skeptikal

There’s the joke that the real national sport of Argentina is “joder al próximo”.

Im someone who doesn't strut. My cousin in law has the walk, quick smile, devil may care laugh

My house has 9 skylights, a 20 sq. m deck, a pool and a quarter acre lawn. Add three kids ages 8 mo to 7 years.

I get plenty of sunlight.

Of course. And the SCOTUS under FDR was ruling under the threat of court packing. A lot of rulings from then are risible.

My favorite is telling a farmer his homegrown pig feed is illegal because it effects interstate commerce.

The one that best illustrates bad law with good intentions is the migratory birds act: protect wildlife -> good. Doing so by making international treaties supersede the constitution -> not good (that ruling has been cut back)

Truncating. OP is right

Our industrial base is gutted and we don't have enough resources. Not enough to sustain our extravagant lifestyles.

Europe has to find a way to buy Rubles quickly or choose between freezing or damaging capital goods (there are industries that cant be shut down because they get damaged).

There’s not enough American LNG to rescue Europe, and if there were there arent enough ports to import it. Anyway, nascent American populism will make sure Americans get (cheap) gas first.

Well, I would be one to argue that the US de facto defaults all the time.

But Nixon’s gold window was the most egregious.

The problem is that the adjective “United Statian” is a mouthful; Yankee (my dad’s favorite) unfair; gringo refers (used to?) to Italians in Argentina.

United States doesn't have an adjective. Colombian would be nice, but its also taken and now problematic.

I have never heard a Canadian say that, in fact as a (also) Latin American immigrant it was made clear to me that “Canada is not America you retard” in high school.

I agree with Latin Americans, for what its worth. USA is “United States of America” not “United States, America”. But its a useless fight. In Spanish Ill be precise.

Ive grown to love Americans (of all walks of life) in way I have never loved the people of any other country I’ve lived in. Not even the people of my parent’s country - the loss of which I still mourn.

Canadians, Ive loved least despite having a best friend and close family.

LOL. Touche.

Im a quarter inch shy of 6’2’’. So, indeed, 6’1’’.

My old man is 6’4’’ and when I was young he’d rib on me that I never got past 190 (we’re metric background). Now I don’t care much about height. At 70, he’s shrunk to my eye level and of all his traits height is the one Id rather not have inherited and gotten his monastic character instead.

As a Canadian who’s (very) thankfully becoming American I can guarantee you that American government is very incompetent. At least in comparison to a Commonwealth one. The wait times, the level of uncaring, the general attitude was jarring when I first moved here.

I even worked as for a few years for the gov, and the bureaucracy is even worse inside!

The idea that the US will de jure default on its obligations is risible.

De facto its happened at least once before when Nixon closed the gold window overnight.

OP wrote (admittedly wordy),

“metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII,”

Meaning that the GDP trends as if we’re in a WW3 situation and loosing, not that we are. I.E the GDP/debt metric appears to be as bad as if we were loosing a war when in fact we’re not even fighting one.

Ironically I disagree with both points. Yes the economy is bad, yes it will get worse but:

- I don't think the economy is as bad as losing a world war; the US has too many fundamentals in her favor (namely resources and a strong Navy to prevent outside threats).

- Ironically enough we are in fact loosing a low intensity world war, mostly fought in diplomatic relations with third world countries. Just like the first Cold War, but with weaker fundamentals on our side.

Even if we assume the measurers of inflation are honest, using honest metrics, inflation is hard to measure and the measurement has a natural skew downwards.

We’ve all heard about shrink inflation by now. Theoretically that’s measurable by taking the Oz. into account.

But how about the drop in quality of goods? Raisin Bran with few raisins, cars with thinner door panels, etc. This is impossible to measure, obviously happens, and is systematic in one direction resulting in a lower reported inflation rate.

Interesting, but we were both 19 in college.

Ya, that happened to me once (Im almost 6’2’’). A guy who couldn't have been 5 10 was insisting he was 6 and that I was taller than stated. What was weird was that we were alone. He was only lying to himself.

And you know what, he was a bit weird looking. He had bad posture. But he was a good guy. A smart, hard working guy with a big heart.

This height thing is annoying. Id gladly trade inches of height in exchange for other inner character traits (courage, perseverance, conscientiousness). Intelligence I have to spare, but what good is it without character?

Its not the height, its the strut. Online women cant see you strut so heights the proxy.

My wife's cousin’s 5’6’’ but Ive seen women go up to him and strike a conversation by the way he walks. Ive been in parties where he’s nailed every girl (including sisters and wives) in the room. Me? Nothing much, and Im 6’2’’

OP was ironic restating verbatim what “conservatives” have been told over the last four-five years when they got ostracized for disagreeing with “liberals”.

