throwaway0a5e

The Chinese digital calipers are of questionable accuracy as the battery gets low. I much prefer a dial caliper at that price point.

Another option is new smaller models get introduced and begin their own lifecycle of bloating. For example the Honda HRV is roughly the same size and price point as the CRV was originally.

Higher liability minimums would be very regressive making support tepid among the demographics who usually want really high taxes.

You paid half ton truck money to wind up with a midsize truck (or you got the deal of the century). Vehicle size was clearly not a priority when you made the purchase. Or at least that's what your actions say.

Tax is just one part of the cost of living picture. A couple percent state income tax difference isn't really a big deal with the feds take a much bigger cut but when you consider the long tail of $6 gas, sin taxes on your smokes, tax on prepared food, government fees, etc, taxes can add up to a noteworthy fraction of said picture.

A few of old IT guys with no fucks to give and a few "up and out" junior devs working over time can whip up a one off abomination build out of LAMP stacks and CGI scrips with a little perl thrown in and an unusable set of websites to handle all the data entry and exit and it WILL ACTUALLY WORK. It will be clunky and the onboarding time will be comical but it will work.

That is a low bar. Your "lowest bidders" should at least be able to equal that. It just has to accomplish the business processes and do so within the software. It doesn't need to be fast, intuitive or look good doing it, it just needs to do it.

>I lived a somewhat similar life basically enjoying living outdoors and odd jobs and travelling and volunteering until I had a kid

You could have just continued that life on a cash basis...

Counting solids doesn't make sense unless you're evaluating ketchup powder. Ketchup itself is mostly water.

Low dose amphetamines are pretty safe. We've given a lot of them to kids with adhd over the years

The devil is in the details.

Borrowing money almost always involves interest but there's a big difference between a government bond and an usury payday loan. Likewise I think that there is a big difference in critical thinking ability between the "reddit" blob of humanity and say, the US senate, subscribers, chemical engineering professionals, people on the Debian mailing list, etc, blobs of humanity. While the lowest common denominator in all groups may be similar I think the mean and medians are in very different places.

Funny, the demographics who post/comment on Reddit are just about the last people I want product advice from.

If there was a "salty old mfer posting on a forum in 2010" search I'd be much more inclined to use that. Google used to do ok for finding those but the SEO arms race killed it.

Once products take hold as being "good" according to the groupthink Reddit's strong rewards for parroting groupthink make it almost impossible to go against the grain and get heard to listen to anything negative.

Anyone complaining about M18 tools, Toyota vehicle, Kitchenaid mixers, speed queen washers, etc, etc will find their comment shit upon by people looking for a few quick virtue points for dunking on the dissenter and downvoted to oblivion.

Reddit in particular with its very strong groupthink/circle jerk loop is really susceptible to this. Marketer's content gets popular/upvoted, then people parrot it, they get upvoted, repeat.

It already is gamed. Almost anyone who has a brand targetted at high class consumers already astrotufs the living crap out of Reddit.

In Reddit's case this is made even more odious by its propensity for group-think and dogpiling so you can't even call it out once the liking for the product has taken hold.

This is an incredibly naive bordering on "probably just dishonesty masquerading as ignorance" thing to say.

Of course cost goes up fairly linearly with size. More rebar, more pipes, more materials, more diesel in the bulldozer, more man hours, more welding rods, more welds to inspect, more money.

But there are also a ton of one per instance overhead paper pushing costs, especially with something as onerously regulated as nuclear that are a large fraction of overall costs and will be roughly the same whether you're building a 1kw facility or a 1gw facility. All of that has to be amortized over your reactor. So if you build a small reactor each dollar of reactor might have $10 of overhead it needs to amortize. If you build a big one each dollar of reactor might only have another $1 it needs to amortize.

Of course there's a sweet spot before the reactor is so massive the part count grows so high that the MBTF starts getting you. That sweet spot also has a low end below which the fixed regulatory and palm greasing costs are so high that your tiny reactor can never hope to pay them back in it's lifetime.

Doesn't matter if you waste half the energy if it's still a cheaper way to boil water than the next best thing.

Doesn't matter.

Public perception > reality.

Look at hydroelectric. Terrible for ecosystems, decent number of deadly failures over the years, way better perception and less pushback from the public than fission.

>1. What's the most efficient way to boil water?

Doesn't need to be the most efficient. Just more efficient per energy transferred to the water than all the other options.

Heck, if an uninvolved local sees you stealing a catalytic converter in Arkansas there's a "high enough you can't write it off" chance you'll get their footwear on your ribcage. In SF the bystanders will probably just film.

>Lots of legal requirements exist to protect someone.

SF is the poster child for what happens when a bunch of people incapable or unmotivated to engage in planning more than 5min into the future write a law about everyone's pet issue.

Clearly there's a balance to be struck and it's to be struck somewhere on the less regulatory side than it is now.

> CO2 and other greenhouse gases are pollutants

As an aside, that is going to have some weird unforeseen effects at low levels because it means that almost every car and every dwelling or heated structure emits "pollutants" and there's god knows how many other laws that they therefore become subject to.

I'd gladly suffer through whatever cold it took to make the improper new englanders move elsewhere, which would make me very happy.

Gamesmanship like this is counterproductive when it gets everyone on your side grouped in with whoever on your side is playing "bad cop".

The part that really annoys me is after these people wear out their welcome and get sufficiently marginalized the adults will have decades less with which to tackle the problems. The opportunity costs of pretending extremists like this have workable plans worthy of consideration is large.

I don't know what fantasy world you live in but unless you have substantial evidence that the pedestrian did something wrong making the accident reasonably unavoidable by the driver you're in for a many thousands of dollars and a couple court appearances anywhere in the first word. If there's evidence it was intentional then move the decimal to the right once in both cases.

Take your trope and shove it.

Thousands of dollars to throw bricks through windows and slash tires?

Anyone who has basic opsec and is willing to cover a decently large area could be rolling in the dough at those prices.

I used to be a janitor. I preferred if you people ignored me. I don't want to have to tiptoe around not offending the sensibilities of people I have little to nothing in common with. If I wanted to interact with you people I could have made the same money operating a cash register instead of a mop.

Yes, but mostly out of economic necessity.

Unless you're building some billionaires summer cottage it's just not economically justifiable to pay for all the labor required to deviate from the standard plus all the material. If you want "better" you just do more extravagant construction but you keep to the same minimums.

That said, there are plenty of people exceeding the minimums. You just don't know it because they are doing it themselves (or with a friend or two's help) on their own property and typically not pulling permits. <clutches pearls>

1 is only an issue because moral panic gave legislators a blank check to write DUI laws that are so immensely broad they would be opposed in any other context.

2 is only an issue because drugs were a moral panic and people hated weed enough to not argue much when it got tied to their gun rights

Everyone loses when we cater to lemmings going off half cocked about the moral panic of the minute.

>That wasn't the people. That was the oligarchs disagreeing as to who got to own the slaves and reap the spoils of genocide.

Oh come on, quit with the BS talking points. War on your territory is NEVER good for business and overall wealth and they knew that back in the 18th century too. They would have been far, far, far, richer throwing their lot in with the status quo. Many of the prominent individuals who played key roles the revolution lost their wealth and in many cases their lives.

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