mkwt

@mkwt@lemmy.world

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mkwt ,

Those pizzas look a lot better than the typical office pizza party I've seen.

mkwt ,

What the heck is that kitchen cabinet thing in the back?

mkwt ,

Big Smoke, you make big mistake.

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    mkwt ,

    In fact this spacecraft is still the designated emergency reentry vehicle for the crew.

    How do you get people to wash their vegetables when you're at their house and you don't wanna seem rude?

    So awkward, but come on it says right there on the package to wash those mushrooms or whatever it is… You’re not their mom but you don’t wanna eat feces or whatever ended up on the produce. A quick rinse is never going to be perfect but it’s better than nothing....

    mkwt ,

    If you add the fat first, the mushrooms are going to release so much liquid that you just have to boil that off anyway.

    mkwt ,

    Fine? That sounds like a thirteenth amendment situation.

    Edit: not US, no thirteenth amendment.

    mkwt ,

    I wonder how much of this is just the Minuteman replacement.

    mkwt ,

    To be fair to Airbus,

    1. They probably chose the language for that call-out way before 2009. Airplanes can live for thirty years, and type designs can keep going several decades longer

    2. The designers were also likely to be French, but they selected English call-outs. This seems to me like a case where they picked a word that's technically in the OED l, but is actually much more common in French.

    mkwt ,

    ...yet.

    mkwt ,

    Is it anything like juche, the Korean-supremacist ideology of North Korea?

    mkwt ,

    Arlington National Cemetery was famously Robert E. Lee's estate before the war. So exactly when was this monument ever in the cemetery, and why did it get in in the first place?

    mkwt ,

    I'm gonna quote Wikipedia on 1 Timothy:

    Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship questioned the authenticity of the letter, with many scholars suggesting that First Timothy, along with Second Timothy and Titus, are not the work of Paul, but of an unidentified Christian writing some time in the late-first to mid-second centuries.[5]. Most scholars now affirm this view.[6][7]

    It turns out that most of the NT passages that have been used to repress women use grammar and vocab that suggest they did not actually come from Paul. And in fact they are a hundred years newer than the letters that do appear to be authentically from "Paul".

    And Paul was the founder of the religion; Jesus didn't expect the world to last longer than the lives of his disciples

    Paul expected the world to end too. That's why he suggested that everyone should be celibate. No point in getting married and having children if the world is just going to end anyway.

    mkwt ,

    Flight attendants are covered by the Railway Labor Act. They can't actually strike. The President can forcibly prevent them from striking. There are serious penalties to be had for any kind of illegal strike.

    So what's been going on instead is an "unorganized" definitely-not-a-job-action where some individual flight attendants do a bad job on service while still fulfilling all of their safety duties.

    mkwt ,

    To me it feels more like post-1939 phony war, but undeclared this time. And unlike 1939, the invasion went wrong and the aggressors are burning up a whole lot of blood and treasure to get not a whole lot of territory.

    mkwt ,

    Wait! You're saying that your police department doesn't get blown up by multiple IEDs every week? How odd.

    </s>
    mkwt ,

    Yea ya can't get any pancakes at the dang Waffle House.

    mkwt ,

    I went to school in the south, and we did learn about this in school, but not necessarily in class.

    My district was still litigating its original Brown v. Board follow-on lawsuit from the 1950s in the twenty-first century. To get released from the lawsuit, the district had to show that the racial composition at each school matched the overall average for the whole district within 10 percentage points.

    That meant that each school needed to be 75-85% black enrollment, in a city that was 54% black overall. Where did all those white students go? They went to private religious schools and to the suburbs. This was obvious to any kid when you went to the sporting events.

    mkwt ,

    Next thing you know, Kansas is sending all-caps letters Remittance and Demand to the NHTSA demanding their share of the Interstate Highway System, as it was allocated to their secret treasury account under the Uniform Commercial Code as enacted by the Continental Congress in 1779.