“Build your own Twitter!”

“Build your own ISP!”

“Build your own DNS”

“Build your own copper lines!”

And now Chomsky has gone as far as to say that people who disagree with him (vis a vis vaccines) should be put in a desert and build their own societies. When asked if those people wouldn't die of starvation he shrugged it off.

changing company structure while the assets remain in Germany (in fact they are immobile) is peanuts. Pretend change.

If they (the Russians) had tried to vent Germany’s gas reserves (which wont happen because the employees are German) to kneecap them (the Germans), then you would have seen the German regulator do something.

This is Germany doing something to not be seen doing anything. Doing something for lack of a plan is usually a mistake.

Everything of value of this subsidiary has (pipelines, stored gas, etc), is physically in Germany and already subject to German law. The stored gas wasn’t going anywhere without the German regulator’s permission and the regulator can always force Gazprom Germania to sell German stored gas to Germans.

Nor does seizing this magically solve the problem of lack of gas. The Germans either abide by Russian rules for gas, or pipelines coming in from Russia remain empty.

This was a boneheaded move. The Russians can now seize a comparable German asset in Russia to recompense Gazprom; say a VW plant, a real asset that can continue to produce real things while the Germans are left with old laptops, empty pipes, a salt cavern and unheated offices in Berlin.

The answer to your actual question is rather simple - Maxwell’s law. But there’s a more interesting point in your question “how do you reference a signal?”. If you want to really understand this, Id read about diff mode and common mode signals.

Layman answer:

the signal is not DC so you can reference it to itself.

More specific:

The EMF must cause a current in the antenna (Maxwell’s law). This current causes the antenna to have a potential gradient along the length of the antenna. You can define any point along the antenna to be “ground” and take opposite ends of the antenna. (or not; ground is a conversion)

The receiver itself is just a fancy amplifier, it doesnt need a reference (you can keep everything as a differential value) but if you want to keep things simple, you can transform a differential signal to one referenced to an arbitrary DC point. Choose a battery terminal and call that “ground”

Well thats the decay, aint it?

GPA is a great predictor of ones ability to work hard, finish the stated goals, etc. Basically its great at predicting a good busy bee.

But I think its perhaps poor at predicting orthogonal people; people that will create things that weren't envisioned by those who built the thought tracks.

Some thoughts:

1. A company that treats you with disdain for a 3.5 is not a company to work for. 2. GPA inflation is real. In a healthy education system no company could hope to attract only >3.5 GPA hires.

“ The thing that really spins my head about this, is that since you never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the goals you need to meet, this system forces you into over-committing to the course.”

I think this is a problem in educaion in the N. America. What are these “goals” that your are potentially “overcommitting” to?

Nothing you produce in undergrad is of any value except to advance your knowledge. The grade isn't the teacher’s payment for good work, its an assessment of how well you’ve mastered the topic.

Seen this way, you know how well you’ve mastered a subject even if you get nothing back.

In high school in Italy (at least where I was from) your final grade was basically decided based on the teacher’s belief of how well you mastered the class.

For example:

In Latin class (chronologically) I had a 6, a bunch of 5s, and a couple of 4s. Finally I put a bunch of effort and got a couple of 7s in an oral and a written exam.

Pass was a 6, and the teacher gave me a 6. A 6 was really where I stood in the class (I had learned the subject by the time I got the 7s). My average, though, was a 5 something - a fail.

The system is open for abuse, but I always thought it made more sense than “earning” points towards an A. For starters the material can be made much more difficult since the kids wont blow their final grade in the first few months. I always liked classes with weighty exams.

No forgotten, but definitely hard to get info from. You can find some books on the internet archive.

Subs use them, high T and rad places still use them (Im told).

Does it though? At what frequency? In the limit of f=DC this is trivially not true.

Also, if that were the case, an airplane couldn't be made into a Faraday cage.

Also, the cage+Earth system would itself be an antenna.

If you need ground for a topologically imperfect cage, maybe… but I doubt it.

I think (but I don't know!) this is like the legends surrounding engine torque car guys believe. Electrical engineers putting everything to ground because they got burned

I keep hearing that for Faraday cages but its not clear to me why.

Why should it be grounded?

The cell signal in the Faraday cage causes a mirror signal on the cages inner surface and the cage’s conductivity ensures that the potential is zero elsewhere in the cage.

Why do I need the ground? Is it a consequence of not having a perfect conductor?