logfromblammo

The idiots you encounter are not all the same people all the time. And sometimes, you're someone else's idiot. You might not even notice when that happens.

All it takes is a moment of confusion, or distraction, or frustration. Or a chemical impairment. Or having a stroke. Or drowsiness.

Braking assistants are good, a self-drive function that has the goal of safely removing the vehicle from traffic--for operators that can suddenly no longer function at speed--would be better. Hitting a panic button and waking up on the shoulder with the hazard lights on is preferable to getting intimate with a pole or guardrail while the cruise control is set to 70 mph.

Our informational machine assistants would also be better with access to vehicle state and sensor data. Your navigation assistant could then tell you, if you are approaching an intersection with your left turn signal on, that left turns are not allowed, before you get there and possibly make a bad snap decision. The nav app on your phone doesn't know that you are signaling left. The GPS signal isn't quite reliable enough to pinpoint which lane you're in. It only knows the positions of vehicles whose operators are currently using the same app.

Obviating snap decisions by drivers should be a goal, because less thinking time means more mistakes. Mobile nav apps have gotten better at this, saying which lane you should be in, and whether destinations are on the left or the right, but they could still do better for in-vehicle improvisation, when the destination changes while enroute, or temporary detours are needed.

Mine would be the Fano plane mnemonic for octonion multiplication, using two curves of constant width instead of the triangle and the circle. That's got the quaternions covered with the inside curve.

It can go next to the skeletal formula for benzaldehyde on my imaginary nerd canvas.

"We" don't fix it.

This hasn't been going on for 7 years; it has been happening for at least 40.

The rage stems from the wage, which has stagnated for the working class for as long as I have been around to see it. People are trying to telegraph that unpleasant things will be happening soon, if all the people who are constantly dumping on their inferiors don't at least start handing out some umbrellas.

I think the tech has actually been a mitigating factor. Online mobs can't throw real-life firebombs. When people go out to actually do something, there are fewer people in the same physical place to pump each other up.

Not going to argue. That's absolutely correct.

And let me tell you, it's really great for the self-esteem, too.

As long as people keep giving tax cuts to the rich and undermining labor law, it's only going to get worse. Kids are still in cages. Presidents are still corrupt. And I'm too much a coward to withdraw my support of the system for your benefit, just because I don't want my family to be insecure about food and shelter again. I don't want to move yet another 1100 miles for work. I want to feel like I matter, but I really don't.

If you feel like you have the choice to not do what I do, then you also have the power to help me have the same choice. Will you use it?

The Uncle Ben Parker Contrapositive applies: with no power comes no responsibility.

As long as "at will" employment exists, then no contract terms exist, and no labor law can stick to the employer, so long as they are willing to lie whenever there is no contradictory evidence. If the employee gets fired for asserting their rights in the law, and the employer can say it was an "at will" termination, the employee has no effective recourse or remedy.

If you criminalize the work that I do, you are just getting me fired for no HR-disclosable reason (again), and the company will have that work done in another jurisdiction.

If you aren't putting c-level executives and/or board members in prison, and forcibly restructuring or dissolving corporations, you aren't doing anything to protect me, the worker. And if you are placing legal liability on me, personally, I definitely will not testify against my superiors. I know the feces roll downhill.

I was about to be incredulous, but I actually do believe that you would rather have me fired and put in prison, and my dependents thrown in the gutter, than to have a software workers' union or stronger federal labor laws that might possibly protect me from an arbitrary dismissal if I tell my boss "What you are asking me to do is unethical." Thanks for that.

They put pop-up stealth advertisements, targeted at your doctor, into your electronic medical record, so that he or she would get you addicted to painkillers.

Software developers did this. For drug money. That's just terrible, isn't it? They shouldn't have done that.

But even if the developers had ethical concerns, they had no recourse but to quit, and be replaced by someone else--who might get six months of work in before realizing that they are working for the baddies, and also deciding to either quit or die a little inside.

I would do that job. I would take that money. I don't get a stupidly-inflated Valley salary with bonus RSUs, and I have bills to pay. I don't have a union that can protect me from nonsense. I know it's wrong. I would do it anyway, because I have been screwed by every company I have ever worked for, such that I learned that my ethics don't matter. Money matters.

