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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • my vision for a peaceful future isn’t a perpetual Mexican standoff. Nor do I like the idea of political power and representation being directly proportional to one’s intent and capability to do violence.

    The unfortunate reality is that all political power is derived from one’s capability to do violence, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. I pay my taxes because if I don’t the federal government will forcefully take the money from me, or my other possessions. Yeah, arresting someone is “nonviolent” until that person just says “I’d prefer not to.” Forcing someone to pay a fine is nonviolent until they say “I’d prefer not to.”

    It’s the only motivator the government or any body of real power has at the end of the day. It’s a bunch of social norms and agreements all backed by the understanding that you will be made to comply by force otherwise.


  • I’m not arguing one way or another but I want to clear up some very common misconceptions about US gun laws.

    in some states, you can get semi-automatic weapons (which are completely banned in Austria) in a shop in just minutes. And that without any background checks, psychological reports, justifications, approval required, without anything like that

    This is just blatantly untrue and I wish people would stop parroting it. If you go to any shop you need to pass a federal background check to buy any non-vintage firearm (pre-1899…not exactly a ton of those floating around). The exception here is private firearm sales, i.e. I go to Craigslist and sell a rifle or handgun. The law states the seller has to have no reasonable cause to believe they would be an unlawful possessor (weak, yes). With that said, almost half of the states (22 per Wikipedia) have implemented state-level laws requiring a background check for private sales.

    In many states even convicted criminals can get guns like that.

    Again, objectively untrue. You are not buying a firearm from any legal, licensed dealer in the US without going through a background check. And a violent criminal offense will get you barred from purchasing. For the 28 states without laws around private sales, the seller can be federally legally liable if they sell to someone that is not legally allowed to have a gun and they use it to commit crimes.

    In the US, guns are sometimes a presents for kids which they can just…own and use (while in Austria everything is obviously 18+).

    No, a child cannot legally own a firearm. The parent can purchase and own a firearm that they are allowed to use, but they do not own it. In many states if the child hurts themselves or others with such a firearm the parents will be held liable, many states have laws around safely storing firearms when children are around.

    While in the US (in many states), you can just carry any gun around in public whatsoever. So even if the police sees you having weapons in public, they can’t / don’t do anything about that

    In most states if you don’t have a license to conceal carry and you do you are breaking the law and can be charged. I’ll say this one isn’t entirely false but heavily depends on your state.

    A large part of why this issue gets nowhere is that neither side can even agree on what is true today, rather than what should be true to bring down the issue of violent crime. If one side says “They’re totally unregulated you can just buy one off Amazon and start blasting. We have to do something!” The other side is gonna think “Well they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, no point in listening to what they have to say”





  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.





  • makes it appear negative that they don’t see what’s going on with their money. I I interpreted that as them being ignorant of what happens with their money

    To be clear, the meme is that PayPal shows the users’ dead names (presumably because the account was set up prior to their transition/legal reasons)

    The “I do not see it” is referencing “not seeing” the dead names in the transaction details.



  • You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space

    Someone above posted an article saying they aren’t actually. But you’d be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They’re highly compressible since they’re just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that’s the idea)





  • I have not researched these specific cases, so may be wrong about them.

    You’re not obligated to do research on every individual bill the political parties push and what rider clauses they slip into unrelated bills. That’s fine.

    You, however, should have research and examples to back it up if you’re gonna “both sides” this. The Democratic party is far far far from perfect or what I would want, but at the very least most of them seem to be campaigning in good faith or at the least not inciting actual violence and treason.

    Saying “so may be wrong about them” isn’t a free pass. Know that people read what you say, and we have a huge problem of political apathy (circa 2016) due to the constant repetition of “but both sides are the same.” Let’s please not exacerbate it unless we’re bringing facts and evidence to the table.


  • 12V sealed lead-acid batteries are a standard size and chemistry… They are absolutely not comparable to a BEV battery. The lithium ion 12V batteries are built to the emissions standards and regulations of the 12V lead acid, that’s a known quantity and a hell of a lot less energy. BEV batteries contain kwH of energy, they are significantly larger, are a nonstandard size on every single vehicle. Even if Toyota made it the same size and shape, the energy density might be enough to fail EMC regulations (without having to change the size and shape)

    I don’t know what else to tell you man, I work on electric vehicles for my job. Literally an engineer. You can choose to not believe me but it just isn’t anywhere near as simple as you’re acting like it is. Just because you think it’s like swapping an alkaline AA for a NiZn AA doesn’t make it true.


  • Different battery chemistries do not behave identically in terms of failure modes, EMC emissions and interference response, and tons of other things. Just swapping one battery for another has a huge effect even before you consider auxiliary components like charging circuitry.

    My assumptions as to why you can just drop in an aftermarket battery and crate motor into an existing ICE vehicle (also, far from any vehicle, it is a relatively niche product) are that A. The batteries are way smaller and aren’t structural to the frame the way they are in BEV-first designs (but this is how we get good range out of them). B. The companies selling these probably aren’t held to the same emissions standards that an automaker is.

    Again, these are assumptions, I don’t work in conversions but in BEV designs primarily. I know there’s a ton of red tape for us to even think about changing battery chemistry, and we 100% would have to get all new certifications for it.


  • What certification does it need other than be certified by Toyota for use?

    Engineer in the automotive industry here. Vehicles need a ton of certification by tons of different governments and face very strict regulation.

    Just a battery alone is going to be subject to lots of EMC emissions and interference tests. Then you have the capability to survive crashes, fail operational requirements, how does the battery fail (does it explode or just disconnect itself?), etc. etc. These are all dependent on the chassis the battery is in, so they can’t just swap it into an existing chassis and say “Oh it worked with battery A, it’ll work with battery B.” Unfortunately the requirements are just way too strict for that.

    Additionally I can’t go into details but the sentiment others are echoing of “If it’s coming in 2028 they should have a functioning prototype” are true in my experience. It takes several years to design and release a car, and when you’re introducing a new battery tech or drive train or similar changes it takes even longer.