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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SI
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2 yr. ago

  • Here's the thing though.
    I agree 100% that the world is probably better off without this asshole in it.
    But I don't think we should be doing that. For every one of these guys, you'll have another guy who got railroaded by a crooked prosecutor, or who will later be proven innocent with better DNA testing. There's just no way to be sure every one is 'good', and I'd rather let bad people live than accidentally kill good people.

  • Actually it's pretty well understood.
    The human body reacts to CO2 buildup with a 'gasping for air' sensation. Nitrogen however, not at all. The air we breathe is 80% nitrogen 20% oxygen, so we aren't sensitive to nitrogen at all. Breathing air with little oxygen is something well understood as it can happen to pilots of unpressurized aircraft. Here's a funny example of what happens when pressurization fails. Once ATC figures out he has hypoxia, they order him to descend to 11,000' (which is usually the point hypoxia starts to kick in) and he's fine. But while he's hypoxic, he happily admits he has no control over his airplane and is totally unbothered by that fact.
    There's a thing called a hypoxia chamber- the oxygen % of the air is reduced (not eliminated) to simulate what it's like being at high altitude without pressurization. Always funny videos there, grown men with oxygen-starved brains playing with a children's puzzle trying to put the square block in the round hole.

    Execution by 100% nitrogen is the most humane death I can think of. The gas is odorless, and as it takes effect the prisoner would experience a euphoric feeling before just falling asleep and dying a few minutes later.

    That said, I'm sure they'll fuck this up somehow- most civilized people have concluded that execution is barbaric and unnecessary, so whoever builds the nitrogen gadget is probably not going to be the sharpest tool in the shed.

    And that's what a botched execution would look like- if you shut off the nitrogen too soon or don't ensure a high enough nitrogen concentration, the prisoner will be left with brain damage but not dead.

  • Use a bidet. The idea sounds weird- a toilet that sprays water up your ass. I wasn't sure it was for me. Then I tried it. Holy fuck game changer. FULLY clean EVERY time.
    But yeah, sitting down. Finish the dump, run the bidet, then wipe to dry, all while sitting.

  • (I thought I replied, but it seems to not be here, not sure if I forgot to hit Reply or what but trying this again)

    Sadly not really.
    Sometimes aftermath is used as a plot device- for example the Avengers series dealt with that a bit and who should be responsible for the actions of superheroes.

    But for real 'full picture' it's almost never shown because it's messy and bloody and awful and really really sad. Think opening scene of 'Saving Private Ryan' just with a lot more feels. If those cars weren't blacked out you'd see blood everywhere and the people in them would be either wounded and screaming or gasping for air as their lungs fill with blood or dead and mangled as bullets tore their bodies apart. And if anyone else was in the back seat and survived you'd have the terrified screams of a child who just watched as Mommy get turned into so much hamburger meat and then the driverless car crashed. And then, perhaps hours or days later, you'd have families that break down in panicked screaming-cries when they are told their wife/husband/mother/father/son/daughter is never coming home.
    Ask any of THOSE people, and any of them would happily trade Joker's life to get their loved one back.
    The REALITY of serious violence can't be shown in PG-13 movies and even R movies either can't or don't often show it. People go to the movies to have fun and feel good, not see a bloody mess that makes them want to puke and then cry as they experience the pain of a broken family.

    Perhaps this bothers me more than most because I HAVE seen what the real result is like. I was around for the shock video era in the 2000s and saw some really awful stuff from Chechnya. There's a bunch of combat footage coming from Ukraine. And closer to this subject, I've seen a lot of videos of defensive shooting incidents. It's not like movies, it's not fun. It's just brutal and sad.

  • I am blaming Batman for his choice and for his reasoning.
    He pulls the trigger, Joker (a psycho who's killed dozens/hundreds already and will kill even more) dies.
    He doesn't pull the trigger, 3-4 innocent people die now and Joker goes on to kill scores more.

    I argue Batman can't just wash his hands of responsibility because he CHOSE to put himself in that position. He decided to be the one with a motorcycle cannon pointed at Joker's face. If he didn't want to be responsible for life and death, he should have stayed home and gotten a massage. But no, he chose to be the city's defender, so there he is.

    Perhaps it helps to drop the movie and pick another analogy. Imagine there's a mass shooter psycho walking around shooting children, and there's a police officer with weapon drawn and pointed at the psycho. Police officer decides not to shoot the psycho because his conscience says he doesn't want to kill anybody. And because he doesn't take the shot, the psycho kills 3-4 more kids.
    Do you argue the officer is blameless for those childrens' deaths?

  • Of course it is.

    We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don't.

    Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

    Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

    And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it's supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don't keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there's shareholders to answer to?

  • Yes, this absolutely. But it's also one of the serious flaws of action films that show good/bad guys- you never see the aftermath.

    Take this scene from Dark Knight. Batman is on his ARMED motorcycle thing, Joker's sitting there shooting at cars driven by innocent people. So at least 3-4 innocent people are now dead because Batman wouldn't take the shot.

