Diederich

In 2020 when we rented in the bay area and decided to find a forever home, we also moved to full WFH and started looking at hundreds of houses in the Pacific NorthWest.

The very first thing we did (mostly my wife) was to call Comcast, give them the specific address, and have them verify the place had high speed Internet.

For those that passed that test (a relatively low percentage did since we were looking to live in a relatively rural area) the next thing we did was contact the relevant real-estate agent. This part was tricky and often annoying. We cut through everything they had to say and said that, if they wanted to potentially move forward, they had to do something for us. They had to get permission from the current owner and run an Internet speed test.

This was a PITA, but most of the time they did it. And most of the time, Comcast's data was accurate about whether service was available.

The place we ended up buying is about 10 miles outside of Olympia Washington. Our street is one of the very few in the area that has high speed comcast.

Having said that, we also got a starlink dishy right away and we use that as backup, because while most of the time our Internet is really excellent, speed is great, etc, it has a lot of small outages, so it's worth having a highly reliable but much less fast backup.

Can you briefly outline what experiments you setup on both sides of the earth? Thank you!

I grew up in Southern California in the 1970s, and a non-trival percentage of the daily conversations I had with normal people had to be in Spanish, because their English was much worse than my Spanish, which was fair.

"Southern California" was/is a very, very big area. I grew up southeast of downtown.

Can you share where/when you grew up? Just curious.

As far as 'replacement': I can't dismiss such opinions out of hand, but for another anecdote: two of my great grandparents, who came from Germany in the late 19th century, lived in the US for many decades and never learned English that well.

Their children, my dad's father, of course spoke English fluently.

I played MUME a ton in the mid to late 1990s, and still login once in a while.

It's truly a hidden gem. Walking around the world often feels like being inside a Tolkien novel.

Really cool stuff, thank you for this!

Thanks for the link, I'm looking forward to reading through it.

How would you compare these cited risks associated with mask wear with the risks associated with more likely C19 infections, and perhaps more important with the emergent recognition of risks associated with long covid?

My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.

Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.

Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.

There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

> It is a symbol of fear and control.

Perhaps to some. That feeling is probably largely driven by one's overall outlook.

We started masking before any of the mandates because it just made sense to do so, to us at least.

> It never ever should never have been mandated, only recommended.

That's a hard question in my opinion. I naturally tend toward letting people do what they want unless they're clearly hurting others. Others have argued that masking does unambiguously reduce harm to others, but I don't find it so clear cut.

I'm personally less uncomfortable with mask mandates than the widespread shutdowns. Those shutdowns caused massive harm to people. Masking? Not so much.

Note I'm not quite willing, even now, to fully support mask mandates, now or previously. I see both sides of the issue.

> It’s sad you get downvoted.

Agreed, it is sad that opposing, perhaps uncomfortable viewpoints get pushed down.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. My wife, son and I have been masking with 100% consistency since April 2020 (in indoor/crowded outdoor places) and we haven't felt 'dehumanized' to the slightest degree.

It's not quite free; the bridge of my nose sometimes experiences some irritation, and we've had to deal with more than a hand full of hateful/snarky in person comments, but that's no biggie.

Being sick two weeks is a very clear cost. Less clear are the long-term costs associated with long-covid.

How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a mask most of the time when in public?

> It is well-known that all currently available non-caloric sweeteners increase cardiometabolic risks.

I'd honestly like to hear more about this, thank you in advance.

Some more recent launch providers are focusing on greatly lowering $/kg to orbit, which is an absolutely necessary step for such visions.

I think this visualization makes it a little more clear what's going on with Starlink orbits: https://heavens-above.com/Starlink.aspx

Yup that's what I do as needed, which for me is pretty rare.

What conclusions if any can you draw from this?

It surely can. If I have to casually mess with a Makefile, I'll just remember to use control-v TAB as needed, or vi yank/put another line with a proper tab and edit. In the very rare case I'm doing more serious work, I'll temporarily turn it off.

Nope. Back in the day that would greatly interfere with copy/paste. One way or another, it's so easy to see what line number you're on and/or jump to a specific line.

I've been using vi/vim on a near daily basis for 34 years now and this is the only thing I put in ~/.vimrc:

  set tabstop=4
  set expandtab
  set shiftwidth=4 " or 2 or whatever
  set shiftround
  syntax on

EDIT:

Just for some fun archeology, I google searched on the 3rd line, 'set shiftwidth=4 " or 2 or whatever' because I very dimly recall copying most of my standard set (minus the syntax on bit) from someone else a long long time ago. This was the only hit I found:

https://www.perlmonks.org/index.qs1968.pl/perlmonks.org?disp...

Yup.

I've dealt with the fallout from 'disorganized' power failures in datacenters before. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I know that a notable but relatively small fraction of our servers had real deal hardware problems after, many not booting up at all. Many fried power supplies, many cooked batteries.

Seconded! I haven't read through a book that quickly in quite a long time.

My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low iron levels.

Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all.

All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week.

Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it.

But some people do effectively need red meat.

Yup, pretty much everything on this guy's channel is top drawer.

The most pressing challenge with climate change is not average temperature, but extremes: extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme rain/floods, extreme drought, extreme storms.

What happened in Canada last year (and partly to those of us who live in PNW: it hit 108F at our house last year in the woods next to the Puget Sound) wasn't about average temperatures, it was about more energy in a quasi-stable chaotic system causing more frequent extremes on both/all sides.

The old saying goes: a human dies after three minutes without O2, three days without water, three weeks without food. More to this point, a human dies after being exposed to 95F wet bulb temperatures for three hours.

What's this have to do with living near the poles as the average warms up? There might be some use there, but wild weather is a truly global thing, and the poles are, on average, accumulating even more energy than the equator.

Amazing movie, had a big impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNQ694QzLqY

Thanks for the link! I have considered such technologies, and I'll probably end up implementing one at some point. It's on my TODO list. (:

My wife reports that she's able to switch WIFI from Comcast to Starlink in a matter of seconds, which doesn't actually break the video chat session. Not ideal, but not terrible.

All fair points, thank you. And congrats on your property!

The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.

Each Dishy is assigned to a specific ground station, so you can freely move it around as long as it's 'close enough' to that ground station. (I don't know the distance by memory..) There's a way to ask Starlink to switch your ground station, which is what people with the RVs are doing.

> If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you.

We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access.

Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest.

Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles.

I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense.

(Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.)

I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.

> not that expensive to send up thousands of satellites

It's relatively inexpensive for SpaceX to do it, but their external prices are still quite high, even if cheaper than the competition.

Pretty sure that would be a Perl script.