magduf

Where was this?

I used to work as an intern at a shipbuilding company making aircraft carriers. People wore stuff when they were required to, so hard hats were always worn, and the attached earmuffs seemed to be generally worn when someone was working with something very loud.

However, at one point I was helping an inspection in a tank and there was a noxious odor, and I couldn't breathe in it. The shipyard worker with me went ahead and went in and did the test, but after this I tried to procure a respirator and they refused to get me one, saying it wasn't necessary for the work I was doing.

Music concerts are another place where you don't see people using personal protection much, though I will say that's changed in the last 10 years from what I've seen. I do see a minority (but a growing one) of people wearing earplugs, and we now have a lot of choices for "musician's earplugs" being sold which are designed to have a neutral frequency attenuation.

>Why would you buy safety critical equipment from China?

1) Because that's where it's made

2) Because they're obviously a lot more competent at public health than we are. We don't know WTF we are doing.

Surgical masks don't need to offer complete protection. For one thing, something is better than nothing. But more importantly, the reason people in Asia wear these masks isn't really to protect themselves from getting sick, it's to protect everyone else from getting sick from them. It's a product of a culture that values acting in the interest of the group instead of only in your own selfish self-interest.

So it's sorta like "herd immunity": if everyone is wearing a mask to keep everyone else from catching whatever they might have, it makes it much harder for diseases to spread around and everyone benefits.

Interesting, but it's a lot easier to just toss out the inkjet and buy an inexpensive laser printer. You can even buy a small-office color laser printer for $200-300 these days. And 3rd-party toner cartridges for these printers are ubiquitous and cheap and work fine. Why does anyone use inkjets any more? The entire industry is just a big scam.

Whoops, I left out a phrase. This should read: "...but the mass adoption of the internet made all that crap much more easily accessible to the masses..."

Several decades ago, it wasn't nearly this bad or widespread. Sure, there's always been conspiracies and anti-science sentiments, but the mass adoption made all that crap much more easily accessible to the masses, so it spread like a disease. Instead of everyone getting their news from Walter Cronkite, now they get it from Alex Jones.

Then what exactly is the goal? If you're not better off after doing something than before doing something, then why would you do it? Hosting the Olympics doesn't help a host nation in any measurable way that I've ever seen, though it does seem to increase the profits and prestige for some national leaders, the IOC, and of course other companies that stand to profit from the event as another poster here pointed out. I don't see how that helps the people of the nation at all.

In my opinion, it's rational (which surprises me that it would be "populist" since populist thinking is rarely rational).

The Olympics really are a terrible waste of effort and resources for the host nation, and the host nation rarely, if ever, gets a positive return on it. Mostly, it seems only to serve to increase the prestige of some head-of-state, nothing more. In reality, it costs an enormous amount of money to build facilities that are only used once and then go to waste. The world would be better off designating two separate, permanent Olympics facilities, one for summer and one for winter, and just reusing those every 4 years.

You can't easily install the nice washlets in many places, because they require power to operate. If a bathroom wasn't designed for it, it's very likely to not have a power outlet near the toilet. In Japanese bathrooms, there's an outlet right next to the toilet just for the washlet. In my American bathroom in my condo built around 15 years ago, the only outlet is on the other side of the sink (meant for plugging in an electric razor or hairdryer), so you'd have to run an electric cord literally across the sink, which obviously is a no-go.

What we "need" isn't important. Coordinated, responsible leadership sounds great, but that's up to the voters to decide. If the voters don't want that, then why should it be forced on them? Who are you to tell the voters otherwise?

The people elected Trump, so why not give him a dictatorship for 6 months? After all, it's within the President's power to declare martial law for times of emergency. It's the job of the voters to make sure they don't elect someone who can't be trusted with the awesome power available to that position. The same goes for any democratic country.

>He must spend all his effort and distribute resources to stay in power which means not benefiting the people.

Do you have any proof for your claim? I can point to multiple dictators in history under whose reign their people had (by the standards of the time) very good lives and government. Elizabeth I's rule was considered a golden age for England.

Finally, how is this different from democratic governments? Congresspeople here in the US spend all their effort getting "campaign donations" so they can be re-elected, and the distribute resources to stay in power (called "pork barrel politics"). The latter ends up benefiting small groups of people at the expense of the nation.

I may not be most people, but for various reasons, it does seem than web apps are taking over and native apps are dying, so this is only good for me. Maybe there's more of us than you think.

What's wrong with something looking "old-fashioned"? That seems to be better from my point of view.

