thx11389793

The trillion/year I believe was in reference to military expenditures.

my personal method when out and about is "ask a stranger," with using my hand computer as a backup. i delight in answering these questions as well, so i'm inclined to believe people generally don't mind.

Neal Stephenson has done world building involving megacorporations that devolve into semi-feudal colonies. His style is goofier than Gibson's gritty realism but worth reading.

Protip: if you find a crap product that's being shilled for in the reviews, you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know someone who was paid several hundred dollars to not leave a bad review for a something that cost under $50. One scathing review that exposes their scheme might lost them tens, maybe a hundred multiples of their unit profit margin.

I went surfing with a friend a couple years ago. I made an error while donning the wetsuit and ended up irretrievably wedging my head into the sleeve. Had to have my friend unwedge me.

Paddling takes a LOT of effort, and you do a lot of it. Catching a wave is about timing, and balance, in that order. I managed to do it exactly once in the couple hours we were out. I'd do it again. :)

autorotation requires control of blade pitch.

my cursory research seems to indicate that it's pretty reasonable to start a local wireless ISP, with a lower bound wrt minimum number of clients to make the venture worth it being 50 or so according to someone.

I came across an old copy of this when I was in grade school. Early aughts. Finding those books may well have put me on the path to where I am now (embedded hardware eng)

If you've been holding onto a LOT, it's possible to spend the entire length of the experience processing everything you've lived up to that point. I've seen it in first-time MDMA experiences, notably a friend in his late 20s who'd only recently 'come out of his shell' so to speak.

I think even in that case, his experience was probably wildly useful, despite bearing little to no resemblance to the happy empathic presentation that's commonly associated with MDMA.

My answer is 'yeah, probably.' But ideally this hypothetical couple should ask someone experienced who knows them better.

MrLeap did a great job explaining this. If I were to add anything, it would be to echo the recommendation to take a class if you're really starting from nothing. Two things are really important starting out: someone who can demonstrate good technique and rapidly evaluate and give feedback on your work, and seat time. It's like learning to write, once you know what you want the result to look like, it's mostly time in the seat to build consistency and muscle memory. If you have the time, I've heard good things about community college courses. Here in Oakland, Ca, there's an industrial arts space, The Crucible, that offers condensed courses, useful if you're short on time.

I had the great fortune of working adjacent to a machine shop. I learned TIG on a work machine. A co-worker spent 15 minutes showing me setup and some example welds, then it was mostly seat time from there, with lots of YouTube and a couple of "hey, how's my weld look?" sessions.

Actually fabricating stuff can be an issue when you don't have machine shop at your disposal. Luckily, some metal shops have a CNC laser or plasma, so if you design something in CAD, you can shop out sheet metal bits and avoid the hassle. There are places that will laser cut and notch steel or alu tube so that you can sort of just hand-bend and lego your workpiece together.

One tool that's not obvious, but becomes indispensable especially to a homegamer is a portable bandsaw. Get a decent corded one-- it makes cutting tube stock etc accurate and fast. You can fabricate a stand for it and turn it into a static bandsaw as well.

it's a reference to Eisenhower's famous 1953 speech

it's all fun and games until someone figures out they can make cigarette butts and turn them in for money

fabrication, welding, juggling, playing music, working on and riding motorcycles, doing acid in the woods.

it takes some doing but it's well worth the effort to move your leisure time away from device-focused activities. the sense of life balance gained is palpable.

Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may get yelled at for doing it wrong

is this actually a legit synthesis? as a non-chemist it has the air of plausibility, author names and quips aside.

mine (etymotic) came with a small squeeze to open coin-pouch thing, maybe 5cm by 8cm. it disappears pretty well into a jeans pocket.

expect to pay 100-200 for custom molded ones. if you want inexpensive ones that are still pretty decent and low profile, I recommend Hearos. barely visible when they're in.

commonly accomplished by smoking a largish joint beforehand.

While the materials don't quite exist for a tether that can survive the forces needed to escape Earth gravity, the wiki you linked mentions the moon as a place where current materials could be used.

Makes me wonder about the near-term viability of an elevator on Mars, which IIRC has 2/3rd Earth's gravity...

This is an important idea in performance vehicle design - in a crash, the 'capsule' around the occupant must not be compromised. You see this pretty vividly in bad F1 crashes. Granted, those vehicles are so weight optimized that they'll lose a wheel if they tap a kerb, but in particularly bad wrecks you'll see that the entire car, aside from the capsule has pretty much disintegrated.

example: Fendando Alonso's 2016 crash. Looking at photos, the car had been reduced to a capsule with a bit of engine and wheel sticking off of it. Alonso climbed out of the cockpit himself.

It occurs to me that we haven't quite done away with cubicles, we have instead shrunk them down to the size of our heads, in the form of noise cancelling headphones.

I worked in a highrise office that had TVs ringing the floor that you could remote into to display dashboards and whatnot. One day I decided to play, on mute, endless episodes of How It's Made.

For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.

Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."

If we have a hundred years to burn, how about reorganizing our cities into forms that obviate the need for cars (self-driving or not) in the first place?

Anecdotally, I've heard people make the point that public transit is infeasible in the states because the population density is too low, and people are too spread out.

I'm not sure that it is -- the US Census Bureau stats show the share of Americans living in urban areas growing steadily throughout the history of the country, with 80% of the population currently hailing from urban areas.

We are and have been urbanizing since the birth of the country, I reckon if were smart about building infra now, we can remove the problem SDVs are trying to solve in approximately as long as it would take for them to become ubiquitous were we to take no action.

OT, but why are immigrants called expats when they're from anglophone nations?

I'm a motorcyclist. I've had the misfortune of flying through the air because someone didn't bother looking before making a left hand turn. The literal mantra of riding a motorcycle in highway traffic is "assume you're completely invisible and that everyone is trying to kill you."

The baseline here really isn't that high. How many miles have you driven, and how how many accidents have you been in?

I've known people to freeze bagels. Apparently they toast more or less equivalently compared to bagels stored above freezing.

When I was a kid making yeast-based sugar hooch I just stretched a balloon with a pinprick in it over the mouth of a jar or jug.

true, thanks for the correction.

I do wonder how much of the issue stems from lack of engagement with the surrounding community.

Anecdote: when I was 7 or 8 I rode my bicycle down the block and came upon a middle aged man who was working on some part of a plane in his driveway. I was then fascinated with everything aeroplane, and hung out a second to pester him with questions. He sent me home with a small chunk of foam he'd cut away from some structure inside it.

I showed my parents my score and they immediately freaked out on me for having talked to a stranger at all, and told me never to go to that house again. Of course if they knew that that was Mr. Donahue working on his homebuilt, it probably would have been a different story.

Having seen a whole tide of articles like this recently, I wonder how long it will be before popular opinion and parenting practices trend back toward giving children appropriate amounts of autonomy.

I hesitate at the thought of raising children here (or at all) for a variety-pack of reasons, one of which is that I was rather over-protected as a child, and I'd rather not pass the results of that that on to my kids.

Any current American-kid-havers care to comment on how difficult it actually is to raise non-sheltered kids in the modern age? Is it a big problem or perhaps overblown for the NPR crowd?

It was disheartening to see Jane Kim vote against sb827. The detractors moaned that it would usurp local authority over development. As someone who has to put up with the effects of insane housing policy, I'd rather see the state step in here. The local governments and NIMBYs are already failing us.