os2warpman

A tennis racket is $13 at Goodwill and tennis balls are $1.30/ea. In the case of living in Massena, NY like the author you can play at Alcoa Park for $0.00.

As for climbing, you don't need a $200 climbing harness you can tie your own Swiss seat out of rope ($2/ft.) and buy a couple of snap links ($4-10/ea.). I would buy a lower-end harness for $30 though.

Spread out over several seasons that is as close to "nothing" as you can get, and is well within reach of any person with a pulse.

35 years ago I played DnD with a single AD&D 2e player's handbook and DM's guide shared among us all, campaigns and items out of Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine hand-copied from issues at the library, and a player miniature made out of a film roll canister that I used whiteout to paint a design on. Our greatest individual expense was dice and I think those were less than $10 for a set.

Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.

Because they require so little, infrequent, maintenance it makes very little sense to pave asphalt roads to wind tower locations.

For the vast majority of wind farms, dirt or gravel roads connect masts to pre-existing infrastructure.

The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPjUGSTN979dfUoDA

The largest wind farm in Europe is the Markbygden Wind Farm: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETVeMXpf1uPieTct8

Dirt and gravel roads.

I'm not saying that there have never been roads paved to create wind farms.

I am saying that the number of roads that have paved is so small that it is irrelevant.

Criticizing rationally acting rational actors on hn is discouraged because it is "low value" or "uncivil".

When the rationally acting rational actors are pressed for answers about how their vision of the world would work they tend to reply with either examples from science fiction space fantasy novels or something that is just a simple dictatorship.

In order to add to the conversation you should sprinkle some effusive praise about the AI/Crypto/Fintech/Quantum scam du jour (or criticism of Apple) into your comments to throw them off the scent.

Something like:

"Oh boy I really get what you're saying! Here at my quantum fintech startup we're using LLMs to turboencabulate novertrunnions. By the way did you know that safety regulations are written in blood and after years of working effectively the public may forget why they were implemented in the first place but the underlying issue will just return absent the regulation and a newer generation will just have to rediscover why the regulation was created and that's something we should avoid?"

The initial tease excites the techbro-- they start daydreaming about being a billionaire dictator of a mars colony and that floods their brain with pleasure hormones which lower their defenses.

This leaves a small, but existent, chance that you can hammer some reality into their antisocial brains.

5-point harnesses, roll cages, seatbelt-ignition interlocks, fuel cells, fire extinguishers, and Hans devices for drivers and passengers would eliminate nearly all vehicle fatalities.

They exist today and can be added to passenger vehicles for much less than $100k.

Broadly, the only fatalities they wouldn't prevent are offset frontal crashes at speeds so great as to be unreasonable and vehicles that have driven off cliffs or into bodies of water (though many would be able to self-extricate).

These are all dumb devices, I'm sure you were thinking of an AI or self driving doohickey.

We've already gotten results from your thought experiment. The results are: "an arbitrary point where cost/convenience lines cross over, based on general consensus but mainly liability costs".

If $10k (what I spent to get my Miata track-ready) isn't the line, $100k ain't it either-- especially since my solution saves tens of thousands annually and yours, like, less than one (45k deaths * 0.001% = 0.45 lives saved annually).

Bullies have been pushing everyone around for 300,000 years.

>However we do mandate rear back up camera which costs $1-2k and saves some percentage of lives when backing up.

A rear backup camera module, its wiring, and the screen cost less than $15 at volume for minimally-viable options and $100-300 for "good" (HD, guidance lines, proximity sensors, etc.) options.

Not $1,000-2,000.

What manufacturers charge for them is a different matter.

Your thought experiment is flawed because its results are known already and you are discarding them for a catastrophizing fantasy.

And the harm reduction wouldn't be 0.001%, it would be practically 99%.

And it costs much less than $100k.

It's found in race cars, today, and you can install it today (in most cars).

It's very simple.

Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.

Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.

The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)

He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.

He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.

He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.

I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.

Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.

The kids are alright.

