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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik ,

The "problem" with that tax is that if it's applied fairly, it gets very big very fast. The damage to the road goes up with weight, but not linearly. Not a square factor, either. Not even cube. It's to the fourth power.

Start applying that to long haul trucks and the whole industry will be bankrupt in a month. The implication being that we are all subsidizing that industry with taxes on roads. Including that one trucker with a "who is John Galt?" sticker on the back.

That said, this is also a very good argument for improving cargo trains to the point where most long haul trucking goes away.

frezik ,

And now you starve. None of the stores will stay open long without them.

frezik ,

Which is good for Airbus, because they haven't been doing themselves a lot of favors, either. The A380 is a pretty good plane that nobody seems to want.

frezik ,

There's a bit of meme that private companies make better decisions because they don't have the silly pressures that the stock market puts on companies. Valve is usually the prime example.

It's not completely wrong, but needs to be more carefully considered. Being private makes it possible to make better decisions due to lack of stock market pressures. Whether companies actually do or not needs to be considered on a case by case basis. There are plenty of private companies that are still run by shitbags.

frezik ,

Their management doesn't just need reshuffling, but we also need to start throwing a bunch of them in jail. They made decisions that specifically led to people dying and endangered countless others.

frezik ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE5G1kTndI4

This is a video from a US-based urbanist channel, and I particularly want to call attention to the modes graph at around the 6 minute mark. This compares driving, high speed rail, and air travel with the distance traveled and figures out the time factor for each compared to the distance. A destination within an hour's drive tends to be better to drive, and then trains become better, and at some point, air travel is better.

As the video points out, the exact numbers depend a lot on individual people, but in general, high speed rail tends to beat air when the destination is within 750 miles.

One problem the US has isn't just that it's big, but that there are huge swaths of absolutely goddamn nothing for the span of several states. This is especially true north of Texas. Go from Minneapolis and trace west, and see how long it takes before you come near a city anyone outside the region cares about. Significantly south of that line is Denver, and you had to cross the Dakotas to get there. Then you're hitting Salt Lake City after another large state's worth of travel (about 500 miles, so we are still within the range where high speed rail would be better). If you were to stay to the north, you wouldn't find much of anything until you get to the west coast.

What that means is that we can have rail that links up the east coast, the Great Lakes states, and the south east and Texas, and then another set of high speed rail that hugs the west coast. Linking those two up, though, is a huge task, and air travel will be faster.

We're likely to have two different networks that, at best, are only connected to the south. Flights across the Plains and Rockies are here to stay. That said, even getting that done would be a huge improvement.

frezik ,

That's downright post-modern.

frezik ,

The version had such poor casting overall, but Ian McNeice rocked it.

frezik ,

Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn't. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.

Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux, but it's also hot garbage that's software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.

frezik ,

You know that guy from Zelda II? He's stopping you from printing.

frezik ,

I liked it on the side in Windows 10. With widescreen monitors, horizontal space is cheaper than vertical space. Doubly so when you go ultrawide.

frezik ,

I've had the exact opposite thing happen with printers. Linux detects and connects to my networked Brother laser without a fuss.

Also, same with some surplus server equipment, like 10G SFP+ NICs. That end of the market makes things for Linux first and Windows second.

frezik ,

The solution capitalism gives us is that those jobs pay less. Any able-bodied person can clean toilets, so supply and demand results in little pay for cleaning toilets. However, those same people deserve a basic human life with food, shelter, and companionship, yet they are easily priced out of this. The "incentive" you speak of is the threat of starvation.

Communism actually recognizes this. Everyone pitches in to get the basic, necessary work done. This tends to be a lot less than generally expected. Most people today are not doing work that is necessary at all.

frezik ,

That's nice. Does it work out that way for jobs with low barriers to entry across the board in your experience?

frezik ,

Depending on . . .