I just finally got switched to Windows 10 on my work computer. Every time I start up a simple calculator, it takes up most of the space on my gigantic 27" QHD screen! Do they think I'm blind or something? The old Windows 7 calculator looked just fine and was an appropriate size.

I'd rather play it in a browser, even if it's much worse.

With the browser version, I can just open my browser and point to the URL and run it. Easy.

With a native app, this usually means I'd have to go buy a new computer running Windows or MacOS just to run this one stupid application, because I don't have either of those OSes at home. Of course, I'm not going to do that, which means I just don't use the app at all.

I completely disagree, and I mean for all desktop software vs. web software.

Web applications are generally better, because, as a Linux user, an in-browser application means I get to actually use the thing, instead of not using it at all.

>What I said is that, likely, there are kids in Africa who, if they were given the same opportunities as Senna, would have turned out to be better F1 drivers than him.

Yes, it is likely, just given the sheer numbers. But F1 driving is a sport requiring lots of skill and training and that opportunity just isn't available to many people due to the expenses involved. So I don't know why you're even bringing this up, unless you're trying to bash race car driving or the fact that not everyone in the world has equal opportunities, and I don't see how that's productive here.

Yep, you're right.

Luckily, the 50/60Hz stuff really doesn't matter these days except maybe for some digital clocks on appliances.

Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.

Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)

People complain about dictatorships, but the absolute best form of government is actually a dictatorship, because it's efficient and looks out for the interests of the people. Of course, this means it has to be a "benevolent dictatorship".

The problem with dictatorships is either your dictator isn't benevolent, or you have a great dictator but then he dies and his son takes over and he's terrible. There's lots of examples in history of excellent dictators/authoritarians: Marcus Aurelius of Rome, and Elizabeth I of England, for example. Of course, with Marcus Aurelius, there was a movie made about what happened there (Gladiator, 2000) when he crappy son took over.

>nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call.

For a lot of people, texting absolutely does replace the intimacy of a phone call. I have an ex-girlfriend who almost never talked to me on the phone, and only wanted to text, and she was like this with all her friends too. Note the "ex-" part here...

On Amazon, you don't know which seller's goods are being shipped to you, if it's "fulfilled by Amazon" or from Amazon directly.

So if two sellers are selling the same item, with the same exact SKU, and both send their inventory to Amazon to be warehoused and shipped, Amazon will happily send you either seller's item, depending on which is more convenient to send. (Perhaps seller A's stuff is in a warehouse closer to you.) This sounds good in theory, because all those products are identical, right? What if seller B's products are all counterfeit? So you buy from seller A who you think is legit (and for the example is), but you get seller B's fake crap, and seller A was powerless to stop it.

HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.

Depends on your definition of "deadly".

The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate.

I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.

To be fair, various media outlets are also calling it a "close pass".

You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.

This just goes to show, "truth is stranger than fiction".

If someone had tried to make a movie that showed the true events of 2020, people would think it's ridiculously unrealistic.

Wow, that's wrong on several different levels. I can't even begin...

I understand that you don't need an electrical engineering degree to be an electrician, but still, these are some fairly basic concepts in the electric power industry, especially the safety aspects, so you'd think someone working on live wires would know better.

Honestly, any halfway-intelligent person who travels internationally should know that Europe runs at 240VAC/60Hz, because this is really important if you want to use your American electronics there without a transformer. (When I went to Europe last, I brought my laptop, and an adapter which does not convert voltage, only the prongs, but that's OK because the laptop's power brick says it works on everything from 100VAC to 240VAC, as do a lot of electronics these days. But you have to check this first, you can't assume! Plugging a 120V-only device into this adapter could cause a fire.)

Sorry, I don't buy it. You could make the same argument about almost any sport. But the reality is that training is a huge part of skill, not just in-born talent. You can't just grab some random person from tropical Africa and have him play some sport alongside trained and experienced veterans and expect him to win, no matter how great his physical attributes are.

The money and connections are useful for getting drivers into the sport, but they're not going to succeed in it if they can't develop the necessary skill.

As an addition here, look at Ebola. It was perfectly feasible to create a vaccine, but no one bothered as long as it was confined to Africa. As soon as white people in western nations started getting it, then suddenly there was a huge effort to create a vaccine.

They probably never developed a SARS vaccine because it didn't turn into a major worldwide pandemic. There's lots of diseases that don't have vaccines mainly because it's seen as not worth the effort or cost. SARS and MERS looked scary at first but never got this big.

Sorry, I don't know anything about poker, but didn't Riker do this all the time on TNG?