merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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merc ,

BBSes were a thing for decades before the Web.

The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was started in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBBS#/media/File:CBBS_Login.svg

merc ,

Also, most people are nearly athiests.

Christians deny the existence of Zeus, Ra, Mars, Shiva, Odin, Thor, Kali, Horus, Tew, Huitzilopochtli, Pele, Erra... Of all the gods and goddesses that people have ever said exist, Christians don't believe in any of them other than their one god. Even Hindus, who have a pantheon with multiple gods, generally don't believe in the gods of other religions.

merc ,

Piracy has never been stealing. It's copyright infringement. The two are completely different.

merc ,

Humans are descended from apes, humans are apes, and humans are cousins of the other modern apes.

We're not descended from chimpanzees, but both we and chimpanzees descend from another ape.

merc ,

Most people don't live in Northern Ontario.

Most Ontarians live in cities.

merc ,

Their are other misteaks people make aswell, alot of people don't know english good.

merc ,

One woman can deliver a baby in an hour, if she's a doctor or a midwife.

merc ,

Yep. Because stealing is a crime that goes back thousands of years. It was an old crime by the time the 10 commandments were written down. Meanwhile, copyright infringement is a new thing that's maybe a few centuries old at most, and it's a lot more morally ambiguous. Is it wrong to infringe on a monopoly that the government has given a corporation over the sharing of a tangible expression of an idea? Maybe sometimes? Maybe not other times?

merc ,

I wonder if the people who wrote the law know that there are multiple versions of the 10 commandments.

They're pretty similar, but the numbers don't match up.

The commandment against killing is #6 for Jews and Protestants, but #5 for Catholics. Stealing is #8 for Jews and Protestants, but #7 for Catholics. Then there are some bigger differences.

For Jews #2 says "You shall have no other gods beside me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth." That's effectively split into #1 and #2 for Protestants, with #1 being "no other gods" and #2 being "no graven images". For Catholics, "no other gods" is #1, but they got rid of the bit about graven images, presumably so they can have old finger bones people can worship, or statues to Mary. So, for Catholics #2 says not to take the name of their god in vain. Catholics make up for that by having a commandment against coveting the milf next door and a second one about your neighbour's stuff, whereas Jews and Protestants have just 1 commandment against coveting your neighbour's stuff.

Also, the Jews didn't seem to understand the assignment for #1, because it's not actually a commandment, it's backstory: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage." So, Jews really have 9 commandments and 1 informational message.

Also, fun loophole. All 3 versions say "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." #9 for Jews and Protestants, #8 for Catholics. But, if someone isn't your neighbour... Loophole!

merc ,

Still doesn't make it a "commandment".

A commandment is an order like "You shall not murder." It is an action that you could take, but are being ordered not to take. How would someone violate the Jewish 1st commandment?

If it were something like "I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and you shall never suggest that that isn't what happened", then it would be a commandment. As it stands, it's not a commandment, it's just backstory.

merc ,

The jewish one, the catholic one or the protestant one?

merc ,

Well, it's 10, so it can't be the Jewish version. I'm guessing the Protestant version.

merc ,

I don’t have a parking space at my apartment

A way to charge it at home is also a major issue for anybody who lives in an apartment.

merc ,

it’s super convenient to never go to a gas station again, and to wake up to a full tank

But, to make that possible, you basically have to have a "gas station" at home. If you own your own house you can modify it to install a charging spot. If you rent, you might not have that option.

merc ,

Hopefully it won't be, but charging an electric car is still not a standard thing for apartment buildings to offer tenants. So, for the moment, that's a major reason for renters to not take the plunge.

merc ,

All EVs come with Level 1 chargers that plug in to your standard house outlet.

Sure, but if you use those it takes a very long time to charge. Like, from empty it can take 40+ hours to charge a battery EV from empty to 80%. If you're using your car to commute and your commute is anywhere near the max range of your car, that isn't a viable option.

merc ,

Meanwhile, at the Joker's hangout

merc ,

earsay?

merc ,

Earsay?

merc ,

To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.

Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That's about 10x as much power as a cell phone's radio, but it's still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it's extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it's still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It's being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they're still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they're decoding a signal that's 10^-18 watts.

So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you're doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.

The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you'd probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn't do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.

So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.

merc ,

Nintendo used to be a company that specialized in cards, although these days it's more associated with carts. They made a very successful transition into gaming, but still make cards in Japan.

I can't see Hasbro being as effective though. I'm sure Hasbro is just going to try to churn out shovelware that bears their IP so that they can monetize things they own.

merc ,

Exactly. If you eat bananas that arrive in a port on a ship, that ship spewed out a lot of CO2. If everybody changed their habits and ate something locally grown instead, those emissions would not happen (but other emissions might happen instead). Every CO2 emission by a profit-driven company is going to be the result of a person buying one of their products.

We live in a society, and the amount of difference one person can make is pretty small. Often all of the options available to us are bad. But, this meme is worse.

The ridiculous aspect of this meme is that it shifts the blame onto companies, and allows people to pretend that their lifestyles and choices deserve none of the blame, and instead it's just some evil companies that are ruining the world. The unfortunate fact is that in this modern society, if you're living like a typical European or North American, even if you think of yourself as an environmentalist, your lifestyle probably results in a ton of CO2 emissions.

merc ,

why aren’t these companies having to pay for the damage they cause?

Because it's too difficult to measure, and it affects the entire world in a diffuse way, instead of affecting a small group of people in a really concentrated way.

If a factory's process resulted in extremely loud noise for their neighbors, the neighbors would try to get the factory shut down. They'd get involved in local politics. They'd show up to town meetings, etc.

If a factory's process resulted in a river getting polluted, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, but in a way that is hard to measure and tough to notice, they might get away with it. It would be hard to figure out exactly what damage is being done. Maybe cancer rates in the area are slightly higher than usual, but it takes scientists and doctors to notice that. Maybe that gets people outraged enough that some of them try to get the place shut down, but other people are going to be out there saying the factory is a source of jobs, and that maybe it wasn't actually pollution that caused the cancers.

With CO2 emissions, the effect is global, and any one factory's emissions are extremely tough to nail down. The affected people mostly aren't local, they're around the entire world. Even if they want a factory to be shut down, they have no leverage because they might not even be in the same country as the factory. And, since every factory does it, you can't easily narrow the focus down on one individual factory. Plus, that factory employs people, and if you shut it down they lose their jobs.

So, that's the problem with trying to focus on a form of pollution that is diffuse and worldwide.

The other issue is how would you determine the "true price". The price of something being sold is based on the cost of the goods needed to produce it, any fees, fines or taxes the company needs to pay, what they think people will spend, etc. So, maybe you think the price should be higher. How do you arrange that? You could increase the price of the items the company is buying. But, that just shifts the problem to a different company. You could add fees or fines, but a lot of people hate the idea of carbon taxes, and when governments threaten them, companies threaten to move somewhere else where those taxes don't exist.

It seems like you haven't really thought this through.

merc ,

Let me just buy some locally grown bananas, in the north…

That's my point. You can't. If you want to not be responsible for those CO2 emissions you have to eat something else.

It is totally up to the governments to regulate emissions, with regulations.

Sure, but you also have personal agency. You can choose to eat beets instead of bananas. You can choose to pay to have an old monitor fixed by a local repair shop instead of buying a new one. Instead, people use the lack of government rules as an excuse to continue to live the way they want to live. They choose to blame corporations for polluting instead of their own choices as consumers.

If I want a banana, I’ll get a banana. I will have no idea or information whether it’s shipped with the shittiest fuel burning ship, or an electric locomotive.

Yes, because you don't want to know. You will never do that research. Admittedly, the research is hard to do. It's hard to do a complete calculation of all the CO2 costs of the entire chain of events that results in a banana on sale at a local supermarket vs. a locally grown beet.

