water-data-dude

I was skeptical for the first little bit, but that's both relevant and a fuckin' bop

I appreciate the author's choice to use Vimeo instead of YouTube for the video. It's not much, but I like the little piece of resistance to the Video Hegemon

Don't forget the third camp who just really like OLD jeeps!

Somewhere in the ballpark of a week ago there was a car show near where I walk my dog (some charity event). Overall not that interesting - there were a lot of flashy low riders with the crazy hydraulics and stuff - but there was also this really cool jeep truck-thing from sometime in the 1950's, a Jeep Forward Control[0]. They had pics of it when they first got it, absolute rusty mess! But goddamn, I'm not even a car guy and I was impressed. Labor of love.

Then my cousin has a more modern Jeep and lemme tell you: not great. I wonder what happened to that company? Garden variety enshittification, or is there an interesting story there?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Forward_Control

It's a choice. I make a lot less money than I could because I refuse to work in ad tech, etc. If I'm spending a third of my time putting energy into a business, it's not acceptable for me if that business is evil. I want that effort going to something that's a net positive for the world.

That being said, I also don't have a family to support - it's just me - which makes the calculus easier. It's still a choice, and everyone should try to face the reality of "what effect is the 8 hours a day I work having on the world?", but I know life-shit can be complicated and stressful and most people are just trying their best.

But will the average windows user be able to figure that out? Most people are a lot less tech savvy than this crowd

The current administration is trying to emphasize certain parts of our history and diminish others. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say it's something along the lines of "this was something the public sector did with taxpayer money that advanced science. We should deemphasize anything positive that came out of it because it casts public sector projects and science in a good light"

Interesting that they list wind as one of the places where vertical panels have the advantage - my intuition would have been the other way around, with angled panels doing better in windy conditions. Wind uplift isn't something I'd have even thought about.

The thing that would get me to actually go to Cracker Barrel would be if they brought back rosin potatoes. It's a weird method of cooking potatoes where you throw them in a CAULDRON OF BOILING ROSIN, and apparently it's quite good.

Idk, I read about them and I'm super curious now - but it's not like you can go to the store, grab a cauldron of rosin, and do them at home.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991352

Rabies is something it's hard for me to be highly rational about. It's 100% fatal after symptoms appear‡, and it's just an absolute horror show of a disease. Most states require you to vaccinate your pets, which is HOW the US became a place where less than 5% of rabies cases come from dogs.

You're right though, I don't know the exact threshold of unvaccinated pets where it really becomes a problem. And I also don't know how representative that survey is (I will admit I was waking up and didn't notice the source was an internet survey with a small sample size).

‡ I know, I know, they can put you in a coma and do some dramatic medical stuff and you might survive - but it's very expensive, of debatable efficacy, and even if it works you'll still probably have brain damage

If 10% of people aren't vaccinating their dogs for rabies that's WAY too many, and it's a big problem.

Going to good ol' Wikipedia[0], "in countries where dogs commonly have the disease, more than 99% of rabies cases in humans are the direct result of dog bite. In the Americas, bat bites are the most common source of rabies infections in humans, and less than 5% of cases are from dogs." But the article is citing sources from 2011 - if TEN PERCENT of people aren't getting their dogs their rabies shots, that number is going to increase.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies

Right-wing furries are in the minority, but they do exist - which is what I thought your original comment was saying.

Again: furries are people, and any group of people isn't going to be homogenous.

I'd say it makes you less likely to be right wing overall (since the right is hostile to you), but yeah, I've known some very conservative furries.

Furries are people, and any group of people is going to have a lot of different views and beliefs represented amongst its members.

I think they're saying that diet is easier for people to commit to than going to the gym regularly and other lifestyle changes.

Obviously witchcraft doesn't actually work, but the timing on this Jezebel article "We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk" is darkly comical.

https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-c...

"...the problem is with impure products and people misusing / abusing them."

