perl4ever

Why do you think "precedent" is solely a legal concept? Would you say "work" is solely a physics concept?

I don't know if it applies to modern microwaves, but years and years ago, I learned a secret to keeping a microwave running long after its normal lifetime, and without paying a professional repair person.

It would start arcing eventually, and the solution was to "replace the waveguide". Someone not physics-illiterate could explain more about how that functions, but practically speaking, it involved getting a flat sheet of special material (mica I believe?) and cutting a small panel out to match an existing one on the inside of the cavity.

Looks like a big sheet is <$10.

Are there really "special screws" that are difficult to deal with these days? Any hardware store carries sets of what used to be obscure security bits. Torx (innie or outie) and hex don't even count as "special".

I had read that the reason for the plastic covers on fancier cars, while partly for appearance and to discourage amateur servicing, also are there for a substantial reduction of engine noise. But I never heard anything about owners not having permission to remove them.

I've speculated that one reason for making it a hassle to service modern cars is that if an owner has been messing with their car, screwed it up, and brings it to the dealer, it's more likely there will be clues that warranty coverage should be denied.

>optimal levels

Ah, yes, calibrated.

Let's say you are having it filled where the weather never gets below freezing, and driving to somewhere it does...

>Things not being illegal is the literal definition of them begin legal

I thought I read somewhere that's specific to common-law type jurisdictions.

>Especially no problems with electrical components

As long as you carried some spare wiring harness smoke.

http://www.whereisbobl.com/tiger/smoke.html

"Q: Can I use this device to replace the smoke in my Alfa Spider? Is Brit smoke the same as Italian smoke?

A: Only if it's pre-Bosch."

>there are 35% on the brink of financial disaster.

This seems like a caricature of the opinion of someone who grew up in the Great Depression and never accepted credit cards as legitimate tools.

Saving money from your first good job until you had several months worth of salary was traditional advice, like, in the 1950s.

In the Depression, my grandparents raised rabbits on the farm for food! Should we be concerned that the average person doesn't have any rabbits in reserve and is therefore on the brink of starving to death?

I know of a system that uses "1/1/2099" everywhere an "infinity" date is needed.

The problem with fixing it, is nobody thinks it will be their problem.

I can't vouch for whatever the state of True Car is right now, but several years ago (more than once) I went there for information on the average selling price of new cars.

They had a nice histogram, showing the range and most common price and how far off msrp it was.

I don't know how accurate it really was, and if it was accurate, someone might have "gotten to them" in later years to inflate the statistics and preserve profit margins.

But it seemed to me really valuable information for negotiating a new car purchase. The special True Car price and "services" and all that seemed like a diversion to me.

It's like some other things on the Internet - a sensible person subsists on the free "teaser" information and never ever engages in any sort of relationship.

Apart from an indication of what a fair price is, the histogram showed relative discounts between models, and there's frequently/always ones that are being disdained by the public that are very good cars and dealers are desperate to move, versus ones that are in high demand that they won't discount.

Since you mentioned that before me, I'm going to link:

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

It may not be very good as science fiction, but it's an interesting historical/social phenomenon.

There's a lot of interesting stuff out there about the Ariane 5 failure, whose guidance system apparently was in Ada.

I thought this article might be about (and think it should've been about) games like:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

...but especially Nomic, which has apparently been played online since the 1990s.

It was bugging me why I knew it was a famous novel when I hadn't read it in or out of school. When I woke up, I remembered - in my freshman psychology class many years ago, we were given a choice of literature to do a presentation on, and one of them (which I did not choose) was Siddhartha, also by Hermann Hesse. And the professor talked about Steppenwolf.

Solving cancer is a fundamentally new thing that nobody knows how to do yet and probably can't be done by one person.

Taking an ugly language that evolved in parts and synthesizing it into something elegant is something that not everybody can do, but it only takes one talented person, and it's been done before. Craft rather than invention.