People could choose to try to do that research, but they don't. It's hard, and it's depressing. Instead they'll feel good about recycling an aluminum can, and never think about the environmental impact of driving around the city in a car.

And will people vote for stricter emissions laws and/or carbon taxes? Some people will, many people will vote against it. Many of the supporters will also not make it a priority. And, if the party that promised carbon taxes and/or stricter emissions wins but then gets lobbied and doesn't enact those new laws, very few people are going to go out and protest.

The government's lack of action and the idea that corporations are really to blame for CO2 emissions is a convenient way for people to continue to live their massive energy footprint lives, while shifting the blame to someone else.

merc ,

And, how likely do you think that any laws are going to actually get passed?

People's consumption is the only real thing they have agency over. They can vote, but if voting is more a placebo than an actual way to change things.

merc ,

they imagined a solution would pop up where they themselves would not be required to make sacrifices

Exactly what's happening in Canada with the carbon tax. If you emit more CO2 than the average you pay a tax. If you emit less you get a rebate. But, now people who emit more than the average think that their case is special and they shouldn't have to make a sacrifice because they're not the real problem.

they imply that corporations emit greenhouse gases totally decoupled from the people’s consumption

Yes! Or, they think that corporations are maliciously burning fossil fuels for the hell of it. While corporations might not care about the environment, they do care about profits. They will burn oil to make profits, but if they can find a way to burn less oil and use that to make more profits, they'll do that too. Now, sure they'll also burn more oil if they can make a business case to do it. But, unless you're talking entertainment companies like Las Vegas casinos, corporations are generally not burning oil just for the hell of it.

merc ,

the specific argument you put forward is rather weak

I wasn't claiming to pick the most environmentally destructive thing that people do. I was just picking a random, easy-to-understand thing that seems innocuous but still contributes to climate change. People know that driving cars is bad for the environment, but often don't stop to consider that eating a banana could also be bad because of the shipping.

the problem cannot be solved from the consumer’s position

Not completely, but consumers can change their habits and make a significant dent in the problem. For example, "people sitting in tons of steel making short trips". If people stopped driving, or at least significantly reduced it, that would have a real effect.

I'd argue that the problem can't currently be solved by voting either. Yes, government regulation eventually has to be the answer, but right now there are too many people who would vote against that kind of a change, or who at least wouldn't make it a priority. And, with all the fossil-fuel special interest money flowing into politics, even if it is a priority for a voter, there will often be elections where both major party candidates are in the pocket of the oil industry.

If people change their own personal habits (i.e. stop driving) that makes a small dent in the problem. But, it also motivates them to try to campaign, run for office and vote for other people who will make that kind of a change. If you stop driving you realize how much cities are geared around driving. How many hidden subsidies drivers get, etc. If you keep driving but just vote for candidates who talk a good game about carbon taxes, when they back down on those promises you sigh but you aren't highly motivated to keep pushing.

merc ,

It's a bit late to make plans. Roads are going to be massively congested in the hours before and after. The best way to avoid that is to stay somewhere overnight, but those places are all booked now.

merc ,

Even worse... he's vegan.

merc ,

No, but he's into Effective Altruism, which is yet another thing you just don't want to talk to people about.

merc ,

It's complete bullshit, you lose nothing by completely ignoring it.

But, if you want to be amused and/or outraged by the bullshit, Wired had a good article about it recently:

https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/

merc ,

Yeah, I love rolling dice, but certain rolls shouldn't be done by the players.

Rolling on a hit in combat? That should definitely be the player. You know how well you swing your sword and when it makes good contact.

Rolling on perception should almost always be done by the DM. This is especially true when another party member can rescue the bad roll. Like, someone rolls to spot a hidden enemy. They fail, but shouldn't know it, but they rolled a 2, so... Another player at the table sees this horrible roll and they have their character light a torch and look out into the wilderness. Sure, that's metagaming, but it's really hard to avoid when you know someone failed a potentially important roll.

