qjkxbmwvz @ qjkxbmwvz @startrek.website

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1,195

Joined

2 yr. ago

I rode in a 3 a while back, and to me it felt like a futuristic econobox.

So 84,000 for a glass assuming 100% of the fluid is benzene (unless I misunderstood your calculation). Benzene concentration is about 1% of gasoline, and a tanker is about 20,000L, or ~40,000x more than a cup. Cube root of 40,000 is about 34 (cube root for the surface to volume factor). 34*100 is 3400, which is about 25x off from the 84,000 reduction required to be "safe." So it's roughly 25x worse than the Oregon cutoff (but seemingly within EPA limits, which appears to be ~1000x less stringent [!!!]). Unless I made some errors or misunderstood.

In any event I'll try to source my cooking oil from uncontaminated trucks!

(As an aside, thanks for taking my question seriously and putting thought into an answer, unlike some of the other more "colorful" responses!)

When I first heard Foghat's "Slow Ride" I thought they were saying "Snow White / take it easy!" Which made a lot of sense to college me --- this Snow White vixen is really getting down to business...

TIL the cancer rate in the Netherlands is through the roof.

I dunno, seems reasonable to me in the same way that Spanish using "¿" at the beginning of a question makes sense.

That it's inconsistent with other units is certainly annoying, but if anything I think it's the more sensible way.

...scaling laws. They are best illustrated with different sized items. Like a thimble, a coffee cup, or an oil tanker, all representing volumes of different orders of magnitude.

A simple, "your scaling argument doesn't really apply since the amount of residue left behind scales with the volume, not area" would have sufficed.

Gasoline is a pretty powerful solvent; would residue left behind that doesn't come off from gasoline be liberated by cooking oil? It's an honest question.

And I sure hope the regulatory agencies and shipping companies in my country do a better job than in China. This sort of thing is terrifying; I'm just curious as to an emotionless analysis of how bad this likely is. What concentration of benzene is acceptable? "None" would be best but we already breathe it. Would contaminated cooking oil likely be equivalent to...inhaling once at a gas station? A wet martini with diesel instead of vermouth?

No shit.

My question was an honest scaling law question. Of course this is bad. Which is what I said.

My question is how bad, which is a legitimate question, and is not in any way saying these are defensible actions. They are not.

If you fill a thimble with diesel, drain it, and then fill it with water, that's gonna be super gross --- the diesel will probably form a thin layer on the thimble which is then diluted with a thimble full of water. Super gross. But by the time you get to a fuel can, the thin layer of diesel on the can is now diluted by a can of water. Because surface area scale like length squared but volume like length cubed, this is a better situation (for a given amount of water). Now when this is scaled up further, the diesel gets increasingly diluted. This is the root of my question, it's not saying that we should accept this or that it's good, I'm just curious.

Apparently an unpopular take, but wouldn't the world (or at least, this country...) be a better place if the folks who became cops were the type of people who were also considering being a librarian?

Basically it seems like the ACAB mindset is in part self-fulfilling: "cops are bastards , I'm not a bastard, therefore I won't be a cop." Ok, so now some bastard who is less qualified than you becomes a cop, with no competition from you.

I get that the institution of policing in this country is deeply flawed; but is what we're currently doing really working?

Maybe a progressive, grass roots "infiltration" of the police is doomed to fail, I dunno. But I'm not sure we'll ever find out.

Remember folks --- this is an opinion piece, it is not news.

The reason you may hear more news about Biden being unfit for office than Trump being unfit is in large part because many Dems are calling for Biden to step aside, and it is newsworthy that a candidate faces calls from his own party.

The GOP is not widely calling for Trump to step down.

This is obviously not good, but I don't have great intuition.

If I have a mug full of gasoline (or worse, diesel or something cruder), and reuse that for coffee, I can imagine that being bad. But a tanker truck is humongous, and the contamination would, I imagine (???), scale roughly like a surface area-to-volume kind of thing, meaning that contamination for a huge container should be substantially "better" than my coffee example. (Perhaps this scaling law is a bogus assumption though?)

Of course it is still bad, gross, and probably dangerous...

Not something I have experience with, but have you looked at city/government jobs? You won't get rich, but afaik a lot of them have stability and pensions --- work there long enough and retirement at a reasonable age may even be possible (assuming things don't go to shit).

USPS comes to mind.

As far as physics stuff goes, I think this is far preferable to using someone's name.

Right. And if you want to self host with some geographic redundancy, it requires having friends or family with a good Internet connection who are willing to let you have a server at their place. Not impossible, but can be annoying.

I'm setting up a raspberry pi+HDD at family's house, with wireguard to my home network. Fun stuff, but it's not an off-the-shelf solution, especially when you consider that it's not my Internet access, it's theirs, so trying to be polite with bandwidth/data caps means it's a bit kneecapped.

You will be assimilated, please. Resistance is futile, eh?

If it's a case of needing ad-hoc WiFi from Windows, an Android phone tethered over USB will act as a WiFi adapter of sorts.

Having survived grad school and then some without a dishwasher, I will never look at loading/unloading the dishwasher as a chore; it is a privilege to do so (and is always followed by a heartfelt Thank You to that most selfless of appliances).

Maybe a dumb take, but I think milking customers for all they're worth is much better option than what HP is seemingly doing --- which is milking them for all they're worth this quarter.

Like, there are companies with a cult like following (Valve comes to mind) and while they could probably increase profit for a quarter or two, they seem to be playing the long game fairly well. Which is ultimately better for everyone --- they get more money over your lifetime, and you get a product that you're happy with.

In an undergrad electronics lab class, the TA suggested I put the function generator leads on my tongue, and play with the parameters. Obviously I know what an applied DC voltage "tastes" like, but he suggested AC, sweeping the frequency. Sure enough, above a certain frequency (want to say 10s to 100s of Hz?), I couldn't feel it at all.

Fun stuff.

...except I love a good Intellimouse.