booly

joined 1 year ago
[–] booly 39 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Glasses make me look weak. They're like a wheelchair for the eyes.

[–] booly 4 points 4 days ago

When corn is in season, fresh corn cobs sell for about 5 for $1. I'd guess each cob is about 1 pound, so we're talking $0.20/pound, or $0.44 per kg.

Obviously the corn cob itself isn't edible, so you're not getting a pound of food from each, but there is also bulk processed frozen corn year round that is still usually less than $1/lb.

[–] booly 4 points 4 days ago

By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

[–] booly 4 points 4 days ago

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It's not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It's actively saying "this party is better than that party." And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

[–] booly 2 points 5 days ago

In the U.S., they meter gas by the "therm," which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It's a misconception that it's equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don't confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

[–] booly 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?

[–] booly 5 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Unless you're converting seconds to minutes, hours, days, years, etc.

Then you get things like watt hours. Or light years.

[–] booly 42 points 6 days ago (3 children)

These fuckers act like they've never heard of Lina Khan. Let's see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they're so serious about tech competition maybe they'll get on board with net neutrality.

And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She's got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.

[–] booly 89 points 6 days ago (14 children)

Cultural appropriation is a broad enough term to functionally be meaningless, but I've found it helpful to think through 4 distinct interests at play, that I think are legitimate:

Proper attribution/credit. We don't like plagiarism or unattributed copying in most art. Remixes, homages, reinterpretations, and even satire/parody are acceptable but we expect proper treatment of the original author and the original work. Some accusations of cultural appropriation take on this flavor, where there's a perceived unfairness in how the originator of an idea is ignored and some copier is given credit. For a real world example of this, think of the times the fans of a particular musical artist get annoyed when a cover of one of that artist's song becomes bigger than the original.

Proper labeling/consumer disclosure/trademark. Some people don't like taking an established name and applying it outside of that original context. European nations can be pretty aggressive at preserving the names of certain wines (champagne versus sparkling wine) or cheeses (parmigiano reggiano versus parmesan) or other products. American producers are less aggressive about those types of geographic protected labels but have a much more aggressive system of trademarks generally: Coca Cola, Nike, Starbucks. In a sense, there's literal ownership of a name and the owner should be entitled to decide what does or doesn't get the label.

Cheapening of something special or disrespect for something sacred. For certain types of ceremonial clothing, wearing that clothing outside of the context of that ceremony seems disrespectful. Military types sometimes get offended by stolen valor when people wear ranks/ribbons/uniforms they haven't personally earned, and want to gatekeep who gets to wear those things. In Wedding Crashers there's a scene where Will Ferrell puts on a fake purple heart to try to get laid, and it's widely understood by the audience to be a scummy move. Or, one could imagine the backlash if someone were to host some kind of drinking contest styled after some Christian communion rituals, complete with a host wearing stuff that looks like clergy attire.

Mockery of a group. Blackface, fake accents, and things of that nature are often in bad taste when used to mock people. It's hard to pull this off without a lot of people catching strays, so it's best to just avoid these practices. With costumes in general, there are things to look out for, especially if you're going out and getting smashed.

[–] booly 1 points 6 days ago

In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you're modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.

In other words, if you're simply talking about "resistance," you're already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.

[–] booly 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We want to desalinate water so that we have fresh water.

Doing so generates salt as waste and requires safe/responsible disposal.

We can sell some of the salt, as a product.

But the market won't buy all of the salt.

So the salt just goes back to the "waste" category, and we need to find disposal methods.

I don't see where scarcity (whether artificial or natural) comes into play. The world has lots and lots of salt, and anyone who wants it can get it very cheap.

[–] booly 6 points 1 week ago

Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm's law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you've got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.

And when you have time variance that isn't a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word "voltage" starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.

So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That's the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you're creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there's never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person's body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.

And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.

So it's current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn't always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.

 

Amazon is running a Prime Day sale on July 16 and 17. Setting aside the fact that this is two separate days, neither 716 nor 717 are prime numbers. They should've done 7/19 instead.

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