ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
I think I read somewhere that surface ships actually experience drag proportional to the cube of speed, due to the bow wave.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
Sidewalks and bike lanes keep getting wider. Very old neighborhoods often have 24" sidewalks (if at all), while now they seem to be 36 or 48 inches. Bigger new roads (like your 11 lane freeway) have 6 or 8 foot sidewalks, getting closer to the width of a car lane.
IIRC (I don't have my books in front of me): The federal ADA requires new sidewalks to be 4 feet wide, with 5-foot-wide passing areas every few hundred feet. In areas where the sidewalk goes right up to the curb, the designer normally will make it 6 feet wide (including the 9-inch curb), to prevent trucks' side mirrors from clipping pedestrians.
AASHTO has issued different, wider guidelines for bike lanes, as well as for "shared-use paths" occupied by both pedestrians and bicyclists, but I don't recall the specifics.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
I can't imagine a pedestrian's dying if I hit him regular speed on a bike.
Lots of people die from falling and hitting their heads on the ground.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
I'm arguing not that we should ticket everyone who takes five or ten miles per hour, but just that those people can't turn around and complain when a cyclist does something that's technically illegal but otherwise makes sense and isn't particularly unsafe.
I think the commenters in this thread generally are complaining about cyclist behavior that doesn't make sense and is particularly unsafe. Most pertinently, the comment to which you replied stated:
There is an obvious problem with some bicyclists thinking that stop signs, red lights, and all other forms of traffic control don't apply to them [presumably even when the street is carrying non-negligible motorized traffic].
This morning I [presumably a motorist on a street with non-negligible motorized traffic] saw a bicyclist veer into the street even though there was a dedicated empty bike lane and an empty sidewalk.
(I personally do 95 percent of my driving on the freeway, so I almost never encounter bicyclists, and I don't have an opinion on whether the other commenters' observations are valid.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
what speed would you drive at in perfect conditions (straight, flat, sunny, minimal traffic), in a 70 mph interstate?
75 mi/h (120 km/h)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
To be fair, a large part of stopping sight distance is the built-in full second of driver reaction time, which is independent of car technology.
Your statement is not supported by your link. The article says:
Barges are less efficient than rail with any appreciable speed.
The graph in the article says that barges still are more efficient than trains below around 10 km/h (6 mi/h).
In Railroads and American Economic Growth, an economist estimated that, if 12-mi/h (19-km/h) railroads had never been invented and instead the Midwest had been connected to oceanic trade with an extensive 7-mi/h (11-km/h) canal network during the late 19th century, the cost of the resulting increased inventory requirements would have been essentially negligible. Most freight transportation does not need to be fast.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
A friend of mine, who is a retired engineer from PennDOT, said of speed limits that "they aren't suggestions; they're requirements".
As a civil engineer: LOL.
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If a road has a posted speed of X mi/h (Y km/h), its actual design speed on which the civil engineers base all their designs is (X + 5) mi/h ((Y + 10) km/h).
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When a civil engineer designs a curve, he can't make the curve too tight, because the "side friction factor" between the pavement and a car's tires will be too small to provide the required centripetal force, resulting in skidding and loss of control. But the side friction factor that's used in design is based on poor weather conditions—ice, rain, et cetera. I don't have the AASHTO Policy on Design in front of me at the moment for the exact numbers, but friction obviously is a lot higher on a dry road than on a wet road, and therefore you can go a lot faster quite safely.
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A hill, or a roadside forest on a curve, may block your view of an upcoming intersection or crosswalk. You probably learned in your high-school driving class that your "stopping sight distance" increases with the square of speed, so you do want to slow down at these locations. But these claustrophobia-inducing segments don't really have anything to do with your speed on segments of the road that have good visibility.
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Obviously, at high speeds it's harder to keep your car going where you want it to go. I personally don't feel comfortable driving faster than 75 mi/h (120 km/h), or 80 mi/h (130 km/h) if I'm in the left lane of a three-lane freeway and there's somebody right behind me. But I don't bear much ill will toward people who flash past me at 90 mi/h (145 km/h) in the left lane when I'm in the middle lane (of three).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
Personally, I don't even remotely enjoy juggling around a zillion different names (IRL, ToaKraka, a single-purpose name that needs to be active only on certain rare occasions, a single-purpose name that used to be active but now is inactive due to my lack of energy/willpower, a few single-purpose names that are inactive but can be used if necessary…), and I wish that I could just operate under a single unified identity. But I feel like your analysis goes too far. None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics. Your analysis applies, not to "everyone", but only to those public figures who actually try to project unique personalities on social media.
