Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything

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2 yr. ago

I should clarify that the actual language in the building code is per control area rather than per building, and in most cases a control area only covers a single floor (and in some cases not even that, if there's a sufficient fire separation between tenants sharing a building floor). I think that the amount of lithium batteries in laptops and mobile devices is a bit of a blind spot in code enforcement these days, but from a practical standpoint it's not likely that a typical office is going to cross the threshold into hazardous-occupancy territory.

Right, it's the weight of lithium inside batteries, not the weight of the batteries overall. I think the biggest laptop batteries I've seen had something like 6 16850 cells, and you'd need north of 1,300 of those laptop batteries in a building before it crossed a threshold for hazardous materials.

As fun as it is to dunk on Elmo I think we both know it's not the seat foam that's the problem there. 😅

I'm actually right now in the process of developing design criteria for a battery testing lab, and as part of that I had to do a hazardous materials analysis. Lithium as it is in batteries is considered a water-reactive chemical, and the code only allows you to have ten pounds of it in a building before you're pushed into a special hazardous occupancy type with lots of extra fire and explosion precautions required. I ran the numbers and figured out that's about 8000 of your typical cylindrical cells -- which is right about the number of cells in a Model S. And in a Model S, you're just kinda... sittin' on 'em. Fun thought...

Here's a direct link to the study. Of note is that there wasn't a significant trend in detected levels by year (odd, since you'd expect the amount off-gassed to decline over time), but that electric cars in the study had ~10 times lower levels of the chemicals being studied. The authors note that this may be more an effect of vehicle brand since most of the electric cars in the study were from one unnamed manufacturer (probably Tesla?) but it suggests that even within the current regulations there are ways to reduce exposure.

I'd like to see the scatter plot for detected levels by year of manufacture, and maybe it'd be good to extend the study's coverage of vehicle age a bit further, because the lack of a noticeable trend doesn't jive with my intuitive sense of what ought to be happening. That said, it's a reasonably solid study, I think.

This is the guy who couldn't even be bothered to spell his own name correctly, after all. I don't get the sense that he's going over anything with a fine-toothed comb on the best of days.

Looks like the stroke was a complication from a systemic MRSA infection, which would not be my assassination agent of choice if I was trying to kill somebody on purpose, even if I did want it to look like an accident. MRSA only kills about 1 in 4 people infected with it, and many of those are people who are already hospitalized for some other serious illness. It strikes me as a rather low-probability way to kill a healthy adult.

I don't like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It'd probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it's anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you're talking about reactors that aren't pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that's reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

It's all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there's 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc... I think you'd have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.

The "I'm gonna give you $100 to fuck off" school of military strategy.

I fully expect a dissenting opinion from Alito and Thomas that attempts to retcon nominative determinism ("Donald Trump can do whatever he wants, but Joe Biden is a stinky poo poo head and must go directly to jail") into a core pillar of Constitutional originalism, but I don't think there's a majority on the court that would sign on to an opinion legitimizing drone strikes on the opposition party. I'm fairly certain the end result will be a significant narrowing of Trump's criminal exposure regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the biggest impact that the court has made with this case is dragging out the process of trying it to the point that it likely will not be decided before the election. If they help Trump run out the clock and it winds him the election, then he can instruct the DoJ to kill the case, and his toadies on the court will have handed him a win while being able to maintain the thin veneer that they're not nakedly partisan operators. If Biden wins anyways, they're not in danger of catching flak from the MAGA crowd because they will have done their part.

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I'm so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request

This used to hold broad cultural applicability, back in the Before Times when the "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" crowd was still excluded from the political mainstream. Norms excluding out-and-proud ethnofascists from the English-speaking political right started to seriously slip around the time of Obama's election and certainly ceased to exist after Trump's win in 2016, but prior to that time "Nazi" was very much more often an ad-hominem attack than an accurate description of somebody's politics.

Bees are basically an introduced domesticated animal outside of Europe. Other parts of the world have their own native pollinators that are at significantly greater risk than bees, which are heavily managed and extensively studied due to their agricultural importance. For all the popular alarm over Colony Collapse Disorder, bee colony populations have been basically stable for decades and certainly haven't seen any measurable decline in recent years.

Studies have shown that in most cases that you'd care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

The management agency that leased the house I lived in while I was in college tried to withhold our security deposit because we didn't provide proof of carpet cleaning.

The house had all hardwood floors.

The personality types needed for each role

The personality types attracted to each role, mind you. Cops become cops because they like the feeling of having power over people, and tend to behave that way on the job. Social workers enter the field because they want to help others, which is why when somebody is in crisis, you should want to send a social worker rather than an emotionally-stunted high school bully who's armed to the teeth and trained to see deadly threats in every shadow.

Arguably you need somebody else to fill the role of police as well, but if you tried to do that the current demographic of officers would probably become something like an outlaw biker gang overnight, so it's hard to see how we get there from here.

There are so many things that were horrifying about the US's prosecution of the Global War on Terror, but at least when confronted with the same problem the US was like, "what if we invented a knife missile that can hit a guy in the driver's seat of a car without hurting anybody standing next to the car?" whereas the IDF took the position that a 100:1 ratio of innocent bystander to presumed militant is totally acceptable (in an environment where fully half of those innocent bystanders are children to boot). Just absolutely ghoulish levels of inhumanity.

Given what they've done elsewhere I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren't big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it's important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80's computing power, and it's only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.