I want my kids to get an education without student loans, if they want it. I want to drive a car that isn't older than they are. And I want to retire before I die. My ethics would only keep me from that. Apparently, the companies that aren't managed by money-grubbing sociopaths just don't hire where I live. So if you don't want stuff like this to happen, make it actually mean something to have ethical objections, even for people working outside of California.

I build software that has probably contributed in a material way to human suffering. For far less money than a Silicon Valley developer might get paid to make a mobile app for on-demand dog-walking. Everyone in my building does it. Everyone in the building across the street does it. Companies that don't hurt people as part of their business model aren't hiring here. People that have a problem with it--or at least those who can't hide that they do--don't get the jobs.

So if you are currently on a high horse, I hope you enjoy the view from up there. You haven't yet used your influence to help other workers--those with nigh-nonexistent power as an individual to influence the corporate employers that reluctantly hire them, and then reserve the right to fire at any time for any reason, or no reason.

Lies are only punished if you tell them to rich people.

Further down the article, you can see that investors are mad only because AT&T's mergers and acquisitions don't seem to be paying off fast enough.

Worked for Epic after the dot-com crash, as they were finishing up their Verona headquarters. I will tell you one good thing about it: underground parking. That matters in Wisconsin.

All of the good things I could tell you that I remember about Epic have zero relationship with the software they sell. And none of them could stop me from leaving, because the software was the job. It was all essentially gold spray paint on a turd.

Some people don't trust the police with anything at all.

They aren't wrong. Federal circuit judges and the Supreme Court have ruled that police have no duty to protect anyone in particular. They routinely suffer no meaningful negative consequences for serious failures in their work, including killing people who are unarmed, not resisting, and not suspected of committing any crime.

And after the Boston police screwed up the Mooninite promotion for Cartoon Network in 2007... well, it's enough to say that Turner had to pay for and publicly apologize for the police response to their fancy LED-illuminated handbills--absolutely Kafkaesque.

If I ever find a suspicious package, I'll certainly alert bystanders to retreat. I'll pull the firm alarm on my way out. I'll call the firefighters. I'll call the local newspaper and television station newsrooms. I might even call the triage nurse at the nearest ER. But someone else can be the one to call the cops.

Because if the tip is non-anonymous, the person making it is automatically the only known suspect.

It's not the difference between anonymous tip and non-anonymous tip, but between anonymous tip and no tip at all, because no one wants to be punished for doing the right thing.

Remember Richard Jewell from the Atlanta Olympics?

The docs that don't bury the patient in bureaucratic nonsense are out of network, and not accepting new patients anyway.

I think you may overestimate the impact of philanthropic efforts.

Everything he put into philanthropy could have been spent into the economy by other means. Such as higher employee wages.

I take it as axiomatic that a person with a plethora of money cannot understand the problems of a person with a dearth of money well enough to implement effective solutions.

200x median annual income is "enough". That's 5x median to live on, and 1x median for a fiduciary manager to make sure it lasts forever.

5x median is enough to not worry about money, ever, yet also not so much that one can afford to waste any of it. It lets you have nice things, but not stupidly decadent things. It's still conceivable to spend all that in one year, just on ordinary consumer purchases, services, and travel.

Measuring in terms of median incomes is also a good proxy for how many full-time servants one can afford to hire and employ indefinitely without disgruntlement. At 5x, that's enough for a 2.5x lifestyle, plus a 1.1x personal assistant, and a 1.4x property manager. That kind of enough is "enough".

So no, he should not have given up after his first million. He should have stopped at around $12M instead. It's fine if he keeps working, but really, after that, it's more of a benefit to others if he spends the excess rather than investing it.

Retiring is about finally doing something purely out of personal interest, rather than for enough profit to pay your bills.

Sitting on a beach forever is okay, if you like that sort of thing. It's also okay to write a novel that no one will ever read, or to crash remote controlled helicopters and then repair them. It's also okay to plant a hummingbird, butterfly, and honeybee garden, and buy a big macro lens. Or maybe ride a motorcycle all over the continent. Or move to Florida and do Florida things. Or move to Wyoming and manage a herd of 15 cattle on a plot that the real ranchers call "Flyspeck Ranch". Or open an ice cream shop that turns a profit only 20 days per year.