But this is thinly-veiled AI slop vomited onto the web to sell a shitty "Cassette Tape Player, Maypott Portable Cassette Player Cassette Tape Recorder Audio Cassette to Digital Converter via USB, Compatible with PC/Laptops, Built-in Speaker&Headphone, Full Stereo" and that is not alright.

John was used by Wikileaks, registered the original Wikileaks domain, was blacklisted by Wikileaks insiders when he started questioning their financial (and "other") irregularities, and ended up cryptome'ing Wikileaks.

His site was not Wikileaks, he operated with morals and integrity. An example of this is how he had questions about how Wikileaks was publicized as a non-profit, when it was a project of The Sunshine Press-- a for-profit Icelandic corporation. Then the Wau Holland audit lies, selective releases, excessive and unaccounted-for spending, and obsession with money and publicity were all targets of his criticism.

John could smell the rot from a thousand miles away.

https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm

"Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." -John Young, on Wikileaks

John was a G. The O.G. His "Eyeball" series was the beginning of web-based OSINT.

> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.

If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.

The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.

Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.

My family is from Washington County, Indiana.

The western-most parts of the Washington county are further west than the easternmost parts of some of the counties that are in America/Chicago.

But the center of commerce, information, entertainment, and all other infrastructure for Washington County, Indiana is Louisville, KY (lollvole). Louisville is America/New York.

When you make an appointment at UofL Jewish you don't care when the sun rises and sets or when the sun is directly overhead-- you care that the clock on your kitchen wall matches the clock in the doctor's office.

Washington County used to be as remote and desolate as you can think of but nowadays it is practically a suburb of Louisville. Farms along 150 are being turned into subdivisions as quickly as farmers can die off so their kids can offload the land.

Same thing with the north west part of the state. Chicago suburbs want to be synced up with Chicago. The southwest part of the state, specifically grain elevator operators and other businesses, want to be synced up with the logistics hubs of St. Louis and Nashville.

Most of the rest of the state is farms. They don't care and just do what Indianapolis does.

I've never understood people who say we have the jacked-up time zones because of farmers. The number of farmers who look at the clock before starting work for the day can be counted on zero fingers.

I grew up with "fast time" and "slow time" and once you are accustomed to it, it takes about as much mental effort as blinking.

Internet people want things to be orderly. Consistent. Algorithmic.

REAL people want to make it to their appointments on time and want the only business serving the area for 150 miles to be open when they call.

Do people, in general, form opinions of others based on reddit posts?

That seems... odd... to me.

For example, I work in a very, extremely, small and specialized subsector of the aerospace industry. Everyone knows everyone else, or close to it.

If I'm going to work with Alice and I don't know Alice I can be assured that Bob knows Alice or at least Charlie, Bob's and my Director of Engineering, knows Alice. Maybe she's new? Doesn't matter, Alice works for either Charlie, Dan, or Erin.

If I was directed to a reddit post about Alice not only would I not read it, I would be instantly suspicious of the person who wrote it (What kind of dickhead goes on Reddit and complains about a coworker? A huge dickhead, that's who.) and the evidentiary weight of any discussion that would be forced upon me (because I wouldn't read the post to begin with) regarding Alice would be so low as to be irrelevant.

You can see how (edit: incredibly) dumb all of this is, right?

When I read "My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal (2022)" I thought it was going to be about egregious bugs or something, not bullshit People Magazine drama.

All of that being said, if Frank writes a reddit post about Alice, and Alice responds with a FOURTEEN THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED, AND TWENTY-THREE word essay that I'm tricked into reading, my only thought is "wow, Frank and Alice are both apparently dickheads".

>There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive.

My prediction is based on the number of efforts, too numerous to list here, being undertaken to develop lab equipment to automate the extremely labor-intensive workflow and the accumulation of vast libraries of CRISPR-Cas9 screens and dependency maps, the creation of which are also expensive and labor-intensive.

If my employer ever fires me, even if it is unwarranted or unjust, item number 1 on the list "Shit I ain't gonna do" will be:

1. Don't write a fourteen thousand, five hundred, and twenty-three word (not including title) Medium post about my firing.