    (I really need to stop reading that stuff)

    mkwt ,

    A great landing is one where you can still use the airplane afterwards.

    mkwt ,

    Jackson.

    mkwt ,

    Here's my recollection from civics class:

    1. Each state makes their own laws about whether and when a dead candidate can be replaced on the ballot. It's entirely possible that citizens in some states would vote for dead candidates, while citizens in other states are voting for different candidates.

    2. Remember you're actually voting for the electors that are listed underneath each (now presumed dead) presidential candidate. States make their own laws on how strictly the electors actually have to vote for the guy they pledged to. In many states, there's no penalty for being a "faithless" elector, and so in this scenario I would imagine that many electors in this situation would exercise their prerogative to vote for a living person who is eligible to hold the office. Perhaps even a re-nominee from their party.

    3. Electors meet in their state capitols to sign and transmit the real ballots to Congress. However they decide to vote based on the above, I think it's important to the constitution that this happens by a deadline (December 18?), and if that is missed, we may be in real constitutional crisis territory.

    4. After meeting, swearing in new members, and electing a house speaker (I really hope they can elect a speaker), Congress meets in a joint session to count the real ballots from step 3. This process is in the constitution. This is the process that was interrupted by a mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Under the constitution, Congress can only go against what the ballots say if there's a tie, in which case the house votes for president on a one state, one vote basis.

    4a. As seen in 2021, Congress could conceivably engage in a deliberative process to determine whether ballots that are presented are real, legitimate ballots or not. The constitution doesn't actually allow them to do this. This is a real weakness in the system. If Congress isn't allowed to adjudicate ballot legitimacy, then who is? Apparently no one.

    4b. There's also no alternate process if the majority of elector ballots have elected a dead person. Presumably Congress is required to declare that person President.

    1. Constitution also says the next president's term starts on Jan. 20, 2025, at noon eastern, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. If Biden dies in office, his VP Kamala Harris will assume the duties. But that term ends on this date, and the fact that she ascended would have no direct bearing on whether she appears on any presidential ballot.

    5a. This turnover deadline literally has no exceptions. If it is missed for any reason, we're probably in real serious constitutional crisis territory.

    5b. If, per 4b, Congress declared that a dead person was elected president, I imagine that person would have a hard time showing up to inauguration on Jan 20. In this case I think that once the turnover has occurred, the normal line succession, which is 17 people deep*, can be used to swear in the next president.

    5b1. In this scenario, next up would be the vice president-elect from the elector ballots, probably sworn into the vice presidency first. Third in line is the speaker of the house (I really, really hope they can elect a speaker). Then President Pro Tempore of the senate (the longest serving senator), then cabinet secretaries.

    *Most of the 17 are cabinet secretaries. These do not expire automatically when the presidential term expires on Jan. 20. This means that all of the old president's secretaries are still in the line of succession (unless they foolishly submitted resignation letters) until a president is sworn in and either fires them or makes them resign.

    **The presidential term starts at a precise date and time, but a president must swear the oath of office. Both things are in the constitution, so what happens when the time arrives, but the new president isn't sworn in?

    mkwt ,

    <for those who are uninitiated in the black arts of HVAC, "reverse cycle heat pump" is a fancy way to say "air conditioner". The headline makes no sense as written. A "heat pump" is just an air conditioner that you turned around so it cools down the outside and heats up your house.>

    mkwt ,

    In automotive at least, it's pretty common to size the evaporator and condenser coils based on their expected operating temperatures and (therefore) pressures. Usually this means condenser is a lot bigger than evaporator.

    If you reverse the flow with the right valves and compressor setup, then the heat exchangers will still be sized wrong for efficiency. I suppose you could design a bidirectional system from the start that trades off for middling efficiency in both modes.

    I'm not at all convinced that there are a substantial number of such bidirectional-sized residential systems installed in North America. But it's also possible that the residential folks don't care much about HX efficiency.

    mkwt ,

    Always upvote Woody Guthrie.

    mkwt ,

    For those who don't want to read the article to find out, the great saviour OS is Haiku, apparently.

    mkwt ,

    MacOS kernel is actually a BSD UNIX and contains no part of Linux.

