ashtonkem

Nevermind the risk that it’s actually a cop sending these requests for their own personal reasons. It’s far from unheard of for cops to abuse these systems to harass former partners and personal rivals; the courts are supposed to provide oversight to prevent these abuses.

And this is why my reolink cameras are on a subnet without access to the internet. The only thing it can reach is my home assistant and open source NVR.

Given how many fake products amazon sells and intermingles with legitimate products, it isn’t at all surprising that they forwarded you to a scammer. They just don’t care about protecting their customers, apparently.

They tend to go through a lot of water too, which is the big issue with the datacenter Meta wants to put in a town nearby to me.

The issue with pair programming has always been that some people hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. I’m one of them. Its very effective I don’t dispute that, but it makes me absolutely miserable and I’ll end up quitting to avoid doing it.

The restrictions the state places on us largely function as a one way ratchet, alas. There is a lot about American drug policy that is wildly unpopular, and yet here we are.

A huge portion of the issue is that we’re largely ruled by people who don’t need to deal with any of the inconveniences they cause; if any senator or rep has a runny nose I’m sure they can get an aide to sort it out for them. The rest of us are not so lucky.

“I asked a cop about how effective an OTC medicine is” is an absolutely insane thing for anyone to say, let alone a legislator. Sadly it does not seem like such behavior receives the social opprobrium it deserves.

Not entirely unique to Seattle, in my experience.

Seared into my head is my experience of trying to buy alcohol in Boston back in 2009, when I was in town for a wedding. I had just turned 21 so buying alcohol was still novel and exciting. I had multiple bars and liquor stores refuse my valid Illinois license, forcing me to hand alcohol to my father to purchase, and find shady bars that wouldn’t card me. It was extremely frustrating to have to rely on such tactics despite being legally allowed to purchase alcohol.

You’re using a much more narrow definition of what a coup d’état means.

> The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority.

Or to use Wikipedia’s definition

> A coup d'état (French for "blow of state"), often shortened to coup in English (also known as an overthrow), is a seizure and removal of a government and its powers. Typically, it is an illegal seizure of power by a political faction, rebel group, military, or a dictator. Many scholars consider a coup successful when the usurpers seize and hold power for at least seven days.

Yes, the military can be involved in a coup, but the essential definition does not require their involvement. Different terms might be applied if the military is involved, and based on whether or not the military is the primary driver (as in Myanmar) or is backing one side.

It is worth pointing out that the American penal system is already distressingly close to the scope of the gulag system in Stalinist Russia. The gulag system hit a high of 1.5m prisoners in the 1940s out of a population of 168m (pre war), or about 0.89%. America’s prison population peaked in 2009 at an estimated 0.754%. If you include parole that shoots up to 3.1%, but I’m not sure how to compare that to the gulag system

Wildly different death tolls though. Our best estimate is that the gulag system had an 8.88% death rate, with that varying wildly on a year by year basis. Meanwhile the US prison system as of 2018 kills 344 per 100,000, or .344%. But unfortunately those numbers are getting worse, not better. I think the difference here is less about our system being more humane, and more the fact that food and antibiotics are cheap. Heck, just look at how the prison system responded to covid.

I honestly think we’re a lot closer to a gulag system than people think. We’ve already built the majority of the machinery to actually implement such a system, and politically making the system harsher and less humane is very popular. There is also a bipartisan consensus that what we need is to fund the system even more. All that we’re missing is the jump to directly imprisoning political opponents, and we’ve already seen some calls for that although it isn’t quite mainstream yet.

If you have made the kind of enemies that will build an EMP to destroy your car, you have different sets of problems than most of society.

This is not something your average person has to worry about, no matter what kind of car they drive.

Depends on the size of your yard and how quickly it grows. My current yard is on the edge where power is a nice to have, my parents’ old yard would have taken hours to do with a non-powered motor.

I honestly assumed they were two stroke. The last lawn mower I used at my parents house was two stroke IIRC (smelled like it at least), and I never bought a gas mower once I bought a house. I went straight to electric.

Electro Magnetic Pulses? The thing that requires us to detonate a nuclear weapon to create at any meaningful scale? No. I wouldn’t worry about that at all.

Besides, if we somehow managed to create an EMP above your city and not set off a full scale nuclear war, your gasoline car and gas pump wouldn’t work either. Those also have computers in them that are critical to their functioning.

We have this conversation on this forum a lot, and many of us are emphatically pro nuclear power. I’m not sure what you’re talking about tbh.

Part of the reason why all cars seem to look the same nowadays is that maximizing aerodynamics, passenger safety, interior volume, and comfort doesn’t leave the designer a lot of room to work with. Very little of the “sameness” is driven by the propulsion mechanism; EVs are already becoming similar but with a frunk.

It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.