Maybe they meant the novel rather than the band? (I haven't read it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)

P.S. it seems there are multiple bands inspired by Hesse, not just Steppenwolf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyone%27s_Daughter

It doesn't seem plausible to me that an organization that refuses to create reliable components will create reliable systems out of the components.

If it's so tedious, maybe someone can come up with a more unified language that accomplishes the same thing?

>Well, I mean, it’s the legal system, so definitions are literally a foundational piece.

Definitions are necessary to understand what a law is saying, I think we both agree. Not being a lawyer, I certainly have noticed that when I look up a law, it tries to define its terms in a precise manner.

Do you have a specific reference for "Bail is defined in state law as money provided by the defendant to secure appearance at trial"?

I don't see why using a combination of risk of fleeing and risk of reoffending to decide on release would be out of line.

I don't think much of appealing to definitions, which it sounds like you are doing - this is what bail is, so this is what bail is.

However, if the DA has less control over the decision, that doesn't seem obviously bad to me? And making bad decisions doesn't seem like it's inherent in the reforms?

People seem to be really mad about bail reform, especially in NY, but I don't understand why.

There are always more people than the jail capacity, right? So no matter who is released from jail and makes a news story by doing something awful, they must have been released because someone else appeared to pose a greater risk at the time. It's a tradeoff using the information available at the time.

So saying that bail reform is the problem seems to me to be saying that somehow, ability to pay is a better criterion than more logical reasons for releasing people. Everything online ranting against the reforms seems to just ignore the idea that there's a tradeoff completely.

Unfortunately, the people I know who care about this, while they can tactfully avoid politics if I do, seem beyond a reasoned discussion if I bring it up. They do know something about police work, so possibly they know something I don't.

The idea that climate change should increase the variability of weather, the intensity of extreme events, and so on, seems intuitive to me in broad strokes. Smart people say that adding energy to a system increases its volatility, sure, ok, why would I doubt that.

But I would think that it would be an imperceptible statistical effect, given the relative amounts of energy (not the absolute amount, which is of course huge).

Is it possibly much larger than I think? Sure, absolutely. "Trust the science." But I can't trust anything based on intuition about particular events and unbiased memories of decades past.

The focus on individual events that feel wrong is unsettling to me. It used to be that people would say "climate change is real, the science is settled, deniers are tools of the fossil fuel industry" and other people would say "no, it's a religion and a scam designed to seize political power". Can't it be both a floor wax and dessert topping? What religion isn't based on deep truths, full of smart people, and often hijacked by power hungry monsters?

I thought this was about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

If you drive at the 49th percentile of speed, you would expect financially burdensome fines on a regular basis?

This may be naive, but I've assumed that it is practically impossible to enforce laws that a majority of the population habitually breaks.

There's an implicit message from new cars having lane-keeping features that we as a society (whichever society) are going to compensate for distractions rather than cracking down.

>10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.

I think of the difference between hitting someone and not hitting them as measured in distance, not speed.

I actually have had the speedometer break on my car. There's no idiot light to tell you it's broken, let alone that it's going to break.

I never had to use it as an excuse.

>If your eyes aren't on the road, you aren't driving.

>I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed.

You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?

I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.

It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.

And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.

I don't know if you're a Californian or not, but what do you think of the car culture there? Particularly as it exists along with all of the regulations that are distinct to the state?

What do you think of the people to whom automobiles are art, pastime, recreation, lifestyle?

The comment that managing actual bitcoin is too risky makes sense to me, even if it's unclear that's the SEC's rationale.

People say, oh oh oh, GBTC and other substitutes don't track bitcoin. Well, yeah, maybe that's nature's way of telling you that keeping actual bitcoin safe is expensive. Pay your money and take your chances.

>And options that have a 15% spread and rip the face off retail investors are ok?

You say that like there was somebody malign doing that.

>Total nontransparent markets such as the pink sheets?

Or that.

Absence of people to trade with is not something that someone is doing to you.

If you choose not to go the grocery store, but instead see if anyone is selling anything on a random street corner, whose fault is that?

Hey, sometimes there's someone with steaks they have to get rid of fast because the A/C on their truck broke.