So not depending on if this is a human being who deserves basic food and shelter.

frezik ,

Which in America, is fuck all, and the biggest capitalists have actively stopped them from being instituted. The same people who benefit a lot from having a workforce that is cheap and easily replaceable.

frezik ,

I'm saying that your support is irrelevant. If you tried to be put them into place, you would be fought by extremely powerful interests. This is the only possible way capitalism could be moral, we've tried to do it, and it's not happening.

That's why we look to throw that system away.

frezik ,

There are many paths to this, and I'm not yet settled on anything quite yet. I am convinced that the Marxist-Leninist branch (basically the USSR and Maoist China and the like) went completely down the wrong path; its focus on a vanguard party makes it particularly susceptible to cults of personality. Not just in the Soviet Union and such, but even much smaller groups aligned with that branch that pop up on college campuses.

A good start is getting everyone unionized. Beyond that, there is lots of theory behind mutual aid (such as (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution], which also is something of a precursor to kin selection theory in evolution), and Anarcho-Syndicalists also have some ideas on how to organize groups into almost completely flat hierarchies that all work to mutual benefit.

frezik ,

LOL, he's 63. You know how women say that men think with their dicks too much? Maybe we should stop proving the point.

frezik ,

It gets overlooked today, but Barron Harkonnen is a gay stereotype. Overlooked because gay men being hyperviolent is a stereotype that's long died out, but it was a thing.

Dune starts in a weird place and it gets weirder as it goes.

frezik ,

It's almost the definitive novel of classic Science Fiction, and I mean that in a lot of good and bad ways.

frezik ,

Frank would probably approve of this. Although I'm not sure how much you can really read while on shrooms.

frezik ,

I haven't watched it, but I have read the main series and the prequel novel Asimov wrote late in life. I believe that one takes place around the first season of the show (Seldon making his early psychohistory investigations and finding the Empire is doomed). He does start including women there. Second half of the second book also has a prominent female character.

Keep in mind that those early works were done as short stories for Astounding Science Fiction under the guise of John Campbell. He's responsible for guiding the golden age of SF. Much of it was good in terms of stories and ideas, but he didn't give two shits about female characters. In fact, he never pressed anyone to have characters of any gender to be thicker than cardboard. Finding an interesting character in that era is rare.

frezik ,

Maybe we should drag Lynch back for creating the later movies in the series.

frezik ,

And neither gets enough to cover inflation.

frezik ,

It’s expected to be the cheapest form of electricity soon

You're going to need a big [citation needed] on that one. The cheapest form of hydrogen right now is produced from natural gas. Where is the gain coming from in using natural gas to make hydrogen to make electricity, as opposed to using natural gas to make electricity?

If it's from expected improvements in making green hydrogen via electrolysis, then you're using electricity to generate hydrogen to generate electricity. That can't be the cheapest form of electricity. It could be the cheapest storage solution to combine with solar and wind (probably not, but it could be), but it makes no sense as a form of electricity in its own right.

frezik ,

You need electrolytes (salt) to electrolyze water. Might as well use sea water.

There are plenty of other problems with hydrogen energy, though.

frezik ,

If you come at it from the angle of the equipment used to capture it having a carbon footprint, then that should also apply to equipment doing electrolysis.

That said, what is the level of environmental footprint we're talking about in comparison to electrolysis? We don't know yet, because it's not clear this new source can be economically tapped, but we'll see.

frezik ,

Testing that myth led to a Mythbusters episode that will never be seen.

https://youtu.be/ziQWDnFSPt8?si=euxNN8WsKtI-NhXC

frezik ,

Or you invent weird things to eat. Like Butter Vodka, which is made like this:

  • Take a full stick of cold butter out of the fridge and put it in a Colin's glass
  • Pour vodka over it
  • Enjoy

Third step is optional, and arguably, asperational.

Anyway, that's how my brain works on THC. Some would say even without THC.

frezik ,

Old myth that needs to die. Nature is not a chummy place.

frezik ,

They're good as long as there aren't any limits on characters you can use.

