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deepdriver

1,769 karma · joined July 12, 2022

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deepdriver··on Should you delete your Patreon account after they laid off their security team?
People who spend inordinate amounts of time indoors on the computer have more time in which to develop computer skills.
deepdriver··on San Francisco decriminalizes psychedelics
Certainly in terms of short-term judgement impairment, this isn't true:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/teendeathbridgefal...

deepdriver··on Who controls the Internet? And should they? (2021)
They shield, and therefore effectively man-in-the-middle, roughly 20% of all websites on the Internet:

https://backlinko.com/cloudflare-users

deepdriver··on Half of Japan's LDP lawmakers had ties with Unification Church
Is "Robloxing" the new "but in Minecraft?"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft

deepdriver··on Building future cities out of timber could save 100B tons of CO2 emissions
Rammed earth is more abundant, potentially cheaper, and has far better sound and thermal insulation properties:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220705-the-sustainable-...

It is more labor-intensive but easily automated, at least one start-up has worked/is working on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TXj5IIkUIY

Rammed earth panels can also be prefabricated and delivered to build site via truck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFddMSRel4A

The city of Shibam in Yemen shows how a high-rise rammed earth/adobe city might look. It's possible to adapt this technique to wet climates with appropriate plasters and maintenance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm8OGIZ7tag

deepdriver··on Long-term cardiac pathology in individuals with mild initial Covid-19 illness
> I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other.

I agree! Historians who went quiet on this when “evil Columbus” became the dominant interpretation don’t seem to share that same view. Nor do those who downvoted and flagged my post, apparently.

deepdriver··on The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy
Pumped hydro isn't feasible everywhere, you really need the right geologic conditions.
deepdriver··on The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy
Sand and basalt-based thermal batteries sound promising. Essentially just heat up rocks in insulated containers, then run Rankin- or Stirling-cycle generators off the stored heat. Power-to-weight's probably awful, but that doesn't matter for grid applications, just cost per kWh:

https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/

https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-...

deepdriver··on Long-term cardiac pathology in individuals with mild initial Covid-19 illness
Unwittingly spreading disease is simply not biological warfare. There is no such thing as “unknowingly” waging it. That is just a pandemic.
deepdriver··on Ask HN: Any way to deactivate your Hacker News account?
It's been in the news, and subject to much HN commentary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32661638

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32711475

deepdriver··on IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power
So you wouldn’t mind white Wakandans? One or two Vanilla Panthers? How about caucasian voodoo gods, or demons of Japanese myth? They’re fictional too.

Of course that would be silly, and we both know why. Tolkien’s work is explicitly based on Norse myth and the peoples of Northern Europe, who were and are quite real. He wrote about these intentions and influences at length.

There’s no need for writers to rely on European culture as a crutch. I’d personally love to see more epics set in the Mali Empire, Ghana Empire, or Kingdom of Dahomey. Sub-Saharan Africa has lots of its own rich mythology, too. It seems bizarre that besides Black Panther, the most I’ve seen these stories represented on TV is still the 1990s PBS series “Wishbone”.

deepdriver··on Mississippi water is so dirty residents shower with their mouths shut
Those numbers are still remarkably similar.
deepdriver··on Mikhail Gorbachev has died
Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994. A drop that fast was practically unprecedented in developed economies. It’s not fun being a Millennial, as I know firsthand, but nothing comparable to 90s Russia in the aggregate.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w

deepdriver··on The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists
The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence? How many countries’ justice systems would need to collapse to convince you of this concept’s validity?