    But you don't see that- the cars windows are blacked out. You don't see the innocent people torn apart and splattered all over their cars. You don't see the little kid sitting in the back seat screaming as Mommy is torn to shreds by automatic rifle fire and the car crashes. You don't see the family that no longer has a mom or dad or son or daughter. And because you don't see that, our presentation of Batman's 'ethics' is fake.
    Ask any one of those families if they'd trade the Joker's life to get their family member back. You won't find a single one that says 'I'm glad the Joker is alive, it was worth my daddy getting shot to avoid killing him'.

    The fact is- Batman is selfish. He ALLOWS 3-4+ innocent people to die, to save his own conscience

    Do you see him thinking about them in bed at night? The people he COULD have saved, that WOULD be alive if he just pulled the trigger? Of course not. Because the writers only show us half the story. They black out the car windows, so we don't see the consequences.


    And if you're all 'Batman isn't a vigilante', well sure. But even for a civilian, there's rules of engagement. Even in the anti-gun state of California you're allowed to use deadly force to save the life of yourself or another from a violent psychopath posing an imminent threat. Especially after Joker shot up the first car and showed he was going to do it again.

  • This is harder than it looks.

    See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
    Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

    What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
    The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
    It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

    As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.

  • The key is make them easily removable.

    If it's 'removable' but it requires heating the edges of the phone up to 120F and then prying apart a sheet of hair-thin glass without breaking it, then most people won't bother.

    If it's 4 Philips head screws then you'll find a lot more people doing it.

    Unfortunately, the economics for device manufacturers are clearly in the adhesive category- cheaper to assemble, and they'd rather a user buy a new device than service the old one so they DGAF how hard it is to service.

    The only exception is companies like Fairphone catering to a niche audience of nerds who value repairability. Most people don't even consider how hard something is to fix when buying it.

    Sadly I think legislation is the only way to fix this. You have to legislate either a. that the battery be removable and replaceable without tools or 'with standard fasteners and not adhesive' or something like that.

    The only way to really fix this is to stop gluing phones together.

  • That's the key- deliberate or grossly negligent. If a supervisor, through deliberate choice or inexcusable gross negligence, instructs an employee to work in an unsafe manner, I have no problem making that a criminal offense that makes both the company and the supervisor liable.

  • I agree very much. I think on the low end fines should go down to be survivable for a small business, and we don't need to fine a big company $100k because someone took their mask off.
    But fines should increase steeply by number of offenses, and multiply if management is willfully refusing to provide a safe working environment (IE doesn't want to pay to have a machine hooked up to water/drain, doesn't want to pay to have filters cleaned, doesn't want to pay for masks / goggles / other PPE, etc).

  • Personal liability (piercing the corporate shield) is a really tough nut to crack. That'd also do some outsized harm- think kids college fund raided for settlement money.
    That said, I'd be happy to make it a personal crime to, with knowledge of the law, instruct any worker to use a machine without safety equipment and water hookup, or to work without a mask. THAT should be a personal crime, like criminal charges. And you should have to, when hired for any such supervisory position, sign a one-piece thing that has that law laid out so you can't claim you didn't know the law.

  • The answer here is simple- regulations with teeth.

    Every saw uses water. Every worker wears a mask. Random inspections.

    Inspector sees one person without a mask? $1000 fine. One machine with no water hooked up? $5000 fine. 10 people with no masks and 3 machines with no water hooked up? $25,000 fine. Make it clear that there is no fucking around here.

    Job site like described in the article? Shut down until problems fixed.

  • I'm a liberal gun owner.

    Neither gun owners nor conservatives have bloodlust. What we do have is disdain for laws that don't actually help the problem but just punish gun owners.

    Take this 10 round magazine law. You know what is the difference between a 10-round mag and a larger one? A little rivet pin that stops you from putting in an 11th cartridge. Anyone with a cordless drill can remove the rivet and turn their 10-round mag into a bigger one. Anyone with a 3d printer can make a larger magazine. A magazine is just a box with a spring and some plastic bits. Making it longer is not rocket science.

    The threat of 'drilling this rivet is a felony' does not stop someone who wants to commit mass murder. This law does not stop murderers or save lives. It just makes life harder for gun owners, as the pinned magazine is much harder to clean.

    I'll also remind you that the guy who shot up VA tech had a .22 pistol (pretty much the least powerful gun you can buy) and a backpack full of 10-round magazines. He complied with the law and it didn't slow him down.

    So stop accusing people of having bloodlust, and ask why they don't support the law that seems obvious to you. You might learn something.

  • Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn't store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn't have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.

    However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.

  • If you have home assistant, you don't need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There's a whole bunch of them, I think they're all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I'm 100% Z-Wave so I can't say personally what is the best stick to use... Just check the forums and whatnot.

  • The dude picked a fight with a mouse and lost. When one of the largest employers in his state that is also the largest driver of tourism, voiced some opposition to a pet policy of his, he used his political position to punish them. And it didn't even work. That tells me everything I need to know about the guy, that he is vindictive, cronyest, and ineffective. Not the sort of guy we want in the White House.