragment across multiple instances, especially if the communities do so.

The bulk would probably move together to a single instance "annointed" as the new default.

esc27 ,

Anxiety (especially now that planes are oversold and standby passengers are nearby waiting to grab empty seats...), the need for overhead bin space, not wanting to have to climb over people, illogical impatience, etc.

esc27 ,

Or we will all have AI chat bots texting for us.

esc27 ,

Hmm. Does God know the largest prime? Does God know the last digit of pi?

esc27 ,

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (written at least 2200 years ago)

esc27 ,

https://www.mturk.com/

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that ...

esc27 ,

I feel like that could backfire. The antivax movement would use it to try and kill off all compulsory vaccinations leading to a resurgence in otherwise rare diseases. ERs would hesitate to perform lifesaving operations without consent over fear of being sued later.

Then there is the question of who makes bodily autonomy decisions for children and people unable to make decisions for themselves. If parents, you could see an increase in religiously motivated mutilations. If the state…

esc27 ,

Voting holidays tend to be a problem because many of the people least able to take time to vote would be considered “essential” and still end up working on the holiday.

Better to make voting holidays entirely unnecessary by relying on vote by mail and a week long opportunity to drop of ballots at secure locations.

Also, you might be able to simplify the voting method a bit by just requiring a candidate to win a majority (not plurality) of the votes. This would encourage districts to explore alternatives to first past the post because otherwise they would constantly need runoff elections.

esc27 ,

You are more optimistic than I am. I worry a particularly “slanted” Supreme Court might interpret school vaccine requirements, quarantine, etc. as coercive violations of bodily autonomy.

Maybe if the amendment had a limited public heath exception and some protections for doctors. But the wording would be tricky.

esc27 ,

Yeah, that’s why any exception would have to be narrow and carefully worded and I’m not even sure it would be possible.

Both risks are pretty bad. Make the protections too strong and people will abuse the privilege. Too weak and governments will abuse the exceptions.

Eh, maybe I’m overthinking it. Even the first amendment is understood not to protect certain kinds of speech. Although sometimes I wonder if those exceptions could survive if directly challenged in our modern situation…

esc27 ,

I was playing with this recently. Suppose you are playing rock, paper, scissors with yourself from a few minutes into the future. Your future self “remembers” what you will play and so as long as you play normally, future self always wins. But change the rules a bit and play where future you goes first.

In a normal game, you should always win because you clearly see how future you played, but future you played to counter what future you remembers present you playing…

E.g. future you remembers playing paper, and so plays scissors. You see scissors and go go play rock, but that should be impossible because future you doesn’t remember playing rock.

The weird thing to me is not that the second scenario (where future you goes first fails) but that playing normally (both going at the same time) works. I think the paradox emerges when future knowledge is introduced to the past. In the normal game, future you does not expose future knowledge until the exact moment you play and cause that knowledge to exist in your present, but in the altered game, the introduction of future knowledge creates a feedback loop.

Of course the game isn’t needed. Simply seeing future you conveys the fact that you exist in the future. Should you, for example (and please don’t do this) see near future you then stab your arm with scissors, you will miss or be stopped because future you does not have a wounded arm.

I wonder what happens if future you’s arm is out of sight. would you be able to stab your arm then only for future you to then reveal a wounded arm?

esc27 ,

I pick box A, then later pay the predictor his cut, which will work because he would have predicted I would do so.

esc27 ,

If there exists a place outside time, then the only way to travel there is to already be there, and if you are there, you can never leave.

esc27 ,

Apple managed to capture lightning in a bottle, twice. First by making a better Walkman, and then again by making that device a phone with internet access. They were able to leverage that success to revitalize their computer hardware business and act as a platform for selling accessories, and all of that made them very successful.

But the stock market doesn’t care about past success, it cares about growth, and without a major new, or buzz worthy product, investors might start to turn against Apple. Problem is, they have ridden the iPod horse about as far as it can go. They tried putting wheels on it, but that failed, and the jury is still out on whether tying one to your face will work out or not.

esc27 ,

Csv is pretty good as well.

esc27 ,

Wait, this award was supposed to be serious? Given the honorees I thought it was an ig nobel or Darwin award sort of thing, possibly run by the onion.

esc27 ,

Mitch McConnell is one of those people who make me want to buy a flagpole. So I can be sure to fly the flag at full staff when he finally dies.

esc27 ,

I generally agree but I think it is starting to change. The primary protest votes suggest there is growing “disapproval” regarding Israel, and this is among actual voters. Not enough to make it politically “safe” for Biden to outright oppose Israel now, but it is something.

esc27 ,

Oh, so they will put a poison pill in it so democrats have to vote against it, then use that vote to block and delay any real support.

esc27 ,

I wonder if down votes should be lightly nerfed. The idea would be to make it easier for people to post mildly unpopular opinions in hopes of furthering discussions and weakening brigading. I imagine there are a lot of people who comment once, get downvoted and then either never comment again, or only comment in ways that are safe and appeal to the community’s biases and sense of humor.

