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anon2775

16 karma · joined November 17, 2018

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anon2775··on Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
When I was at the Stanford cardiac unit last, they let me sleep. That wasn't the problem but they had a problem giving me privacy: door wide open, curtain wide open.
anon2775··on Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S.
Cults and other extreme forms of magical thinking take root whenever survival seems difficult. Chris Hedges' latest book delves into paths to anomie, self-destruction and insanity that are more likely as a civilization crumbles and slowly cannibalizes itself into oblivion.
anon2775··on Australian Police and spies gain powers to access encrypted messages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Also note that Telegram and WhatsApp are insecure and horrible. I would use Signal, OTR and maybe iMessage if you trust the Apple bean-counter-turned-CEO.

anon2775··on Australian Police and spies gain powers to access encrypted messages
Get your Clipper chips! Steaming hot Clipper chips! Chocked full of vitamins, backdoors and laughably lazy intelligence agency bungling!
anon2775··on Refusal after Refusal
The word "literally" is misused, unnecessary and annoying.
anon2775··on Refusal after Refusal
It sounds like a recipe for anticholinergic, Parkinsonian-like tremors, nausea, vertigo, sweating and other dysfunctions.
anon2775··on White House seeks to end subsidies for electric cars, renewables
The 1% don't care how money is made (who it kills or destroys the planet) so long that it flows. An existential threat from externalities is just another new inelastic market to exploit.
anon2775··on The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016)
0. Take all concepts, modifiers and verbs

1. Make a histogram of their usage

2. Huffman encode them based on what sounds/inflections/etc. are easiest to make and most distinct

3. Add an ECC syllable to each word or phrase

4. Set straightforward, simple semantic rules so that it's mechanical, obvious and unambiguous

Relish in the glory of the next Esperanto.

anon2775··on The Making Of Dust (2003)
We played the beta and first release of CS in college (UCD). Ah the memories of AWP and skywalking (jumping up on crates with aid of a buddy and walking on top of the map's bounding box "sky").
anon2775··on ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’
Yes. What's missing from modern life is somewhat intended by corporations and the political elite: the atomizing of people from each other via glowing screens and burning down of community that churches functioned to anchor people together. The multitude of consequences are loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, depression, anxiety and more suicidal than ever. I'm not arguing magical thinking in any form has any inherent value, but the caring about each other and the social commonwealth collectivism, empathy and support it provided are indispensable to sane, decent, good and successful people. The charity, forgiveness and nonviolent disobedience by deed part of many traditional religous traditions embody virtues that to most are inherently inspirational, noble and provide the foundation of civilization as functional, decent and possessing integrity. If we let society devolve into Orwellian, Kafkaesque, social Darwinism, then feudalism, inverted or outright totalitarianism, bullshit and brutality will comprise the primary palette of the social contract.
anon2775··on Twitter user hacks 50k printers to tell people to subscribe to PewDiePie
Many organizations are in dire need of departmental NAT firewalls and VPN solutions. I had to beg, bitch and moan before a Pac10 uni would offer such a service to protect our users.
anon2775··on Google rescinds candidate verbal offer due to low GPA
Yup. I have a horrible GPA due to a bunch of personal and disability stuff but they never look at it due to experience. If they did, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that favors GPA and/or nonsense certifications. In fact when I hire, I measure candidates inversely proportionate to their list of certs.
anon2775··on How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes
It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions.

Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.

anon2775··on Starting a Business in Silicon Valley
Where to eat, University Ave PA:

- Cafe 220 $

- Oren's Hummus $$

- Crepevine $$

- Il Fornaio $$$

- Coupa Cafe $$

- Local 271 $$

- Sprout $$

- Madera $$$$ (Sand Hill Rd)

Man-bod approved.

anon2775··on Deputy AG calling for encryption backdoor
Hello? It's 1993 calling. Will you buy these discontinued NSA Clipper chips?

No. phreak'n. way. Sunshine.

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

anon2775··on I’ve used Apple computers my entire life. why I'm never buying one again
Glorified Tweet.
anon2775··on Tracking China's Muslim Gulag
Satellite imagery from a BBC investigation

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...

anon2775··on NASA asteroid warning: 700 foot space rock on risk trajectory with Earth in 2023
Estimated mass: 1.51e10 kg - heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza but lighter than the Three Gorges Dam

(4/3) * pi * (213/2 [m])^3 * 3 [g/cm^3]

Mean diameter: 213m

Kinetic energy is 0.5 * m * v^2, so figure 10 [km/s] which works out to 7.59e17 [J] or 181 MT of KE total. The airburst is around the square root of that, so 13.5 MT.

If it hit just right, it would be big enough to wipe out a large city metropolitan area. The odds of it hitting at all aren't that great.

