Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world

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

---

Read more

Posts

3

Comments

406

Joined

2 yr. ago

There have been studies (this one, for example) that suggest the total radioactivity-related health impacts from coal power exceed that of nuclear power by an order of magnitude. That's not all pollution-related deaths for coal -- just those associated with radon exposure inside of mines, and radioactive materials embedded in coal going out into the environment. For all the fear-mongering about nuclear, it's hard to find a less dangerous source of base load generation using present-day technologies. Maybe once grid-scale batteries are available at scale, they could replace nuke plants, but that's a solution ten years too late for an environmental problem we have to fix right now.

Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their yields, especially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or is hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so -- farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don't have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don't usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from university research.

Brown Christians don't count. Wish I was joking.

But that's kinda the problem, right? Piketty's central thesis is that above a certain amount of critical mass capital has a sort of gravity that almost inevitably attracts more wealth to itself at an exponential rate, and only truly cataclysmic events (either on a personal or societal level) can disrupt that accrual. People like Elon, Trump, and all the other failsons and nepo babies populating the millionaire and billionaire class are walking proof of the theory -- even if he wasn't keeping pace with the larger market, Trump still managed to make Daddy's money last until now, and he's self-evidently less intelligent than most small rodents. That wasn't any special talent on his part growing the family fortune -- it's just (effectively) ambient cash getting caught in the gravity well of his inheritance and falling past the event horizon, in spite of his dumbassery.

What in the generative AI nonsense is that header image? A mysterious man is lasering the moon, while his crotch ray attacks a low-flying jet and another beam shoots from his briefcase towards parts unknown, and a confusing late-night aerobatic demonstration takes place in the background?

The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I'd put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD's write cache is saturated. That's not even comparing like-for-like -- consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.

There's absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that's not likely to change for quite a few years yet.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.

Cats don't have the metabolic pathways that dogs and humans have that process and neutralize many common insecticides belonging to a class called pyrethroids. For cat flea control meds, these are substituted with fipronil, which is (less) toxic and doesn't get absorbed through the skin, though when we were dealing with a flea infestation a few years back we still had problems when one of our cats ended up being flexible enough to scrape the gel off its neck and lick it off its paw. Bottom line, though, cats tend to have a lot more trouble with metabolizing medications generally, and tend to encounter problems with "cat safe" meds more often than you'd expect. You have to be careful about monitoring your cat after starting a medication generally.

I understand the resistance to paid mods in more mainstream games, but in the simulation community paid mods are an accepted thing, and good paid mods are almost universally thought to be worth the price of admittance. The effort involved in making a high-fidelity recreation of a specific racecar or aircraft takes a lot of time and resources, and the people who go through the effort of doing so deserve to have their time and costs offset. Hell, I have only made a few free mods, and I've made a few hundred in tips off them all the same.

More than one fashion writer has declared the tie to be dead. Go on, wear a suit and skip the business noose! Nobody's gonna stop you.

I've caught a few slips of the tongue and minor errors when Robert touches on things I have particular knowledge of, but not any gross misrepresentations. The warning was more along the lines of "I haven't gone to primary sources on this" rather than casting aspersions on the podcast.

My understanding (entirely mediated by the Behind the Bastards episodes about him, so take it with a grain of salt) is that he never posted directly to YT; everything of his up there was and continues to be reuploads from his followers. So, regrettably, even though Romania has thrown him into a hole in the earth, Tate-stans will continue to spread the bad word.

Public universities in the United States haven't been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they've tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students.. all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment -- for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.

Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they're a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now -- to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they're gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can't afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they've vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.

However, as you've guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair's actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department's endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn't need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.

In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.

Several years ago in my city a guy got punched once outside of a bar, fell backwards, and broke his neck on the street curb. "Just one punch" can do a hell of a lot of damage, if you get hit in the wrong spot or fall the wrong way.

There's a world of difference in disposition between new money and old money, in my experience, and flashy-car-and-expensive-jewelry rich is decidedly new money. Families with generational wealth tend to be more discreet about it, and often have a "noblesse obligee" mentally about how they engage with the world. New money's much more likely to pull the "don't you know who I am?!" card.

Similarly, there's a split between working class folks who know the score and recognize that they're all in it together with the guy behind the counter, and the sort of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who have themselves convinced they're better than they are.

Well, if another curbstomping by Britain is what it takes to run this addle-brained right wing moron out of office in short order, then perhaps that's a silver lining.

Keep in mind that a large chunk of the United States is considerably closer to the tropics than Europe is. Washington TC is on roughly the same latitude as Lisbon or Ibiza is. It's not tropical, but climatically it's still considered sub-tropical, and large chunks of the country have the summer heat and humidity to prove it.

It's white-dominated settler-colonial ethnostates all the way down!

You jest, but Israel also has a long history of discrimination against non-Ashkenazi Jewish people.

Reddit's great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren't likely to find them on Lemmy. I've more or less made my peace with that, but if you're not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they're not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie... but y'all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).