Retirement is as varied as the people who are no longer bound to conform to a work standard.

Hang on, I need to call my peat guy, who assured me that one meter was sufficient. Also, you have to line that tank with shotcrete.

Hosting locations matter when you are buying network-delivered services. Even if it is trivial to bypass for the user, this one time, jurisdictional risk to the provider is something that you have to consider as a factor when comparing competitors and self-host options.

The self-ionization constant of water, Kw, changes with temperature, pressure, and ionic strength.

Kw is also used as cologarithm pKw. If you are not aware, X = 10^(-pX), and pX = -log(X). So a lower pH is a greater concentration of [H+] (actually [H3O+]), a lower pOH is a greater concentration of [OH-], and a lower pKw is a greater self-ionization of water.

pKw decreases with increasing temperature. It decreases with increasing pressure. And it decreases with increasing ionic strength until around 0.6-0.8, then goes back up.

While those are held constant, a dropping pH does indicate acidification. pH + pOH = pKw . But if they are not constant, pOH can drop at the same rate as pH, because pKw is also dropping. As long as pH and pOH are both near pKw/2, the solution is neutral. The solution is only acidifying when pH is decreasing faster than pOH.

If you become slightly less basic, your pOH goes up. Under normal circumstances, that means pH is going down by an equal amount. Either way you describe it in English, de-alkalinization usually yields the same mathematical results as acidification. Deviation from this rule, which holds at standard temperature and pressure, and constant ionic strength, requires additional explanation.

If work is the only stable thing in your life, you should try not to let it fall apart, but it is designed to support you financially, not emotionally. It can't hold you up by itself.

You're in Canada rather than the US, so there are fewer barriers to professional mental health care, as far as I am aware. Go see a psychiatrist or clinical therapist.

You have had four major stressors in one year, and then piled on change social behaviors and change in sleep habits. It's justified. Go talk with a pro so they can hold you together with duct tape and baling wire while working out a plan for more permanent repairs.

Right here is when Tevye jumps in and starts singing "tradition!"

It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and the ordering had to be fixed.

Once Indo-Arabic numerals made it in to the character set, the need for strict ordering went away. But now that characters have numeric values again (ASCII, Unicode), they're fixed forever.

When visitors are over, the "main" bathroom becomes #1 only, and #2s have to be taken in the less convenient bathrooms.

Like forcing longer-running processes onto a different CPU when congestion occurs.

#1s are usually quicker and more time-sensitive. Nobody wants to piss in the backyard because someone else is pooping. And that has only happened while visiting a 2 bed/1 bath place. Fine for one, but five people overloads the resource, and the scheduler can't pre-empt the running process.

Really, the problem is that the bath or shower and the toilet are in the same room. Occupying the bath or shower should not exclude others from using the toilet. It's bad design that has propagated via real estate marketing.

Good. For the foreseeable future, the limit of energy available from solar will be the total surface area of the Earth divided by two.

And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear.

A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.

Global-politically, there shouldn't be any problem for the US, UK, France, Russia, and China to have fast-breeder reactors, but it still may be a concern in local politics due to environmental or terrorism concerns.

Nuclear waste has to be shipped to the facility. All the shipping routes from all the nearest waste-producing reactors converge there. That's naturally a concern to all those who live nearby.

By human emotional calculus, it is better for a million people to experience on average 0.001 of a mortality event than for 1000 people to be killed outright.

When we measure such things in terms of "increased cancer risk" and "possible thyroid dysfunction", it is far easier to discount, particularly as young people are not tremendously concerned when people above a certain age die of diseases that are already typical in the aged.

So even if we knew it exactly, people would still care less. It might be more relevant if, instead of death toll, it could be given a money value derived from additional healthcare expenses for exposed individuals, because young people implicitly know that they are the ones who pay when old people get sick.

Stellar fusion like that which occurs in our sun is effectively aneutronic, but is also relatively slow, because the limiting step is the combination of two protons into a proton-neutron pair.

You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass.

So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster.

It's a bit beyond our means right now.

Electrolysis only produces chlorine to the extent that chloride ion is present in the water. If the charge-carrying ions are metallic positive and hydroxide negative, the chlorine produced will be negligible.