Postscript: There ought to be a scifi weapon that flings pyramids.

anon2775··on Strange earthquake waves rippled around Earth
Long period waves and their decay signature makes me suspect "water hammering" of a large volume of magma came to an abrupt stop inside a magma chamber or tube.
anon2775··on Capitalism, Socialism or a hybrid?
Balance the competing tyrannies

- individual / majority

- class

- age

- ability

- and many more

The messy reality of balancing interests tends not to fit to any impossibly idealistic -ism, but somewhere in the middle between the unworkable utopian extreme goal-posts of libertarian-anarchism and communism. Call it democratic socialism or socialism, what works seems to be a hybrid of many ideals.

Find out more: Economic Updates by Richard Wolff on YT

anon2775··on Swathing is going out of fashion, as most farmers desiccate to ripen their crops
On average, Dutch farmers tend to use the least water per mass of product sold.
anon2775··on Chickenpox Outbreak Hits N.C. Private School with Low Vaccination Rates
No, it's not.

1. Latent VZV causes shingles in later life; a horrible, painful, debilitating condition.

2. It's a signal of intentionally creating other unnecessary, preventable epidemics of treatable, disfiguring and deadly diseases.

anon2775··on NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
This is clickbait based on old news. The MTA hired an unconventional transportation turn-around guru. It's going to take time to make things better.
anon2775··on Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t
Everyone who's family has lived in North America for more than a few generations has at least some of both European and African ancestry. This means, that of these people, "black" Americans have European ancestors, and "white" nationalist Americans have African ancestors. We're all mutts, there's no "pure" anyone... just pure human.

Ancedotally: I'm an SAR member with non-tanning skin but have European, African and Asian/native American genes.

The conclusions: races are illusions and racism is completely idiotic. There are bigger things to worry about or look down on than which flavor of human a person ticks checkboxes for identity politics games.

Questions: Let's be honest, what is "diversity?" And then, why do organizations claim to be diverse when they either hire people that all look like them or hire only people that think or believe as do they? Isn't that the opposite of "diversity," but exclusive monoculture or groupthink?

anon2775··on PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires
Disclaimer: I barely survived the Camp Fire, with all the credit to our neighbors for letting us know.

That's a chick-little, strawman and blame-the-victim argument. The issues are:

1. PGE likely started the fire. They should be held responsible for this specific incident, not passing the buck to ratepayers or anyone else.

2. PGE is corrupting and coopting liability when it needs to pay the penalties for its actions, not pass the buck. This is separate from 1. because it indicates a greater decay of liability and they're insulating themselves to gradually become an untouchable mafia.

3. In order to get 2., removing SIG, PAC and large private monies, and all those who benefit from them, from politics is imperative.

4. Paradise is a tiny town that doesn't do a very good job with code enforcement. My mom had to mobilize the neighbors to get an abandoned propery's owner to mow their 7 ft tall, dried weeds and remove fire other hazards like an abandoned house with a tree crashed through it, but then the institutionalized owner later allowed a random tree-trimmer to dump dozens of piles of pine sawdust and logs on that property. SMH.

5. "Regulations" aren't an uniform obelisk to scapegoat that you implied. One regulation maybe advantageous or harmful uniquely to each and every affected group, depending. So don't even start spreading the tired, libertarian, utopian refrains like "If only there were no regulations, markets solve everything," which is utter horseshit. Regulations can and do work but only if the governed demand it and refuse to allow the rich and their corporations to have their way.

It's the POLR for most former/current homeowners to move to where professional town managers exist rather than deal with small-town incompetence like the bumblers in Paradise or Butte's Sheriff Kory's flimsy excuse for not activating the EAS, which likely caused the needless deaths of hundreds of disabled and elderly people.

anon2775··on A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker
I heard about a mayor from there at one time, nobody's ever heard of him because they were too busy showing empty podiums. ;)
anon2775··on A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker
24 hour donut shops: I've seen them baking all night and morning. It's a rough business.
anon2775··on World′s tallest elevator tower rises in Rottweil, Germany (2015)
Czech Post

https://goo.gl/maps/txNY4VB7Pfz

Is that the right one?

anon2775··on Poppy Seed Tea Can Kill You
3.5 lbs of poppy seed makes how much tea: a cup, a liter or a gallon? Seems like a heckova a lot of seeds for a batch of tea.

If this were in the US, shouldn't this be something the USPHS, USDA or FDA should regulate? Selling bulk poppy seeds containing enormous amounts of would-be heroin seems tantamount to drug trafficking.

anon2775··on Antidepressant withdrawal: reviewing the paper behind the headlines
Anecdotal FYI: missing one dose of mirtazapine feels exactly like a moderate hangover the next morning. I would vaguely hypothesize depression accrues in sleep, ethanol is indeed a CNS depressant with long-term effects and missing doses of medications causes much more harm than previously thought.

Also, I had some nasty vestibular dysfunction from withdrawing from vortioxetine... eyes randomly moving around quickly in all directions on their own, limbs twitching randomly, and any horizontal eye movement causing instantaneous nausea/vertigo.

And, I once titrated off mirtazapine and had some serious nausea... recommend ginger and weed.

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