The “anarcho-tyranny” idea is orthogonal to Francis’s other and later views, and has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism. Here it used in a Newsweek article by Hispanic conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez:

https://www.newsweek.com/president-bidens-anarcho-tyranny-op...

deepdriver··on Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards
I briefly shopped on Walmart.com because Amazon had marketized, destroying my trust in reviews, brands, and product quality, and Walmart had not. That time is past. Now I find myself sticking to manufacturer websites or buying things in the store again.
deepdriver··on Pakistan pleads for international help – parts of country resemble a small ocean
BBC quoted a Pakistan government official as saying 1/3 of the country is currently underwater. Even if that’s hyperbole, and I’m not sure it is, the scale of devastation is immense.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62712301

deepdriver··on The Big [Censored] Theory
I saw it mentioned elsewhere as removed from Netflix, glad it’s up on the NBC streaming service.
deepdriver··on The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists
Anarchy-tyranny in 1980s New York (see “Context and Background”) led to this famous act of vigilantism and subsequent acquittal via what was essentially jury nullification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...

Recalling a DA is firm rejection of his vision for a more-permissive justice system:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-da-r...

In terms of total collapse, see Venezuela (“Public Opinion” subsection highlights ineffective courts and weak rulings):

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

deepdriver··on The Big [Censored] Theory
"Diversity Day" has been removed in its entirety per first link.

The distinction between private and government censorship is increasingly irrelevant to consumers, as in heavily consolidated markets the end effect is the same.

deepdriver··on The Big [Censored] Theory
This type of censorship isn’t unique to China. Numerous scenes and whole episodes of The Office were silently removed from streaming services. The episodes were renumbered so you wouldn’t notice:

https://www.newsweek.com/comedy-central-caves-cancel-culture...

This article goes so far as to praise the censorship:

https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/the-office-edited-censor...

As usual, piracy (or the legal purchase and ripping of old DVDs) is now the only way to access this material, which was deemed suitable for public consumption as recently as a few years ago.

deepdriver··on NASA’s newest rocket is a colossal waste of money
In theory it can do both. However, it is not yet crew-certified.
deepdriver··on NASA’s newest rocket is a colossal waste of money
Starship is specifically designed to fly to and land on Mars:

https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/

deepdriver··on The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists
On the other hand, systems where the bar for guilt is too high err too much towards not punishing criminals. Eventually such systems are rejected by their subjects and collapse, either totally or into anarcho-tyranny. This is especially true of states with great power over the middle classes, but little power or willingness to exercise it over the worst criminal element. There's a balance to be found in the middle between standards of guilt that are too high or too low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis#Thought_and_...

>Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.

deepdriver··on The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists
>It is better than 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers

What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism. Maybe works for petty thievery, not so much crimes of great bodily harm.

deepdriver··on How to Terraform Mars for $10b in 10 years
The wonderful pop science channel Kurzgesagt has a video on this:

https://youtu.be/G-WO-z-QuWI

deepdriver··on The Best Books on the Great Divergence
From the link, it sounds like recent study has pushed back on Pomeranz's thesis of "coal and colonies":

>So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Divergence, now the received wisdom?

>It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years.

>It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided.

>One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it.

deepdriver··on Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship
Forums, 4chan and random blogs are the last-ditch avenue for information sharing among a small, extremely attentive, more-paranoid-than-average segment of the population. They are not an effective means for journalism or mass political speech, even when the facts of that speech are clearly established.
deepdriver··on Cancelling student debt is essentially printing money
The massive run-up in tuition prices has not been confined to just private or for-profit schools. Public and private universities alike have gorged themselves on federally-guaranteed student loans. Whether the loan gets repaid or not doesn't matter to the school. They get all the money up front; the feds are the ones who must later try to collect. Schools have used this money to drastically increase the scope of their bureaucracies and facilities, often while paying teaching staff less:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re... (https://archive.ph/Ju3ro)

deepdriver··on Amazon is not going to make a bid for Electronic Arts – sources
Key difference is that EA still charges full price up front, too.
deepdriver··on Amazon is not going to make a bid for Electronic Arts – sources
EA has been increasingly anti-consumer for years, notably through the proliferation of microtransactions, loot box mechanics, “Season Passes”, and half-finished base games with expensive DLC “expansions.” Highly unpopular brand, despite their commercial success.
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