    But I think that's really interesting, because I think this author would agree that MacOS is a user friendly operating system, even if it might not be a privacy respecting operating system.

    And that makes sense, because MacOS has architectural similarities to BeOS through its NeXTSTEP heritage. They both have microkernel architecture, with an extensive system-provided graphical toolkit (both systems use the word "kits" for libraries) in an object oriented programming language (C++ for BeOS; Objective-C for NeXT and MacOS). Both BeOS and NeXTSTEP started development around the same time in the 1990s.

    So the complaint about Linux here has nothing to do with the Linux kernel. I don't think the author cares about system calls, networking performance, or driver support. The complaint is with the GNU tools + GNOME or KDE or whatever user space that has no design guidelines, and where the only real lingua franca is the old sh shell.

    I feel like the people warning not to ditch Linux here are mainly worried about hardware support, which is also very valid. But this stuff we're talking about here is also valid, and it's a serious problem for Linux.

    mkwt ,

    I remember when real conservatives wanted to enforce the United States Flag Code. Which would ban this upside down nonsense. Alas, whatever happened to real conservatives?

    mkwt ,

    I think that's what I said the last time this one came around.

    Israel “Likely” Used U.S.-Supplied Weapons in Violation of International Law. That’s OK, Though, State Department Says. ( theintercept.com )

    In a long-awaited report, the State Department lays out numerous suspected international humanitarian violations by Israel in its war on Gaza, yet suggests no changes in policy or consequences....

    mkwt ,

    Israel is a more-or-less democracy in a region where that is quite scarce. For a long time, most of the Arab league was aligned with the Soviet Union, and Israel was the only and primary counterbalance.

    That kind of inertia takes a long time to unwind, even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, and several of those Arab League members have made permanent peace with Israel.

    In conclusion, I don't think Israel "has anything" on the United States. I think the plight of a few million stateless Palestinians is not enough to override the various realpolitik concerns that the United States has in the region.

    mkwt ,

    And really people are not making phone calls nearly as much as they used to. The pollsters need to find a reasonably unbiased method to sample people on other communication methods.

    mkwt ,

    For those who are interested:

    The judge's reasoning here is that she has a large, backlogged docket of pre trial motions to clear relating to handling evidence that is itself classified at trial.

    And she can't really estimate how long it's going to take to resolve all those issues.

    mkwt ,

    This is the Latin police: it's "writ of mandamus" with an 'a.' First conjugation, indicative present, first person plural.

    mkwt ,

    Get a demon core first?

    mkwt ,

    Since the question specifically asked about mailing, I specifically recommend one of those hard sided Pelican cases, with the cut-to-form foam inserts.

    You'll pay a fortune in postage.

    I'm not sure if the postal service routinely scans parcels with a Geiger counter. If they do, you might consider paying an even larger fortune to ship shielding.

    The real engineering challenge is the mechanism that triggers the criticality event. Demon core was able to kill the people it killed, because they were using jankety-ass stuff like screwdrivers to hold the hemispheres apart. Getting a mechanism that works reliably when you want it to, and not when you don't is hard. For the first few years of nuclear weapons, it was not allowed to insert the nuclear pits into the bombs until the plane had taken off with positive attack orders. Imagine trying to jimmy a core into a bomb casing in the bomb bay of a B-29 while it's traversing 800 nm of hostile waters to Japan. Sounds crazy, but that's what they did.

    Anyhow, mechanisms are hard. It took at least twenty or thirty years to get to something that has a "reasonable" level of safety. And if you see the blue light, you're probably already a goner.

    mkwt ,

    Ironically, the (second) KKK was pretty anti-semitic.

    mkwt ,

    If atoms were like the solar system, all of the electron orbits would lose energy and decay by emitting electromagnetic radiation.

    The same type of decay does occur in the solar system as the planets emit gravitational radiation, but the decay rate is so miniscule we can't really detect it.

    mkwt ,

    General relativity is famously difficult to understand, and I don't claim to fully understand it, so I'm going to fall back to the famous rubber sheet model.

