Overzeetop

It’s magic and we don’t know how it works*.

* as of my latest coursework in Biology; IDK if anything has been discovered since the 80s.

Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.

Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)

Yeah, that’s just a shitty (or out of spec) time base. My Seiko watch gains 1-2 minutes a day, but it’s completely mechanical so it depends on temperature and winding/mechanism tension for accuracy. There are electronic timing circuits which are resistance and capacity based, and as the resistance and capacitance of the system drift (time/age and temperature) they also drift. A crystal, made to vibrate at high frequency (piezoelectrically, iirc), will provide a much more stable time base and be accurate to seconds over many days’ time.

Interesting aside - time keeping is how ships at sea used to determine where they were in the ocean. Latitude can be found from the stars, but longitude can’t so it needs a time reference standard. The book, Longitude tells the story of the search and the competing methods for determining location prior to the invention of crystal/electronic time bases and modern GPS. I won’t say that the storytelling is particularly gripping, but the actual path to discovery is fascinating.

That’s probably just fluctuations in the line frequency and the method for keeping time varying between the two (one might use a crystal that drifts). Being on the “wrong” frequency will have it shift by hours every day. I had a (US/60Hz origin) microwave in my apartment in Bonaire (50Hz) last year that never seemed to have the right time, and when I did the math I realized it was the frequency - it was behind by ~4 extra hours every day (50/60 x 24 hours).

Funny effect, though - many cheap electronics (think coffee makers and microwave ovens) use the line frequency as a time base. Taking a 60Hz or 50Hz appliance and plugging it into the other causes the clock to be off.

I’m not rich enough to hate Google. I have a couple of domains and several people who use them for email. I have calendars with people across device ecosystems. I don’t have the hours and hours to keep up with fighting spammers or an infinite budget to hire someone else who will guarantee my privacy to do it. What are my options? Is Microsoft or Yahoo any better?

I’ve been with Google since they were a Do No Evil company. Now that they Do Evil, they already have terabytes of my old data in storage to mine. Adding a few more GB isn’t going to make a hill of beans difference.

Also, I recognize nuance - Google, well Alphabet, isn’t one company. It’s a huge conglomerate of, sometimes competing, interests. That’s a distinction that often gets lost in online discussions. Whether I hate Youtube’s profit arc or not doesn’t really affect my impression of the Gsuite services I rely on.

Its a joke - yes.

Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It’s harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.

Sad, but true. About the only way to control it would be to require online comments to be directly identifiable to the person. Even Republicans appear to be embarrassed - and attempt to expunge their vitriol - when their homophobic, misogynistic, and racist comments and activities online are publicized. And even that wouldn’t eliminate it, it would just push it back underground to further fester.

Marketing: We need to defend this - what’s something people are really excited about?

Engineer: Stainless steel; you can’t make a good stainless without nickel

Salesman: Oooh - I know! How about nickels? Everybody loves nickels and their worth 5 cents each!

Engineer:

Marketing:

Intern: You know, they use nickel in battery packs for electric cars

Marketing: Oh, right - everybody likes electric cars. Green and vroom-vroom, I love it!

Engineer: You know that electric cars don’t go vroom-vroom, right?

Marketing: I’m going with electric cars, it’s a feel-good use people will get behind.

I don’t know how deep that area is, but damage to a pipe and the comm cable cut makes me wonder if it was some numbnut dragging an anchor - plain incompetence rather than an act of sabotage. Not that it wasn’t sabotage, just that it seems sloppy for someone looking to disrupt gas supplies.

I mean, we sort of set up this fuck-fest despite Britain telling us it was a bad idea. But we were the Victors of the World™ so clearly we knew what we were doing (clears throat). Kind of like our useless embargo of Cuba, we made a decision and we’re sticking with it, no matter how stupid or counterproductive it is, and there’s a very vocal portion of the electorate which supports the move (mostly out of spite, which makes them that much more intractable).

Is the current war terrible? Sure. Nobody should be killing civilians or taking the hostage. Is the plight of the Palestinians real? Yeah, it is. Israel has been an absolute menace, because they can.

Clear containers for anything that isn’t commercially labeled. My wife used to wrap leftovers (or anything, really) in aluminum foil. more than two thirds of the time I’d end up throwing it out after a couple of weeks because, since nobody knew what was in the mystery packages, nobody ate it. I bought some glass storage containers (the kind with the plastic, locking lids) so it’s obvious what is contained within. A lot less waste.