That second part "people misusing/abusing them" is a lot bigger than you're letting on. People can get hooked on opiates easily - a quick trip to Wikipedia turns up: "Long-term opioid use occurs in about 4% of people following their use for trauma or surgery-related pain" [1]. That's a pretty big knock-on effect! If you're prescribed opiates you're rolling the dice, and if you have the right mix of brain chemistry and genetics, you might be screwed.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30063596/

I'd guess that you're not from somewhere that water is scarce. In the American West there's not really a lot of water. I won't turn this into a multi paragraph lecture, but I'll give a few bullet points to give you a sense of what it's like:

- There's an entirely different legal framework around how water from rivers is allocated. The "normal" flow of the most important river, the Colorado River, was calculated during a time of unusually high flow, so there's a lot of tension between different states about whether they're getting their fair share.

- To give you a sense of how "thirsty" the west is, the Colorado River rarely reaches the ocean anymore.

- groundwater use is generally much less regulated, which is causing issues like the Oglala aquifer to drop at an alarming rate. Many aquifers are damaged if they're overpumped, because the weight of the ground above them will crush empty spaces.

- bad actors in the groundwater space can lower the water table and make other peoples' wells run dry

- this is made more complicated by the fact that surface water and ground water interact with each other. Reducing stream flow can affect groundwater, and using groundwater can affect streamflow.

If you want an approachable and entertaining introduction to some western water issues (including the backstabbing and plotting that inspired Chinatown!), I'd suggest reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

In recent news: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/jacobs-well-texas...

Also: this DID end up turning into a multi paragraph lecture. My bad.

The Navel Klein Bottle Award

For the optics of "we have a bug bounty system".

A digital footprint of your forebrain vs. a digital footprint of your hindbrain.

"The platform states that selfies were not deleted as expected to comply with law enforcement requirements related to cyber-bullying prevention."

This is why laws that say "just give websites your photo ID! It's for the safety of the children!" are concerning

Right? There's something oddly satisfying about watching The Time Blob.

Any time I see something like this, I'm reminded of a tongue-in-cheek* post I saw of someone showing off the fancy "egg separator" they found at a thrift store (it was a chastity cage).

*I hope

*no consequences for transgressions by anyone in law enforcement. Qualified immunity has snowballed into some serious bullshit.

Yeah, the whole thing gets messy in an interesting way.

- if the rod travels across 7 light seconds in a round, the only way to avoid breaking relativity is if the 6 seconds the round takes are measured in the frame of reference of the rod

- that would mean that from the frame of reference of the rest of the people/monsters/edgy antiheroes/misunderstood blob creatures, the rod’s “turn” took 7 seconds.

All characters in the D&D universe are accustomed to a reality where each round takes 6 seconds, and everyone - in synchrony - is able to perform an integer number of tasks that fit within that timespan. Rounds begin and end simultaneously for everyone involved in combat. How disturbing would it be for such beings to see those laws broken?

I’m nervous about how willing SCOTUS has been to throw out precedent and side with this administration.

I might do the same if they weren’t a privacy nightmare. The tech company running the robotaxi service would need to buck some Silicon Valley trends before I’d use their product

I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better.

- If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section.

- If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been.

- On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!

No? Your plumbing shouldn’t matter if you’re distilling the water.

Some volatiles are going to come through (which can be mostly mitigated with an activated charcoal filter at some point in the process), but you’re vaporizing the water and condensing it back into a liquid, leaving behind stuff like metal and microplastics.

Who do you think has the most interesting time of it? People from Hamburg, Lesbos, or Frankfurt?

Those are the only three I could think of, tricky to put together a search query to find more.

Oooooh! I saw “I’ll have to teal deer it” and thought it must be some strange idiom. Had to go to Urban Dictionary to find out “teal dear = tl;dr”, and now I feel as dim as a garter snake that’s evolved resistance to large amounts of tetrodotoxin.