As far as I can tell, every single person involved in the video gaming industry from executives to workers to consumers falls into a category of person defined by their extreme levels immaturity and pettiness rivaling or even exceeding the film industry.

I think you may be operating under the assumption that the extremely expensive price tag will need to be repeated for each patient.

In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.

The reduction in cost will almost certainly be similar to reduction in cost needed to sequence an individual's genome, which has fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.

The only catch is that we have to spend money to get there.

Another catch is that the nations who underwrite this research will turn millions in investments into trillions in dividends and the stingy or poor will be left in the cold.

Seeing that private enterprise is only good at taking publicly-funded work and patenting it, and that in the absence of public funding nothing ever gets invented, we should be all-in on this.

edit: it's apropos that you mentioned obesity because GLP-1 drugs are the direct, irrefutable, product of spending at government labs.

edit2: specifically, a single government scientist playing around with lizard saliva in the 1970s because he thought it was interesting.

I have paid for Fastmail for over a decade and there have been no cons I can think of.

I use my own domain and turned on wildcards so each service gets a different email address to try and spam.

Linguists using the word "hypothesis" when nothing they have ever pondered, proposed, or published has ever been even close to a "testable and reproducible prediction about reality" really tickles my pickle.

Also their use of the word "proof".

And "science".

Cosmos 482's orbital data and reentry predictions were publicly available from the US Space Force via USSPACECOM's space-track.org service.

It was tracked for decades as object number "NORAD 6073" and anyone with a sufficiently-capable observation apparatus could have imaged its reentry.

Provided they were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, of course.

It will be difficult to get an exact final position because the space surveillance network points up, not down, and it was behind the horizon from the GEODSS at Diego Garcia anyways, and ballistic missile radar coverage does not extend to the Indian Ocean.

The world is more than Europe.

There are many domes that were built in the Middle East and Asia while Europe was trying to figure out how to fund expensive vanity projects (large domes).

Computers aren't vanity projects.

Those were all local events.

The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.

Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth.

If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot myself in the head to avoid starvation after playing a few rounds of solitare.

Georgia Tech has one of the best fabrication programs in the world.

Yup!

Here's one in Utah: https://www.nanofab.utah.edu/

Here's one in Pennsylvania: https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab

Here's one in California: https://nanofab.ucsb.edu/

>Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.

Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

People act like computers are complicated. They are but they also aren't.

Any moderately-sized US state university can (and some have) build one from scratch: as in from fucking sand to "Shall we play a game?", all in one go.

The state university nearest to me has a complete nanofab that can make-- and package!-- ICs (somewhere around 14nm-ish), a different lab that can make wafers from scratch, a chemistry department where undergrads could make the plastics, and all of the software guys you can shake a stick at.

The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity.

The knowledge and ability is so widely globally distributed that taking it all out is death.

Do not mistake the centralization of consumer goods assembly with the centralization of the knowledge needed to assemble consumer goods.

Is this OS just for the brief period of time between the loss and the ultimate end? To like, play some rounds of solitaire while awaiting the inevitable?

Having read quite a bit about Franklin, his life was defined by an extremely generous interpretation of some of those virtues.

It used to be there was one hardware store in town and you bought what they carried, and they would carry tools of a sufficient quality to avoid returns and complaints.

Now you can buy tools from several thousand different manufacturers and people trend towards the less expensive options.

You can also, with just a little research, buy the best in the world from anywhere in the world. (edit: for now)

I built sets for a small regional theater company back in the 90s and we had, at the time, state-of-the-art cordless Makita power tools. Today's Makitas are so much better it is ludicrous. The old skinny-handled Makitas were barely powerful enough to do the job, the batteries didn't last long and had memory issues, the chucks were clunky, brushes would wear out extremely quickly, and the plastic was so brittle if you dropped them the housing would often crack or split.

I remember having to pre-drill thousands of pilot holes for screws and bolts, not because I was worried about the wood splitting but because the drills weren't powerful enough for longer and/or thicker screws.

Modern Makitas are more robust, more powerful, smaller and lighter, and more reliable.

They can drive 3/4" hex head lag bolts into soaking wet wood all day, something that was impossible for (or destructive to) 80s and 90s tools.

