I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. YouTube is already near the bottom of my list for source of information and I already have more sources of entertainment than I have time, so if they manage to win their war on ad blockers, I have no problem never visiting the site again.

I have a mini fridge purchased new early 00s that I recently left unplugged for a day or so to melt the ice buildup on the freezer.

Not that I’m happy with the overall state of appliances these days, but the reality is that technology is still improving, but some of those “improvements” aren’t for the buyer’s benefit (while others are). And there’s plenty of plain old cheap shit in a nice brushed stainless steel package to make it look high end.

Like induction stoves and convection ovens weren’t really a thing in the 80s but imo are way better than what came before. But, despite being a convection oven, the cheap one the developers picked for my place is the worst oven I’ve ever used. And I’m hesitant to “upgrade” because, despite knowing they can be better, there’s a good chance whatever I end up getting won’t, or make will be at first but will start degrading rapidly from day 1 such that it’s shitty by the time the warranty runs out.

That is the big difference between modern and older appliances. The older ones were made in good faith, the newer ones are a gamble because we have an economic system based on greed and it has progressed a lot since the 50s.

Funny because when I think of things bursting into flames randomly, the things that come to mind are samsung phones and teslas, not old appliances.

Is that smooth disengaging when the smart appliance is about to burst into flames even a thing? And if so is it really just limited to modern appliances and not a thing appliance makers have been doing to resolve flaws all along?

And you can decide the thing you want isn’t worth the cost.

That whole submarine pedo thing told me he was the type of boss that made unrealistic demands and raged at anyone that pushed back. It was no surprise to later learn that his companies have people whose whole job is to deflect him when he’s there so he doesn’t get in the way of the engineering.

His whole “yell at advertisers to get them to give him money” was another sign of that. He’s used to yes men placating him and flew off the handle when he didn’t have power to dictate how others acted, even if they just went back to what they were doing prior the moment he left the room.

Dammit! Smashes worthless spaceship and starts over

Yeah, they could probably even go a bit lower than sea level pressure.

Though even then, it would still be like everything outside was a giant vacuum cleaner. How thick would a pane of glass on earth need to be if you stuck a massive vacuum cleaner over it that managed a perfect seal around the window so that the window didn’t shatter even if you bump it a bit on the other side?

I was going to add that a strong hurricane can result from just a 10% pressure difference, but I realized that it’s a bit misleading because while that is accurate for the pressure driving it, the destruction that hurricanes cause from winds is more about the momentum of all that air moving to equalize the pressure, not the acceleration from pressure difference itself. It’s probably easier to engineer a bay window for a spaceship than a bay window to watch a (strong) hurricane make landfall through. Other than all the space crap slamming into it, at least.

Exactly and that makes it harder to contain all the pressure inside the spacecraft.

Yeah but the one time (we think we know of) that we collided with another planet, the moon didn’t even show up until just after. Fucking slacker.

And ever since then, it’s been edging farther and farther away, like it has better things to do than take meteors to the face for us (and asteroids to the ass). We need some sort of tether or leash to keep it where it is.

Which just happens to be when it’s the same apparent size as the sun, a lucky coincidence for anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing one, because this might be the only place in the entire galaxy where such a thing even happens.

Oh guess the AI folks haven’t yet realized that you can increase perceived accuracy by adding a small amount of random noise.

Which of course they didn’t, because then they’d need to understand some things about images instead of just throwing whatever data they can find at it and hoping it figures it all out from that.

Though I’m not sure how much it applies to images, as the examples I’ve seen were audio. But it’s cool to hear a low bitrate audio sample of someone talking unintelligibly and then play that same clip with random noise also playing and suddenly you can understand what is being said.

How thick does that window need to be to handle the pressure without blowing out?

I don’t think I’d be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there’s no way for us to “escape” the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn’t be less true, it’s just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.

It’s kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.

Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It’s the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question “if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?”, and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what’s up). Though circularity doesn’t imply it is wrong or incorrect, it’s also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.

And this isn’t an anti-science stance, I just think that there’s a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don’t think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn’t turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).

Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.

From what I understand, thermal paper is one of the worst sources of BPA. It isn’t regulated because it’s not consumed or touching anything you consume usually, but it would be better to consume it than absorb it through the skin because at least the liver processes shit we consume, while shit we absorb can go straight to the bloodstream.

This is on top of being generally the shittiest form of printing by most measures, as the other comments go into. I’d prefer dot matrix or inkjet over thermal paper.

If I was a woman, repelling guys like that would be a feature, not a bug.

In my experience, the paper wasp description applies to the yellow jackets. They are fairly common around outdoor eating areas around here, especially near the garbage cans. I find they mostly just check out the food, though they will check you out, too, and will sometimes get right into your face, but I’ve found a good way of reclaiming your space is to slowly push them away. You probably won’t even make contact with them while you do so because they react fast.

Though I’ve also noticed that they (and bugs in general) are more interested in some people over others and I’m lucky to be on the low interest to bugs side of the spectrum.

In addition to what the other commenter said, there’s some luck of the draw, too. There were three forms of it, having to do with how you were infected. Bubonic was one, associated with sores and boils on the skin, caused by flea bites. Pnumonic was a lung infection, which could spread directly via droplets. And septemic was the blood infection version, usually happening as one of the others progressed.

Bubonic only killed about 40-60% of those who showed symptoms, while pnumonic and septemic killed 90-100% of those who showed symptoms.

So to get infected at all, you needed either to be bitten by an infected flea, share air with someone who has pnumonic, or share fluids with someone that has bubonic (specifically the pus from the sores) or septemic (the blood, though maybe other fluids too).

Some managed to avoid these entirely. Others could have had lower exposures to the point where they didn’t develop symptoms. If someone gets infected but the infection doesn’t get established enough to become stable, they often don’t get treated any differently from people who weren’t infected at all. Those death rates only apply to those that they knew had it (though sometimes death rates are given per population rather than infected, and those tended to vary wildly in infected areas, from like 50% to 80%).

With viruses, at least, asymptomatic infection seems to be far more common than we would have thought. Both ebola and covid antibody studies showed that the antibodies were found in many who never got sick, implying they were exposed but their immune system beat it before symptoms showed up.

Bacteria isn’t necessarily the same, but it’s possible that something like this is a factor and those might have even developed some immunity. Plus, natural selection would select for people who are just less susceptible to it while it’s out there killing off a significant part of the population.

Oh boy, you’ll want to swallow any food or drink currently in your mouth before reading this next part.

Yeah, I’ll change my wish to I wish people weren’t so susceptible to propaganda, especially the really shallow stuff that falls apart the moment you stop and think about whether it really makes sense (like the old “they hate our freedom” argument).

But then again, if the simple stuff didn’t work, then it would just get more sophisticated and maybe the really dumb propaganda is required to recognize its other forms.

Yeah, and some profs are really good about it, even if they wrote the textbook. Like a lot of my profs would talk about how it was possible to photocopy the course notes package pages, that there were ways to get textbooks without paying for them or even offered to send a copy of the pdf master to anyone who asked because writing the textbook wasn’t intended to gouge students.

But I’ve heard the opposite story, too, where the prof wrote a textbook that was barely even used but added it to the required texts list. Profs in my program weren’t that bad, but I did see some of the textbook publisher response to those kinds of profs, where they’d have a website and buying the textbook was really about buying a code to sign up for the site. Luckily, most of those didn’t use the site for real assignments, so it still wasn’t mandatory but the rent seeking was obvious.

But yeah, wish it was similar to Europe in the Americas. Canada might be a bit better off, though I might just be saying this as someone who went into a well-paying career and actually managed to pay off my student debt pretty quickly. Government forgave some of the student debt I had through them when I graduated (actually a decent chunk of it) and this even happened automatically (was a very pleasant surprise).

But I wish the public saw how increased access to education helps improve things for everyone, even if you don’t get educated directly (though I’d support a system that gave universal access to education so no one is being completely denied, though some gating based on ability would help avoid waste time).