Also, I’ve got pull-out bottom freezer with one basket and one deep “bin” and shit got lost so I 3D printed dividers and organized it.

I had high hopes for Dex when it was first announced and I was on android for my phone, but dragging around a monitor was more work than just bringing my laptop. I got a 12.9" iPad a couple years ago as a portable library, then last year thought I might replace my (Windows) laptop by adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad so I wouldn’t have to take both into the field for minor work. I’ve also got a Samsung S7 so I tested it out as well. The capability/usability gap between the full desktop version of Word and the mobile versions made me give up. Understand I have a dozen templates, from simple to complex, in Word, and around 20 calculation or tracking Excel sheets - so transitioning to Pages/Docs and Sheets/Numbers would cost me about $20k in productivity time. And I still wouldn’t have my CAD, finite element analysis, or industry-specific utilities with me.

It’s the present in the US. Many people own personal train cars, and you just contract with Amtrak to hook you up and you’re off on vacation. You can even bring Babu. You can rent personal cars as well, though you probably should make sure yuor ocelot is housebroken if you’re taking a rental.

Now, I say “many” but what I means is that’s more than a few. Many is still probably in the 3-4 digit number (I’m guessing). And you’d be correct in assuming that it’s not a luxury most people can afford. But it does exist.

Yes. Yes, they are.

Maybe stupid is the wrong word? Willfully, negligently, and/or belligerently ignorant might be more accurate, I guess. These people get pretty angry when told they can’t build on “their land” because it s uninsurable and it is within the (statistical) flood plane. These are the same people you see crying on TV and angry at the government for not paying to rebuild their house, or for letting them build there at all, after a flood. They conveniently forget how they were told that it would flood and they intentionally ignored the warnings. I don’t know; in my book that’s pretty stupid.

“the country’s flood zones — areas that are deliberately flooded to absorb excess water — were built. But such areas are no longer as sparsely populated as they once were. Local governments have allowed towns in designated flood zones to grow, despite regulations meant to control the number of residents living there.”

"“Is it the government’s fault or is it the people’s fault for moving back to these places?” said Wang Weiluo, an engineer and expert on China’s water system who is based in Germany. “It’s the government’s. All those people were given approvals to build their homes there. They’re the government’s rules and they didn’t enforce them.”

Yeah, so, I happen to work in this field (or adjacent to it) in the US. At least here, everybody knows where the flood zones are - published maps, disclosures when you buy property, disclosures/regulations when you build. And you know what? The dumb motherfuckers I work for will do everything they can to skirt the regulations because they haven’t seen in flood in a long time, and the government is just over-regulating. And in the rural counties where there is little to no regulation enforcement, they just build there without permits - or even with permits that have been issued without due diligence on the part of the building official.

I have no doubt that there are a bunch of stupid fucking hicks in China, and stupid fucking hick government officials, and greedy fucking land sellers and builders who have the same attitude. I feel bad for the people who got flooded out and lost everything, because that’s a terrible fate - especially if you didn’t realize what you bought. But this is the result of human stupidity.

Life is hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.

Not recently; it’s bee a year or two since I needed (and I use the term loosely) to find out and map the wireless bands and strengths that are in my house. Wifiman doesn’t appear to expose the specific channels each signal is bound, just a strength. By contrast, something like WiFiAnalyzer shows which APs are using which channels, what each signal strength is, and which channel zones are empty. I don’t need it often, but for something like setting up an AP for Quest PCVR, knowing where the blank spots are is pretty convenient.

If you’re not writing your own software for the phone, and you don’t need access to the raw sensor data, there’s likely an equal app for iPhone now. I was in the same boat for a while - needing things that only android offered. I switched to iPhone in '19 I think, and I’ve found replacement apps for everything except detailed wifi scanning. Also, the apps I used on android which offered direct GPS tracking would show how many satellites and nominal locations are just binary - you have signal or you don’t. That’s frustrating when you’re at the edge of signal and trying to get a lock.

I can see how it would be a deal breaker if you need a specific app for work. I can’t switch to mac as several of my (multi-thousand dollar) analysis programs are windows only, and if an update breaks something or there’s an incompatibility, it costs me $2k/day to troubleshoot.

So I can shotgun two pints of beer after a donation (gotta rehydrate!) and still be a couple hundred calories ahead? Win-win!