In the 80s and 90s I had the same Craftsman screwdriver set that everyone else in America had-- the ones with the clear handles that turned into a cylinder of greased ice the second a single drop of oil got on them.

Now I have a nice set of Weras and even when wearing oil-soaked gloves they are easy to grip.

The increase in fatalities is almost exclusively due to frailty.

>However, we also need to improve the driving skills of the young and elderly.

In the US, at least, an 80-year-old driver is safer than a 21-year-old.

Additionally, the least safe group of female drivers, females aged 15-20, is only marginally more likely to be operating a motor vehicle that causes a fatal crash (25.5 per 100k licensed drivers for teenaged girls) than the safest male cohort (23.8 for males aged 65-74).

The gender gap is not even close. Males aged 15-20 are 60.3, my cohort is in the mid-30s, and retiree males are in the mid-20s.

Female retirees are 7.5, geriatrics 10.1. All other age groups are in the mid-teens.

It doesn't matter how you massage the data.

Driving for work vs. not, crashes per hours driven, crashes per number of licensed drivers by gender, crashes per 100 million miles driven, highway vs. surface street, at all times in every instance women cause fewer single vehicle, multi-vehicle, pedestrian-involved, injurious, and fatal, crashes.

Crashes involving a female driver are also less likely to have passenger fatalities, due to the greater likelihood that all passengers will be wearing their seatbelts. Females are less likely (by a LOT) to drive intoxicated, less likely to drive distracted, and are less likely to speed.

Actuaries working for insurance firms and rental car bean counters have known this irrefutable and unquestionable truth for at least 30 years.

Whenever I suggest that males receive additional training and oversight until their crash rates fall to those of the typical 16-year-old girl, people get irate.

edit: I can't find the numbers but it is fact that CDLs (commercial driver's licenses) both lower and level the statistics so training and oversight is almost certainly the answer.

ChatGPT is incapable of thought and can only mash together strings of text and output grammatically correct-ish sentences that meet an arbitrary criteria for "sameness" to what it has fed on.

Like with all things that are complicated and have nuance, it is incapable of giving an answer that is useful.

Fuel expenses over the life of an aircraft are tricky because the life of an aircraft is defined by its number of cycles (take offs and landings) independent of the number of miles flown.

For short/medium haul aircraft like the A320neo, 48,000 cycles at 1,220km/cycle with 2.79kg of fuel used per km of flight, at $0.80 per kg for fuel means that the total spent on fuel during the life of the aircraft is just below the list price of the aircraft but slightly above what airlines actually pay for an A320neo.

For long haul aircraft like a 787-10 with the GEnx engines, 44,000 cycles at 10,240km/cycle with 6.12kg of fuel used per km of flight at $0.80 per kg for fuel means that the total spent of fuel during the life of the aircraft is over $2.26 billion, or roughly 8x the list price of the aircraft.

Neither 0.8x-1.25x nor 8x are "2-3x". Looking at financial reports, for no US airline does it even average out to 2-3x.

But those were fuel prices 3 years ago, today they're half that.

Tomorrow they might be double.

All of this ignores the fact that "the planes themselves are..." doesn't limit the dollar amount to the initial purchase cost.

It also ignores the fact that some aircraft are leased, and others are major capital expenditures so the total costs for the same aircraft at the same company can vary greatly. Airlines typically report the "cost" of their aircraft as CASM-ex, or cost per available seat mile excluding fuel so the "price" of an airplane over its lifetime is CASM-ex + fuel and fuel is currently around 25% of the CASM-ex of the three largest US airlines.

Every single aircraft type has different costs that can vary widely.

A useful non-bullshit response from an A"I" would start with "For what kind of aircraft?"

If you are going to use Babbage as the start of the clock, we must use the mechanical and electromechanical logarithmic and analytical engines created in the late 1800s/early 1900s as the stop.

We must also use 1980 as the year in which quantum computing was "invented".

As far as progress goes, in all of those fields there are naught but papers that say "quantum computing would be totally rad in these fields" or simulations that are slower than classical computers. (by, like, a lot)