So to promote electrolysis, add KOH or NaOH (lye) instead of NaCl (table salt). Or don't add anything, and let your charge carriers be H3O+ and HCO3- from dissolved CO2.

The chlorine will come off first, and if you have a reducible anode, it will attack that first. If you have a graphite anode, you will get Cl2, which will oxidize pure hydrogen just fine. You'll get HCl in the combustion, which isn't dangerous when diluted (it's the same acid that's produced in your stomach).

Fluorine gas is not produced from aqueous fluoride salts because the oxygen is always oxidized first.

The half-reactions:

  2 H2O + 2 e- --> H2 + 2 [OH-]       (-0.83 V)
  2 H2O        --> O2 + 4 [H+] + 4 e- (-1.23 V)
  2 [Cl-]      --> Cl2 + 2 e-         (-1.36 V)
  2 [F-]       --> F2 + 2 e-          (-2.87 V)

Even if you do get a F2, it immediately reacts with the electrolysis water to produce oxygen gas:

  2 F2 (g) + 2 H2O (l) --> 4 HF (aq) + O2 (g)

In short, this is not much of a problem.

By the redox half-reactions, it looks like oxygen should be produced before chlorine, but there is also something called "overpotential" at the electrode. On a graphite electrode, the activation overpotentials for H2, O2, and Cl2 are -0.62V, +0.95V, and +0.12V, respectively. There is also a "bubble overpotential" of the tiny bubbles that form on the electrode. That pushes the preference towards chlorine gas. Tiny oxygen bubbles will form, but the energy required to grow them large enough to detach from the electrode and rise to the surface exceeds that required to form and grow a chlorine bubble.

That's a good point. The capital expenses should be recoverable via civil suit, with actual operating expenses so far, and possibly also projected future operating expenses over the expected lifespan of the installation.

But possibly not. Water rights in legal-land aren't always as fair or uncomplicated as ordinary non-lawyer folk--such as myself and most HN readers--might expect them to be.

Electrolyze water in one vessel. Combust the gases in another vessel, and condense the water vapor.

Hilariously inefficient use of energy, but I think the only contaminants you are likely to encounter would be... nitrous oxide (N2O)?

Take three fractions, the first being the "heads" or "tops" from the first condensed volume up to 5% of the original volume, the next being the "mains" from the next 90%, and the last being the "tails" or "bottoms" from the final 5%.

Wash the packed column and boiling vessel with the heads and then discard them. Discard the tails. Repeat the process with the mains.

Your twice-distilled mains are now pure water, discounting contamination from inferior distillation apparatus.

Get some food-grade calcium chloride (E509, de-icing salt), magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt), sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and potassium chloride (NoSalt brand table salt substitute) and add some (known) minerals back into the result for your drinking water, because pure distilled water has a very poor taste profile.

The only types of chemical that cannot be easily removed by this distillation process are those that form azeotropes with water, such as ethanol, and those chemicals are unlikely to be present in quantities significant enough to be a problem.

> "...you can't put a price on clean water."

Is that... is that not exactly what you just did? $5k capital expense and $1500/yr operational expense.

That system is almost certainly more than enough for your own household needs, so you could probably sell the excess capacity to your neighbors at near cost to cover some of the operational expenses.

Today I learned that California has at least one business that can be called a "water store".

Obviously, the chemical that's in the water that must promote such enterprises has to be reintroduced after any purification processes that may occur in the aforementioned store.

Someone please explain to me how such a business is viable in 5 gallon quantities, when the rest of the world either digs a well, buys the outflow from a metered pipe, or fills up a cistern from a tanker truck with at least 3000 gallons per delivery.

Do they not sell reverse osmosis filters or distillery pots there?

Also, if one person filters out the stable perfluorocarbons like PFOA and PFOS, and then dumps them back down the drain again, is that really helping to solve the problem?

I buy tin in one market town and sell it for 5% more at the market town a week's journey away. Or I load up my ship with tin in one port town and sell it for 20% more at the port town a month's journey away. That tin can go quite a distance without any one captain having to load up in Penzance and do a long haul all the way to the terminal end of the Mediterranean.

But even that would have been possible, if anyone had enough knowledge of enough prices for common trade goods at enough of the ports along the way. One trip would make the owner, captain, and crew rich enough for it to be worth the risk.