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Howdy, Y'all fellow americans!
  • "welp" isn't related to whelping. It's a way to write the word "well" when it's used as an interjection (meaning it has no definition). The word is often pronounced with a terminal -p and people started writing the letter in text.

  • Tesla recalls every Cybertruck again.
  • It means the manufacturer is required to offer to buy it back. If the manufacturer resells it after fixing the issues, there must be paperwork attached and given to the next purchasers stating that it was a lemon.

  • If only it was that easy
  • The security level should be the user's choice. Maybe I don't care if my neopets account is hacked. Maybe the 2fa offered actually decreases security, like the SMS 2FA required by my 401k account that can be used as the sole recovery factor, bypassing the password. Maybe I'm accessing from a system configuration that makes 2fa really annoying, like a build system running inside a fresh VM on every run.

    The service doesn't have the context necessary to know when 2FA is warranted.

  • The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
  • You're misunderstanding how their wealth is distributed. By and large, they're not directly owning the land and paying taxes. They just own significant stakes in the actual companies holding property. I'm sure they own a house or three, but it's not significant compared to their other assets.

    I'm not taking a position on whether property taxes are good. I think they are. I'm just pointing out the discrepancy.

  • The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
  • I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people's homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.

    Billionaires generally (are there even any counterexamples?) do not have the majority of their net worth stored in assets that are taxed the same way. It's a meaningful difference.

  • Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser
  • Other than Apple music and iCloud, they're generally less intrusive about popups than Microsoft. Their tactic is to completely prevent competitors from integrating with the system at all rather than nag you to use a setting. For example, there's no way to use Google maps or Spotify in all the same ways you can use Apple music or Maps.

  • Up is an illusion in space
  • There's multiple things you're mixing up here. There's the "up" in the global coordinate reference frame. This could be based on the local system, though that makes entering and exiting the system a tiny bit more difficult. More likely it'd be based on galactic coordinates.

    There's also the ship reference frame in the comic. This probably won't be oriented towards the global coordinate system. It'll be oriented towards whatever the engines, sensors, and gravity need. Because the ships will all be in orbit, their orientations will probably be changing constantly relative to other ships and the global reference frame. There's no reason to orient in a single direction and lots of reasons not to (it wastes energy, points your sensors away from the things you want to see, etc).

  • Up is an illusion in space
  • The ecliptic North Pole (Earth's plane of orbit) is a bit over 27 degrees off the plane of galactic rotation. Which one is "up" and why would a spacecraft that's done any number of inclination changes to get there care about it?

  • Move over, Ford and Chevy: Kei trucks are pulling up as customers opt for smaller, cheaper vehicles
  • A torque converter is part of the whole transmission system even if it's a separate housing. When you buy a new transmission, it comes with a torque converter.

    Torque converters also create the majority of heat in automatic transmissions and are why automatic transmissions get coolers in the first place. How many manuals have you seen with transmission coolers?

  • EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them
  • It wouldn't. I have the benefit of having worked on a vehicle with a 1M mile service life. It was not designed like typical consumer vehicles. The long tail hits hard and most of the complex systems failures in modern vehicles don't originate in the power train that EVs simplify.

  • You can pry these high voltage lines from my sizzling dead fingers
  • The CSB doesn't regulate and it can't issue fines. They also don't show up unless you've already had an incident. When they do show up, it's simply to document and investigate the root causes, so they can issue recommendations to one of the regulatory agencies that actually enforces things. You need to have really fucked up for an agency with literally 40 staff overseeing one of the largest industrial economies in the world to notice you.

  • This cannot be unseen.
  • Genesis is pretty clear that Egypt came after the flood. Noah had sons with him. One of them, Ham fathered Africans. Noah's grandson Mizraim was the father of all Egyptians.

    Some early Christians reconciled that with the obvious age of the pyramids by guessing that the pyramids predated the flood and modern Egyptians were simply a new population, but no one's seriously argued that in literal millennia.

  • Four minors found working at Alabama poultry plant run by firm found responsible for teen's death
  • I'm not the one who posted the initial response, I'm just explaining what they meant.

    Also, this isn't intended to be dismissive or insulting because I recognize that everyone comes from different backgrounds and experiences, but it's pretty widely known that different crops have different labor costs. Everyday is a chance to learn something new though. Here's a quick overview from UC Davis on the subject.

    I'd also recommend the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies if you want a more personal, on-the-ground understanding of (some of) the human costs of agriculture. Understand that no book can cover everything though and there's much worse costs than anything it covers.

    None of this human cost is inherently related to concepts like monocropping either. Rather, they're related to the economic and political context agriculture exists in, especially how those impact current mechanisation capabilities. Harvesting things like cereals is so efficient in large part because of the huge demand from livestock agriculture for cheap feedstock to justify the development/purchase of things like combine harvesters.

    Some crops aren't heavily mechanized though, and modern agriculture hires cheap laborers instead. These tend to be the expensive things at the grocery store for fairly obvious reasons, but not always. If you're buying Spanish produce in Europe (e.g. bell peppers), there's a reasonable chance it was harvested by migrant workers working under inhumane conditions in a greenhouse. Things like coconuts tend to have slavery and animal cruelty in their supply chains and that's the basis for a good chunk of cuisine in South Asia.

    Another way to directly tie specific crops to their human costs is to look at the daily dead body reports by US border patrol. They tend to spike a couple weeks before/after certain crop harvests. Strawberries and tomatoes show up particularly strongly in this kind of analysis, which is why I mentioned them. You can also see the spikes from things like grapes, lettuce and beans.

  • Four minors found working at Alabama poultry plant run by firm found responsible for teen's death
  • It's true that plant based diets use fewer resources (inherently true because of net productivity works), but it's not what the parent comment is talking about. Fodder crops are not hand harvested. They're harvested with big machines as cheaply as possible. If you add another acre or 20 of barley to the world, there may not be a single additional person helping to harvest it.

    The parent comment is drawing a contrast with human crops like tomatoes and strawberries that are typically harvested by backbreaking manual labor.

  • Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds
  • Just for context, a large chunk of "top tech talent" at the companies in the study are going to be making 200-400k. While there's still going to be issues with pay, it's a pretty different situation than fast food workers or similar.

  • Types of OS
  • WSL is just a well integrated VM running Linux. It's mainly intended for CLI tools, but there's nothing preventing you from e.g. running an X server and having programs appear in the Windows "window manager".

    The super key is largely inaccessible though. It's tied very deeply into Windows, which is still the one talking to the keyboard.

  • AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says
  • I'm not assuming it's going to fail, I'm just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we're not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.

    As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I'm not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I'm aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.

  • AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says
  • ML is not an ENIAC situation. Computers got more efficient not by doing fewer operations, but by making what they were already doing much more efficient.

    The basic operations underlying ML (e.g. matrix multiplication) are already some of the most heavily optimized things around. ML is inefficient because it needs to do a lot of that. The problem is very different.

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