3,514 karma · joined February 2, 2014
Yep, that's the big mystery you couldn't solve in 30 sentences. It's a strainer.
I went on a similar kettle-quest a while ago and wound up accepting the disco-ball LED enhanced model because it was cheap and did the job (and mine doesn't beep - that would have immediately sent it back). I still think about going with the fancier one with a temp control for that perfect cup, but just waiting a minute for the water to come off the boil is fine enough for me.
We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.
The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?
Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.
We could go back to having advertisements be relevant to the content audience instead of the specific viewer and end stalkerware for good.
Crazy talk, I know...
It's now banned in paint thinners as a result of some pretty long lobbying efforts. It's a little sad, since chemicals like DCM are hard to replace, but if it saves the lives of our artists at the expense of them having a bit of a harder time cleaning their brushes, maybe we can live with that.
So, probably pretty safe when used appropriately. I wouldn't go inhaling it, since any fine powder's not great for the lungs, but that shouldn't be news to anyone. Just wear your N95 when mixing dry pigments as you always should.
Which is about all we can ask of companies doing open source work. And it's still vastly more than most are doing.
We're going completely backwards by introducing cruftware into tvs that will be thrown away by the vendor in a year or two - however long it takes for a warranty on that batch to run out. Whatever it takes to sell the next TV at Black Friday I guess.
(But seriously, just look at the absolute absurdity that Tillis is trying to push through right now as an example of how broken and backward copyright in this country is. If the companies keep getting their way, there will never be a such thing as a public domain going forward.)
It's just too easy to not bother. For a moon colony or a Mars base, the economics change, but for near earth orbit it just doesn't make sense.
It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.
It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.
It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.
Scary thought, being able to purchase music these days rather than a streaming service lease, I know...
The jokes on this one write themselves.
Streaming just allowed cable networks to unbundle in the most lucrative way possible... and when users stop subscribing to various services because their prices have gone too high they'll scream "see, it doesn't work, we have to sell packages!"
Meanwhile the users are back to either pirating or suffering shitty overpriced services, of which Netflix is on a quick pace to make themselves one as their catalog narrows from TV producers moving to their own platforms and they continue to cancel their native shows and give ridiculous fortunes to D-list movie directors churning out flop after flop.
It's a little easier to believe they could detect whether or not they got 60g by the last significant digit change in the moment of inertia from their instruments by nulling out the rotation... It's a little harder to believe they could detect a difference between 0 and maybe 500g in the sample return container via their acceleration data. I doubt they even know how much hydrazine and helium is left with all that much precision - at more than hundred grams a second burned, it's easy to believe there's some amount of accounting slop.
The scientists are mostly worried because they want as much of the sample as they can possibly get, and they're a little worried about closing the sample container - if there's a rock that gets stuck somewhere, the container might not seal shut and then they've got a real bad problem they've gotta contend with.
It's 2020, they don't want to jinx it, just shut it up in the container and wait for the time capsule to arrive in 2023.
A good healthcare team really helps, but it's pretty rare to find in America, and even harder to keep hold on when insurers change and coverage is all over the map. Therapy helps some - I don't get much benefit from the group stuff, but one-on-ones, knowing someone actually understands and believes you is a huge boon.
I personally find no reason to not share my experience and I'm honest when I'm having a bad pain day and someone asks me how I'm doing - there's a reality that pain colors moods and decisions, so it's worth others knowing. If you can't trust your coworkers or employer not to discriminate against you for that, then you're probably working in the wrong place.
But, one day at a time is the only way you really can take it.
And then once one or two companies have made that acceptable, they all will go that way.
I do see their balances coming up positive though, thanks to a very massive balance transfer from the General Fund per the FAST act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/22), straight from US taxpayers' wallets.
I also see no mention to climate impact anywhere. $36 billion dollars of gas taxes at 18.3 cents per gallon suggests sales of nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline were burned. That's a hell of a lot of climate damage that everyone's being forced to pay for.
So, you were saying about us not subsidizing the IHS?
We spent half a trillion dollars building the IHS over five decades, and have historically thrown at least a few billion a year at US oil producers - is it really surprising to anyone that driving is cheap? We keep bailing out the airline industry repeatedly - we already gave them $25 billion in grants this year because of the coronavirus, and they're still asking for more.
But, dare we build an alternative to those systems, one that could be more ecologically and financially sound? Nope, too busy feeding our sunk cost industries. Keep blaming Amtrak for being terrible while refusing to give them their own run of rails so they don't constantly get stuck behind freighter traffic. Keep shuting down High Speed Rail projects around the country because the billionaires don't want it in their back yards.
All of the tech companies see where the economy is going, and they all know it's time to bunker down. Going public is a good way to raise a nice burst of cash they can sit on to get through the really bad times ahead, especially while the market is still hot enough to raise said money.
Galileo was as close as they came to a home run though. It really was their run at a Rasp-pi-alike, but it was almost twice as expensive, wasn't compatible with the Rasp-Pi headers (though it oddly was with Arduino, which seemed like a real design impedance mismatch), and was lacking numerous peripherals like video out.
They had a similar problem with that whole Maker-targeted series of chips - they couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to capture the ease of use of Arduino or the deep integrator capabilities of these target-specific MCUs and really failed to split the difference.
They also failed to take into account that they were very much the minority player and any sort of entry into those markets would be a war of attrition and not just overnight success... and the billion dollar juggernaut did what billion dollar juggernauts do to side projects that aren't overnight successes - they killed it before anyone could even develop competence working with them.
Both Edison and Quark really had niches they could have well serviced, if they had given it a real try... but it was very apparent that management wasn't interested and the designers didn't understand who they were targeting.
No, this thing runs its own firmware. It's a Baseboard Management Controller on-die, basically.
You say that, but the San Antonio Caltrain to California Avenue Caltrain stretch still has an enormous T-Mobile deadzone, even after I twice reported it to them and both times they said "they'd send someone to take a look."
He's Senate Majority Leader. That's literally exactly what he does.
Besides, he's whipped his party so hard they basically never break rank. Even Mitt "I'm not like the others" Romney votes with him nearly 100% of the time.