Something like requiring 10 downvotes to drop from 1 to 0.

Oh, it would also discourage spite downvoting since it would be hard for any one user to push a persons comment to 0.

esc27 ,

Especially when people often travel to other time zones or sleep in on weekends…

I suspect the real issue is modern work culture leaves people with so little free time the chronic sleep deficit can’t handle the time change and a work day…

esc27 ,

Standard time in which time zone? Since each zone is (typically) one hour off from the one next to it, then the people in the timezone to the east of yours are essentially on daylight time relative to you.

I could see an argument that sunlight is involved since sunrise times vary by latitude and longitude, but I’m told sunlight arguments are nonsense…

I’ve seen this take a few times now and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Either sunlight matters or it does not, and if it does, time zones seem too broad to adequately match sun positions. (E.g sunrise can be an hour apart on each side of a time zone)

esc27 ,

That still puts the fringes of a timezone possibly 30 minutes off from the ideal, and that is only the east/west direction. Places further from the equator are more susceptible to seasonal light changes.

Really I think time zones themselves are the problem. Prior to that each locality could adopt a time that worked best for them (horrible for trains and probably not compatible with modern communications tech, but easier on the people.) DST is a problematic patch on a problematic system.

Personally I’d like to see UTC adopted more broadly, at least for travel. Flying to NYC to LA takes 6.5 hours but you gain three hours due to time changes making it effectively 3.5 hours. Whereas flying back takes 5.5 hours but loses 3 to make it 8.5 hours. While I understand that intellectually, I find it hard to grasp intuitively. Just give me UTC and a relative time. Say 1900 (noon) or 1600 (mid morning)

It would also help with people living on either side of a timezone. Just say let’s meet at the restaurant at 500 instead of having to specify a timezone. Doubly so for coordinating online meetings with people around the country.

esc27 ,

Put it in one of those scrubbers with a built in soap dispenser and keep it on the shower. Then you can scrub when you shower.

esc27 ,

Wait, did damaging this painting really bring back the dead and save all those people in Gaza? That’s amazing, why isn’t that the lead story in the news everywhere?

esc27 ,

That sounds a lot different and more nuanced than weighing the painting against the entire suffering of the Palestinian people.

I don’t particularly care about this painting, and I hope this ends up doing something positive. But I worry that it is dangerous to celebrate violence just because we like the cause.

esc27 ,

Short term this is disappointing, but long term I think it is for the best. Being unanimous makes it less likely a state will ignore the rulling, and had they ruled against Trump, then we would have seen decades of retaliation from red states removing all democrats for any reason.

The root of the problem remains that nearly half our voting citizens support electing a violent and hateful criminal.

esc27 ,

Yes, and refrigerators actually create more heat than cool.

esc27 ,

Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.

This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.

esc27 ,

Yes and no. The idea that people are temporarily possessed meat puppets is just silly. But I do think there is something intangible that makes a person who they are. That we don’t have souls so much as we are “souls”.

Ug, I really don’t understand it enough to answer the question… it is sort of like the ship of Theseus. If we slowly replace, upgrade, or even modify each part of the ship, it remains the ship of Theseus even when every piece is replaced. There is something intangible left that makes it the ship of Theseus, makes all the old bits still part of it, and incorporates the changes into it as well.

esc27 ,

Most recently, Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies. I used to love the things and they were a nostalgic part of growing up, so I randomly decided to buy a box a few weeks back.

Took two bits of one and threw the whole box away. They were nasty. Chemically tasting, dry, full of little hard bits from poorly milled oats, etc. pure garbage. And this is not a matter of my tastes changing. I remember exactly how those are supposed to be, and the modern version is crap.

esc27 ,

Maybe I’m the centrist in this scenario, but isn’t that just normal left? I’d expect far left to be like “we are going to exterminate all the rich then give their stuff to everyone else”

esc27 ,

This is why the Hubble telescope had mirror problems and James Webb was so delayed. The admins had to sneak delays into the simulation while they upgraded the hardware to render more of the universe.

esc27 ,

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-68301239

A Florida deputy has resigned after mistaking the sound of a falling acorn on his car for a gunshot, prompting him to open fire at an unarmed suspect.

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