    Imagine the Earth in empty space. The mass of the Earth causes spacetime curvature that extends outward away from the Earth. However, if you look a single little patch of spacetime at some distance, say, 1000 km away, that little patch doesn't know that it has to be curved because the Earth is 1000 km away. It doesn't know where the Earth is. It just knows that its neighboring patch is a little bit more curved in the direction that leads to Earth, and its other neighbor is a little bit less curved going away from Earth. This essentially restates the principle of locality: all physics is local physics, and there is no spooky action at a distance.

    Now imagine that the Earth moves by some small distance dx in a small time dt. Going back to our little patch of spacetime, it doesn't know that the Earth moved. So how does it change its curvature to match the new position of the Earth? It changes when its neighbors change. When the Earth moves, the spacetime immediately near the Earth stretches and bends first, then spacetime a little further away, and so on and so on. This process doesn't happen instantaneously; it takes time for changes to propagate to longer distances. The theory predicts that disturbances and ripples will propagate via waves, called gravitational waves, and that these waves travel at the same speed of light as electromagnetic waves.

    Notice I called these spacetime waves "gravitational waves." It is common to use the term "gravity waves" for typical water waves, of the kind you might see at the beach. Those are not the same type of wave.

    Now let's talk about energy. The Earth in the solar system has some energy, including translational and rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy as it sits in the Sun's gravity well, and of course its own thermal energy and rest mass. Waves have the ability to transport energy from one location to another without transporting matter, mass, or electric charge. Spacetime waves are not any different. Because the Earth is moving in a periodic motion, it produces a periodic spacetime wave that propagates outward away from the solar system, and that spacetime wave carries some amount of energy away from the solar system. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the Earth, mainly from the Earth's kinetic energy.

    So the story is that the gravitational waves are very, very, very slightly causing the Earth to slow down in its orbit. And following the laws of orbital mechanics, this causes the Earth to fall closer to the Sun. The result is that over the long term, the radius of the Earth's orbit gets smaller. Alternatively, the Earth's circular orbit is an illusion, and it's actually spiraling inward on a very, very, tightly packed spiral. That's what I meant by "orbital decay."

    I find it hard to overstate just how small this gravitational radiation effect is for a typical solar system situation. We have an observatory called LIGO that can detect gravitational waves. It can measure a variation in distance of a tunnel of several kilometers down to well less than a single proton diameter. (Remember, this is trying to detect disturbances in space and time itself). Even still, it is only able to detect gravitational waves from the most powerful kinds of gravitational events--mergers of black holes and the like.

    Essentially: Spacetime is very "stiff" and gravity is very weak.

    mkwt ,

    Unitarians have entered the chat.

    mkwt ,

    Yeah. Spider man was a big deal at that time

    mkwt ,

    Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon would have needed to make these immunity arguments if he had not received that pardon.

    mkwt ,

    I think that Biden has done a better job of working the hill to get the stuff he wants than Obama ever did

    mkwt ,

    Does this guy even understand what Energy is mostly about? What does he want to happen to all of this country's nuclear infrastructure?

    mkwt ,

    May 9 of which year?

    mkwt ,

    To be clear, nearly every substantial bill in the House only arrives on the floor by passing a custom single-bill rule that was referred out of the rules committee.

    So these normally-party-line rule changes are a routine occurrence in the House. The weird part is that this one went through on a bipartisan vote.

    mkwt ,

    Want.

    mkwt ,

    Devaluing currency?

    Isn't that the thing the US used to accuse a bunch of other countries of doing?

    Sounds like Trump, then.

    mkwt ,

    The thing is that in the presence of wealth taxes, wealth dis-accumulates exponentially in the same way that it accumulates exponentially without the tac.

    So you end up needing much lower percentage rates on wealth to get the same effect as an 80% tax on marginal income. Wealth tax rates as low as single % would dramatically alter the distribution of wealth.

    mkwt ,

    I'm pretty sure that's because the FOSS nerds are working really hard to maintain a high quality experience.

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