Some people like to use passphrases. But honestly, the gold standard is a password manager with randomized strings.

frezik ,

There seems to be a trend with certain people of always asking to "cite your sources" on every goddamn thing. Then when you refuse, they'll trot out "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and your only claim is that you bought a sandwich yesterday.

Worst way to "win" an Internet fight.

Fridge failures: LG says angry owners can't sue, company points to cardboard box (www.nbcbayarea.com)

Fridge failures: LG says angry owners can't sue, company points to cardboard box::NBC Bay Area’s Consumer team filed a report focused on faulty fridges, and then, viewers responded resoundingly about their own refrigerator problems....

frezik ,

I'm starting to run out of mid-range appliance brands. Had problems with Bosch and Samsung. Now take off LG and Kenmore. There's a few others, but for the most part, it's either cheap appliances left or the higher end stuff like Sub-Zero/Wolf.

frezik ,

It's usually easy enough to adapt it as needed. It can typically send signals compatible with HDMI and DVI-D just fine.

frezik ,

There's some really high bandwidth stuff that USB-C isn't rated for. You have to really press the limits, though. Something like 4k + 240Hz + HDR.

frezik ,

USB-C with Thunderbolt currently had a limit of 40Gbit/sec. Wikipedia has a table of what DisplayPort can do at that bandwidth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort

See the section "Resolution and refresh frequency limits". The table there shows it'd be able to do 4k/144hz/10bpp just fine, but can't keep above 60hz for 8k.

Its an uncompressed video signal, and that takes a lot of bandwidth. Though there is a simple lossless compression mode.

frezik ,

I have plenty to hide from exactly the sorts of people who make that argument.

frezik ,

I think this used to be a Polish virus joke back in the DOS or Win95 days. That was probably the last era where there were jokes about Polish people being inept.

frezik ,

Yes, in fact, that's what happened last time the whole Arab peninsula was knocked off the Internet.

frezik ,

They like the version of the '60s civil rights movement they constructed in their head. Their conception of old X-Men can fit into that.

Notice that conservatives complaining about "wokeness" always point to superficial attributes. A woman protagonist in a superhero movie, a half second lesbian kiss, or a black actor for a traditionally white character. They don't point to media that has even slightly deeper ties to leftist thought, such as Andor or The Expanse. If they do at all, it'll be for only those superficial attributes. They don't even recognize it for what it is.

frezik ,

See, all you had to do was have enough money to start a competing business in a market with very important safety considerations, and people will flock to buy your product instead of theirs.

  • some dumbass Reddit libertarian
frezik ,

Escortware. You're not paying for the software, you're paying for the time you're using the software.

frezik ,

The odd emoji at the end of a message is fine. It's embedding them throughout the text that makes it borderline unreadable.

frezik ,

I kinda like the idea of the laptop industry coming up with a bunch of wild concepts where only one out of ten is ever useful. The car industry does this all the time.

If you go to car shows, you'll see all sorts of cars with a full glass passenger area. They'll never happen, one reason being that you can't fit an air con unit strong enough to keep the passengers from cooking on a sunny day, but they're neat to look at.

frezik ,

Everyone in the circlejerk can look at the same screen.

frezik ,

Everyone forgets the Korean war, but MacArthur begged for the use of nukes when he fucked up and gave the Chinese an excuse to get directly involved. This is especially notable because while the USSR had tested a nuke at that point, they didn't have many, and they didn't have the ability to deploy them en masse against the US directly. The US still had an effective monopoly on deploying nukes, and it still didn't use them.

Oh, and fuck MacArthur.

frezik ,

There was a coup in the Japanese military to try to prevent a surrender after the nukes were dropped. Things are far from that simple.

Now, one thing I'll agree with is that Japan would have surrendered long before on the condition that the Emperor would be kept in place. Then we got the unconditional surrender, and after all the peace talks were done and documents signed, we still allowed the Emperor to keep his place. The argument here is that the American people were out for blood and public perception would only accept unconditional surrender. I don't think that's a very good moral argument, though, especially when it led to nukes being used in anger.

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