Probably because high levels of math skill don’t translate to economic success. Analytical thinking is a good skill that math can teach you, but there is more than one path to that. In the context of a college education the ability to write clearly and persuasively is far more an important skill to learn.

As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?

As a general rule, I always look at more subjective measures like extra curriculars and “well-roundedness” with a huge amount of skepticism. Such subjective standards are phenomenal places to hide discrimination and favoratism.

It seems to be a problem common among specialists, especially among highly valued specialists. I’ve heard the same complaints about lawyers and doctors, for example, so it doesn’t seem to be specific to the “good with computers” crowd.

You should look up how many people are killed per MWh produced by coal and natural gas. People overweight on rare, high impact disasters and underweight things that quietly kill people in a dispersed way.

Related fact, roof top solar actually kills more people per MWh than nuclear, and that is entirely due to installation accidents.

The current war and gas crisis in Europe is finally underscoring one of the points that’s been ignored for a long time; depending on unstable rentier states to secure the energy required for HVAC and transit is unbelievably foolish national policy. Nuclear is really expensive to build, both in terms of money and political capital, but the benefits are more apparent once crisis hits oil producing states, which was always inevitable.

Lumber production responds slowly to market demands, as it takes a while to cut down, mill, dry, and transport lumber. It’s entirely possible that rapidly changing consumer demand causes wild cycles as the supply chains struggle to scale up and down in response to consumers who are likewise reacting to price changes driven by their own behavior.

Made, not designed. Mass production a century ago was a fundamentally manual process, and therefore would show much more variation per item than modern processes.

The only argument for it being designed for durability is that the designers assumed poor tolerances in the manufacturing process, and therefore designed with that in mind.

This is precisely why most people abandoned old appliances, even if they “last forever”. Often the energy efficiency of newer devices is well worth the reduced lifespan.

Also, survivorship bias. Not every electric motor made a century ago survived until today; we just see the really well made ones that did.

Because Russia can't wage a par purely based on what's in Putin's head. The assumptions and beliefs of any given leader ends up encoded in both internal policy memos, and in the observed strategic decisions made by the various agencies tasked with executing on said leader's goals. Both are places where external observers can infer what is going on in the upper levels of the government.

If you can’t restrain yourself from childish insults, you’ll probably get banned. It also makes everyone think you’re a child, and they will ignore your arguments because of it.

Also, it’s “butt hurt”. Please try and at least spell your insults correctly, they lose a lot of their impact when riddled with typos.

> west proceeds to deeply fuck with ukraine for 8 years while russia repeats the above and totally ignores it

There is a reason why I accuse those who take this line of being chauvinists. First of all, for the past 8 years Ukraine has been begging for Western weapons and assistance, because Russia had already invaded their territory. You’re ignoring the fact that Ukraine has their own agenda and own initiative, and they can request assistance legitimately.

Second, “mess with Ukraine and we’ll invade” is not a legitimate stance to take. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, not a Russian puppet state that Putin can put claims on. Especially when that “messing” is in the form of legitimate arms deals between sovereign nations. Russia can complain all it wants, but Ukraine trying to buy Javelins is not a legitimate casus belli.

Third, again, Putin made it very clear in his initial speech that he views Ukraine as a fake state, which is wildly out of line with the argument you’re trying to make, and much more characteristic of Russian chauvinism towards Ukraine.

> Also drop the identity politics

Incredible how valueless identity politics has become as a phrase, other than as a way to signal disagreement.

> The truth of the matter is the West provoked a war through utter inept diplomacy and they are making things worse every day.

“The world isn’t black and white. Anyways, I am going to blame one party alone for a geopolitical disaster. If you disagree you’re either wrong or doing identity politics”.

> As someone else commented it's like we have children at the wheel. The sad part is even a large part of HN is just towing the party line blindly.

Valueless ad hominem.

Also, if it’s really about NATO, why all the nonsense about “denazification” and the existence of Ukraine being a mistake that Lenin made?

> Apart from NATO expansion contrary to the unwritten undestandings of the 90-s

A war over an “unwritten understanding”? Thats one of the saddest excuses for an argument I’ve ever seen, not even a defunct treaty to wave around as defense, just an “unwritten understanding”. That wouldn’t fly in a contract negotiation, let alone as a casus belli.

Nevermind how Putin’s own words put lies to your post a fucking month ago. Shame on you for repeating such obvious nonsense. Putin made it very clear that this was about him seeing Ukraine as a fake state; I have no idea why you would keep repeating the line that Putin himself cast away before starting an illegal war.

Also, it drives me absolutely nuts that everyone keeps acting like it’s NATO that is expanding into Ukraine. Are we just pretending that Ukraine is a puppet without its agency and agenda? Hint: there is a pretty obvious reason why Ukraine wanted in NATO. It’s pure chauvinism to ignore this.