prime_number_314159 @ prime_number_314159 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Turn hard to the left while accelerating, then hard to the right while braking. That usually shakes it out.

I, too, am scared of clean spaces.

Do a whole lot of research, then take control of the president, and pardon people for a minute. As far as I'm aware, it takes effect as long as someone hears, or I write it down or something.

Every hour of sunlight brings 173,000 terrawatt hours of total solar irradiance. Even one hour is enough to make a big difference.

Good news, everyone. 314159 is not evenly divisible by 17, just as you'd expect.

"Sorry, someone else has already asked a question about python."

Wait, I know this guy! He's super into wine. Like... SUPER into it.

I would swear I've seen an annual figure, but I'm not finding it.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm shows the weekly figure, and $1165 times 52 fits with $60k/year. Sorry I don't have a nicer is source

FYI, the median personal income for a person working full time, year round is just above $60,000 in the US, so 1 million dollars of crime might only deserve 16 years, 8 months.

JPMorgan Chase has paid out $30,000,000,000 in fines over the last 20 years or so. That means if you apply similar logic to companies, their executive team owes up to 500,000 years in prison collectively, which is only 3,000 years per member of the senior leadership team.

Numbers smaller than 314159, surely.

Wrong: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 101%.

Right: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 2%.

Wrighongt: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 3%, because I'm a lucky person.

Won't someone think of the children('s rights)?

Often "equality" is used to refer to legal and societal systems closer to equal treatment, and "equity" is used to refer to systems closer to equal outcomes.

Of course, the terms as defined in the dictionary are very similar, while how close the ideas they represent are when applied depends substantially on what is being considered, when, and how.

If I were just a little rich, I would work less, and spend more time traveling.

If I were rich (but not rich-rich) I would retire, move further away from the city, and make my own saw mill. Also spend more time traveling.

If I were rich-rich, I would fund Vasalgel, lobby for that project to make mosquitoes extinct, and fund a few low budget films per year, outside of Hollywood. I don't know where I would move, but I would probably still travel more.

Military specifications are often designed around specific manufacturing processes. When the commercial state of the art changes, this leaves the military as the weirdo insisting they be allowed to buy a 1970s toilet seat made out of 1970s plastic. Those can be redesigned to allow purchase of commercially available goods that pass some kind of suitability testing. This is small potatoes, under a billion dollars per year.

The use and prevalence of IDIQ could be reviewed systemically. Some of those contracts are wildly disproportionate in cost to the value they deliver. This could be a few billion dollars per year kind of stuff.

Almost all T&M contracts could be replaced with FFP, or FPLOE. The T&M contract style promotes (very obviously) inefficiency at every level of the delivery process, and this actually gets even worse with growing contract scope. This is tens to maybe a hundred billion dollars per year.

Congress, holistically, should embrace the notion that unspent money should not be deallocated in a future year. The "use it or lose it" approach to budgeting causes everyone subject to Congressional review to find a way (even a silly way) to consume every dollar they are handed. If, instead, authorized money were allowed to accrue for large expenses (the replacement of a technology system, refurbishing an office, expanding a field site - whatever that agency needs) it could reduce the mindset that unspent money means losing power among the thousands of beaurocrats that make purchasing decisions on behalf of our country. I genuinely have no idea how much money is burned unnecessarily this way.

The government should hire its own experts to deliver services to itself. The entire mantra of minimizing costs known up front has produced some of the most massive wastes in history. Almost everything a contractor can do for the government that's a total cost of more than one person's salary would be better achieved by hiring a person to do that work directly. This is most obvious (to me) in personal computers, where the government regularly buys what should be powerful, capable machines, but then forgot to specify some requirement, and is forced to purchase a machine with a spinning disk drive, or only 2GB of RAM, or a 720p display, or... Just something obviously wrong, that no one is empowered and knowledgeable to say "This is going to critically hamper the performance of every human handed one of these computers, we need to fix it". This is done (theoretically) to save sometimes just a few dollars, and adds to the general malaise of "The government doesn't care about whether its workers are productive" that's one more push for people with better options to leave government. I won't even begin to guess at the value lost through having people think of government jobs as paid daycare for those that couldn't cut it in the commercial world, let alone the way government contractors really are, or are perceived.

There's probably more, but... Wait, what's that? They're not going to be trying to remove the stranglehold of the MIC on the government purchasing apparatus? Well, maybe they can still fix that toilet seat thing.

My Geiger counter is beeping occasionally, even though I'm hiding in my basement. Is... Is this the end?

Face to face, this is definitely possible. I've convinced more than a dozen people that climate change is real, and humans are the primary cause of it in face to face conversation. Online, where tone is easily misinterpreted, everyone is a stranger, and people are more able to rapidly retreat into a bubble of others that agree with them, I think it does a lot less good - but every once in a while, something works a little bit for someone.

More importantly, if we decide that we should all exist in our isolated bubbles of (non)social acceptance, it leads to the rise of extremism in some of those groups, and even the most terrible ideas can be allowed to fester and grow. Pretty much regardless of who you are, or what you believe, you probably have an example or two of such beliefs.

Actually, debate between hostile strangers online serves an important role in churning up internet drama. This is vital to the continued survival of the popcorn industry.

It, uhh... It looks like your double peen is made of plastic. Are you sure this is something to brag about?

When I was 25, my girlfriend complained about buying the same bra, same size, same material, same URL, from the same company, on their website, 2 years apart. The first ones fit really well, the second ones didn't fit at all.

Meanwhile, there's a shoe that I buy a pair of every few years. They release a new "version" about once per year, but the fit has been consistent, so I'm over a decade, and 6 pairs, into my purchase of them, with no problems.