aronpye

LA is turning into District 9

Which UK cities? A London year travel pass costs £2,568, so public transport is hardly cheaper either, plus it’s a whole lot less convenient. Unless you enjoy spending all of your time in an urban group think bubble with the only option is to use public transport to travel to more of the same.

An annual London travel card is £2,568, and that only lets you travel around London. So why should be instead force people to buy something more expensive and less useful than a car?

free (paid by taxes)

Free != paid by taxes

I also think tax funded services are quite regressive as you have to pay for them whether you use them or not, and there are no market forces driving them to be cost competitive.

Is any unsupervised access to the internet for children ever really safe? At the risk of sounding crass, why can’t they meet in real life like human beings are supposed to?

… many US employment contracts also insanely long …

Most US employees are employed “at will” and don’t have contracts …

Most manuals tell you to inspect the oil monthly or before a long car journey.

Waiting two years before realizing your engine is drinking oil is probably reckless which wouldn’t be covered under any warranty.

Fuel and oil quality is a lot more variable in the US as it’s set at the state level, plus it’s just generally worse, so are the environmental conditions, so you have to set the guidelines according to the minimum / worst case likely to be encountered.

Fuel and oil quality is a lot more variable in the US, so are the environmental conditions, so you have to set the guidelines according to the minimum likely to be encountered.

I used to help develop Diesel Engines before I moved into Software Engineering.

If they followed anything like what we did, they would just run load cycles on the engine in a test cell to simulate approximately however many miles of ‘normal’ use they want to validate the engine up to. During the testing the engine would be maintained, fueled, and oiled according to the maintenance schedule and customer guidelines the engine will be sold with.

After the testing, the engine would be completely broken down and analyzed. If there weren’t any signs of abnormal wear then the engine would be considered validated __under those conditions__.

The problem is when real-world use deviates from the testing conditions. Which is pretty much always. Then the manufacturer guidelines no longer apply.

If you run your engine harder than the test cycle load factor, you will need to replace the engine oil more regularly. If your fuel quality is crap, i.e. has any ethanol in it, you will need to replace your oil more regularly as fuel eventually gets into the oil, and ethanol results in high water content in fuels, and hence oil, which will break down seals as well as reduce overall lubrication.

If your engine breaks down due to poor oil quality from lack of regular inspection and replacement, then as a manufacturer I’d be very resistant to paying out on any warranty claim. Even if you followed the “guidelines” for oil changes, you still have a duty to inspect the oil regularly, both as a responsible driver and under the car manual guidelines. Using bad oil and / or fuel is very easy to test for.

Long story short, the oil change intervals guidelines are just that, guidelines, and real-world use dictates the maintenance schedule. Frequent oil changes, before the oil breaks down / becomes crap, is just a quick, cheap way to prolong the life of your engine or any mechanical device with bearings or sliding surfaces for that matter.

Environmentally probably a good idea. From a consumer rights point of view this is going to be bad.

The cynical side of me thinks this is just a way to control the after-market and eliminate third party repair shops and mechanics.

A better way would be to design their cars with right to repair in mind, that way the environment and the consumer benefits.

I think you need more specialist equipment and training if you want to mess with high voltage electrical systems on BEVs.

An oil change is cheap. It’s also far better to preventatively change the oil, that way the engine is running with optimum lubrication most of the time. If you wait to change the oil when it’s black sludge, it’s likely damage will slowly build up from allowing the engine to run with poor oil.

it’s not just an awful safety culture and poor maintenance makes anything unsafe.

I agree, I just felt that the original article was being disingenuous by stating that power lines are somehow safer than fossil fuel infrastructure just because it’s not fossil fuel. Whereas it is more about your point on safety culture, where both can be equally as safe or dangerous if managed incorrectly.

that's what curtains are for. if you were caught doing a shameful activity because your windows were wide open and a onlooker saw, that's on you.

People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own home. In addition, the right to privacy is not limited by arbitrary definitions of shamefulness.

so... jehovah's witnesses?

That’s a whataboutism logical fallacy. Just because some people do it and get away with it doesn’t make it acceptable.

How is this any different than going around and recording the coordinates of every street address? You can also make the argument that a street address can be correlated to an individual, and by associating a coordinate with it, you are violating "user’s right to privacy by publishing information about them without their consent"

That’s kind of a straw man IMO. An IP address is public information and is transmitted by every IP packet. You can’t compare it to someone’s home address which is normally private by default. By associating a location with an IP address, you are effectively transmitting your location with every IP packet.

< “It is just pinging around.”

Would you feel any differently if people were recording your activities by pointing a camera at your window from the street? Or even just pressing random doorbells to see if anyone lives there?

Personally I think there is little difference between virtual unwarranted data collection and physical intrusions, and just because there isn’t some kind of barrier doesn’t make it acceptable.

“Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.”

I’d posit that recording the location of every IP address, which in many cases can be directly tied to an individual, violates a user’s right to privacy by publishing information about them without their consent.

“ Yes, you’ll need transmission lines to move electrons around, but they are far less dangerous and intrusive.”

Yeah …

California Says PG&E Power Lines Caused Camp Fire That Killed 85 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/business/pge-fire.html

I think cooperatives are an interesting idea (0). Maybe you could start one to provide a service in your community like fiber broadband, etc.

For a higher risk option that’s not been mentioned you could look at peer to peer (p2p) lending.

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

I wonder if most of the info is sent by the payroll / HR software employers use, rather than the employer themselves and without said employers knowledge? I.e. it’s a way for the payroll software companies to earn extra money rather than the original employer.

I wish the quality of prose as well as underlying journalism of today’s mainstream media and newspapers matched those of yesteryear. When reading the posted article, the decline in quality is shown to be immense.

Not a book recommendation, but Star Trek TNG has had a huge influence on my life and was (and still is) one of my biggest inspirations to get into engineering. It’s also filled with philosophy as well as things like leadership advice, etc.

Maybe one day I’ll get round to compiling a TNG greatest hits, like Measure of a Man, The Inner Light (the entire episodes pretty much), as well as scenes like Data demonstrating “calling in” rather than “calling out” bad behavior (https://youtu.be/vMKtKNZw4Bo), and just general Philosopher King speeches from Picard (https://youtu.be/Jph2qWXJ-Tk)

Wouldn’t it be easier to simply invert the problem and come up with a whitelist instead? When searching for technical info there are only a handful of sites I use, namely stackoverflow and wikipedia.

Maybe try and time stamp the page, presumably the earliest page is the original source. Could also combine it with a site reputation rating or something similar.

A lot of the spam results just seem to be copy pasted content.

I wonder how difficult it is to compare the main body of text in search results, then say if it is over a 95% match with another site (I.e. it has been copy-pasted), demote it in the search results. If a site generates too many of these demotions then it gets blacklisted from the index.

Git is essentially web3 technology and was meant to be decentralized however, it all ended up being pretty centralized by a few players like GitHub. I envisage the same happening to ‘crypto’ type stuff like the use of exchanges, etc.

Is there a plugin which allows you to curate your own index, i.e. a whitelist of sites to search?

How are these sites created? Are they hand crafted or automatically generated with something like GPT?

From what I’ve seen, a lot of them just seem to copy-paste content from each other and sites like stack-overflow. I’m just curious whether a human does this or a machine programmed to game SEO.

Also see:

Radiation burns from Army radio

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3707424.stm

And

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_burn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn

“If it fits I sits”

It’s non-ionizing radiation so would “only” cause radiation burns worst case. I don’t know what frequency the transmitter uses / how deeply the waves can penetrate, so you could also end up with “internal sun burn” as well external burns depending on the power and penetration.