One idea I'd like to see, and might try if I ever DM'd a game would be Dunning-Kruger rolls. The Dunning-Kruger effect is basically how people who are incompetent at something sometimes think they're much better than they are, and people who are experts (and realize how complex things are) underestimate their own competence.

So, in this case, the DM rolls a die which says whether the rolls are normal or reversed, then the player rolls. If the DM's roll said the player's roll was reversed, the player's 20 might become a 1, or a 1 might become a 20 (the actual number is 21 - roll). Mid rolls stay roughly the same: a 10 becomes an 11, for example.

If the barbarian is trying to check for traps and gets an 18, the DM might say "You're confident there are no traps", but that could be the result of overconfidence when they really "rolled" a 3. If they get a 10, the DM might say "You didn't notice a trap, but you're not sure". You could set this up so if someone has a proficiency, the DM rolls a D10 and only a 1 means the player's role is reversed. But, if the player is trying something they're not good at, a 1 to 5 on the D10 means it's reversed.

I haven't tried this, so there may be serious flaws in it in reality. But, I like the idea of players still being able to roll for something like spotting a hidden enemy, but not knowing for sure if their roll is good or not.

merc ,

human drivers of fire is exactly what it sounds like

Dudes who drive flaming cars in stunt shows?

merc ,

The nodes are features

I think the fact every car is white is a feature.

merc ,

Take for example, here is a map of active fires around the globe, right now:

By "fires" do they mean fores fires? Controlled fires to burn crops, or burn land to clear it for crops? House fires? Bonfires? Campfires? Fires in fireplaces?

Ignition is a fundamental for fire to happen, and humans cause WAY more ignition events than nature does.

A car causes hundreds of ignition effects per minute. But, I'm guessing you mean a certain kind of ignition?

The timing and frequency of these events directly influence the frequency of fires.

The timing and frequency of things like lighting a fire directly influence the frequency of fires? Do you mean the frequency of out-of-control fires? Because otherwise that seems like a pretty obvious conclusion.

merc ,

If you noticed and are distracted (and you're not the only one), I'd argue that it's a them problem not a you problem. If you're "dressed up professionally for an office environment", that dress code is supposed to be boring, conservative, modest clothing. I personally hate workplaces like that, but if that's the kind of place you work, then that's the expectation.

Assuming what you found distracting were nipples, there are ways of not wearing bras while still keeping nipples hidden or at least discrete. If someone's supposed to be "dressed up professionally for an office job", it's reasonable to say that someone who isn't making an effort to hide her nipples isn't meeting the dress code. It would be the same if a guy came in wearing a skin-tight shirt from Father Sons.

I would love it if we lived in a world where workplaces just let people wear the clothing that made them comfortable, but until we reach that world, people who have to dress conservatively for a business environment are going to have to cover up.

merc ,

Yes, there's some reading comprehension issues here, but there's also bad writing.

The original question is about size, but the Philosopher, for some reason, makes a detour into mass. This detour goes nowhere, and just ends up as a distraction to the point he's trying to make. He could have just said, "Suppose you were to have $30 in coins instead, which would have more value, the coins or the bills?" No introduction of "mass" for no reason, just a straightforward analogy that different things can have the same value. Or, he could have kept the idea of size: "Suppose you needed to carry $30 in coins instead, would you need a bigger wallet? ... Ah, but which wallet's contents would have the greater value?"

It's also distracting that he says "you were to have $30 in coins as well". That makes it seem like it's important that Anon now has $60 instead of $30. If the idea was to compare $30 in coins to $30 in bills, a better wording would be "instead". Then you're comparing two situations in which Anon has $30, instead of a situation where he now has $60 instead of his original $30 but half of it is now in coins.

The way it's written is like a trick question where the obvious answer is wrong. The obvious answer is right, it just feels like it's wrong because it's badly written.

merc ,

Just because it was written badly doesn't mean I didn't understand.

merc ,

The irony: you posted this because your reading comprehension was too low to understand what I wrote.

merc ,

Larger breasts have more mass.

Yes, but that detail is not necessary to the story, so it is bad writing to introduce it.

You have to be able to interpret what someone is saying, even if they don’t phrase it in exactly the way that would make it easiest for you personally to understand.

In other words, if the writing is bad. Thank you for agreeing with the point I was making: the writing is bad.

merc ,

Ok, I thought you said "even if they don't phrase it in ... the way that would make it easiest ... to understand".

So, bad writing.

merc ,

Maybe you're just a bad writer.

merc ,

It's important to remember that whistleblowing is extremely stressful, so much that it's one of the main things the government talks about on their whistleblowing site:

Practice self-care and stress-reducing activities throughout your whistleblowing process. It is common to experience toxic forms of retaliation – from professional isolation to gaslighting (manipulating someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity) – which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or even thoughts of harm.

https://whistleblower.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/whistleblower.house.gov/files/whistleblower_survival_tips.pdf

Researchers have found the same thing, being a whistleblower is terrible for your mental health:

About 85% suffered from severe to very severe anxiety, depression, interpersonal sensitivity and distrust, agoraphobia symptoms, and/or sleeping problems, and 48% reached clinical levels of these specific mental health problems. These specific mental health problems were much more prevalent than among the general population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604402/

In addition, "Half of Patients With Suicidal Thoughts Deny It"

Not only did approximately 50% of people with suicidal thoughts deny having those thoughts, roughly 50% of people who had died by suicide, and 30% of people who had attempted suicide had denied having suicidal ideation in the week or month beforehand.

Furthermore, in many cases, people who had disclosed in apps and on paper that they had thoughts of suicide then denied that they had suicidal ideation when questioned directly in face-to-face assessments or interviews. For example, in one study, nearly 60% of those who reported their suicidal ideation on an app then denied their suicidal ideation in a telephone interview less than 24 hours later.

https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.10.9

So, just because he denied he was suicidal doesn't mean that's necessarily true. He might have been trying to appear strong to everyone while suffering in silence.

This should definitely be investigated as possibly being murder. And, even if the investigation does determine that he shot himself, they should keep looking to see if he was being blackmailed or if he might have been pressured into suicide.

I just can't imagine an executive at Boeing going out and hiring a hit man. But, what I can imagine them doing is hiring a team of private investigators to go through this guy's entire life and dig up every bit of dirt on him. It could be they found something really embarrassing and were going to blackmail him with it. It could be that they found something innocent that they could frame as being awful, like to make him look like he was a child molester or something.

merc ,

Maybe, but Mandarin / Chinese isn't really used outside China. English has about 1.5 billion speakers, and over 1 billion of them speak it as a second language. Chinese has 1.1 billion speakers, but only 200 million speak it as a second language. It seems like the international langua franca is English.

Policies could change, and China could try to teach people Mandarin as part of the Belt and Roads initiative. But, right now, if you're trying to do business in other countries or with foreigners in your country, English is the most useful language to know.

That's not to say that future-English will necessarily be too similar to current English. I'm sure the more it spreads, the more it will change.

merc ,

A Latin term used in English to indicate French.

But really, isn't the "Franca" part from the Frankish language used in West Germany / Northern France / Benelux? Apparently the Byzantines called all Western Europeans "Franks" and the Lingua Franca was the simplified Italian / Spanish language with many Greek, Slavic, Arabic and Turkish loan words used for trade around the Carribean. So, it's more "English is the European Language" or maybe "English is the language to use with Europeans".

merc ,

There’s a Brexit joke in there somewhere.

Definitely, but I think the Brexiteers get a last laugh because AFAIK EU business is still done in English.

merc ,

retire

merc ,

Increasing productivity per labor hour invested

How are you measuring that?

for everyone to have a 1950s life

Does this mean no Internet, no computers, no TV, or maybe a small black and white TV with only 3 channels, no washing machine, probably no refrigerator, one telephone for the entire family to share, etc.?

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