Also, you forgot to link to the definition of "becoming a deranged parody of oneself", flanderization.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10d ago
Astral Codex Ten's Non-Book Review Contest has one particularly interesting entry: Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos. tl;dr:
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In most of the US, online casino gambling (labeled "iGaming" on this interactive map) is illegal. In order to circumvent this restriction, zillions of companies have seized on the same workaround that Japanese pachinko parlors exploit: users pay real money to buy "valueless" tokens that cannot be exchanged for real money (sweeps coins), and then use those tokens to gamble for tokens that can be exchanged for real money. These online casinos are known as "sweepstakes" or "sweeps" casinos.
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Recall that many traditional casino games have very low house edges. For example, "French roulette" (European single-zero roulette where you have only a 50-% chance of losing your money when you get the zero) has a house edge of only 1/74 (1.35 %).
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Apparently: (1) Just like gacha games, these sweeps casinos have daily log-in bonuses, averaging 0.5 $/d. So, if you sign up for 36 different casinos, and then use those free daily sweeps coins to play games with low house edges, you will make nearly 18 $/d for next to zero effort. (2) These sweeps casinos often have temporary sales for purchasing sweeps coins with real money. At 5 to 15 %, the discount rates for these sales usually vastly exceed the house edge. (3) If you exploit these sales, the casinos will see that you are spending a lot of money, assume that you are a gambling-addicted "whale", and give you even more bonuses. (4) At a normal casino, a credit-card purchase of chips counts as a cash advance, since those chips can be exchanged right back to real money. But, at a sweeps casino, a purchase of sweeps coins counts as a normal purchase of goods, since the sweeps coins cannot be cashed out before you gamble with them. So, at a sweeps casino, you can get your normal credit-card rewards of 2 % or more.
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According to the review, all these effects can be stacked to make 95 $/d by "working" for a single hour per day, which multiplies out to a very livable income of 35 k$/a—and that's assuming you don't use bots. (Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage", and not to be confused with ban-worthy "bonus abuse" as defined in various online casinos' terms of service.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12d ago
It appears that this murder occurred in an industrial part of the town of Pottstown, PA (23,000 people), not in the "hood" of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.
Mildly interesting autopsy report related in a court opinion:
The trial court set forth the relevant facts and procedural history of this case as follows:
Ian Hood, M.D., an expert in the field of forensic pathology, performed an autopsy on [the victim, Joshua Smith, Appellant’s good friend.] The victim presented as a 25-year-old male, 5′11″, and 230 pounds. The doctor determined that the victim died as a result of gunshot wounds to the head and neck. The most obvious injury was a gunshot wound to the neck, and the doctor opined that there would have been a lot of blood loss from this injury. Dr. Hood also testified that there was an unusual gunshot wound to the back of the victim’s head. There was soot and gunpowder on the hoodie that the victim had been wearing, indicating that the gun was only a few inches away when it was fired. Dr. Hood opined that this execution shot to the back of someone’s head would normally cause a victim to drop and die, but in this case the victim had an unusually thick skull, so that the bullet actually bounced off his skull and came back out. Putting this physical evidence together, Dr. Hood believed that the bullet to the victim’s head was probably the first wound, and then the victim was shot in the neck and ran 200 feet, pumping blood out of his severed arteries, until he went down where he was found.
The murder weapon was a Ruger revolver of a caliber not specified in the opinion. So feel free to assume it was .22 caliber and make jokes accordingly.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12d ago
Why does the rDrama engine insert paragraph
<del>breaks</del><ins>margins</ins>of different sizes?
I think it's some kind of weird interaction between margin-top:0;, margin-bottom:1rem;, the collapsing margins behavior, and the fact that the paragraphs (<p>) are inside list items (<li>).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15d ago
One failure mode of a good employee is where all your effort and good will for management is captured by your immediate supervisor, but then he doesn't advance you further up the ladder because you're so productive in your current role.
Some would call this a successful avoidance of the Peter Principle rather than a failure.
People in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15d ago
I'm pretty sure there's a 4chan greentext about urban youths' conducting a cannon-broadside drive-by shooting.
(reposting to alert of major correction)
with the only indication being an extra "approve" item on the row of small, greyed-out text at the bottom of each comment
The moderators can use custom CSS to make the approve button more visible. For example, [data-bs-target="#reportCommentModal"]{font-size:2em!important;} makes the report button twice as big as the other buttons. (Not being a moderator, I don't know what selector will make the approve button bigger. I'm just using the report button as an example. From looking at the code, I think it might be something like [id^=approve].)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
16d ago
(1) Slightly negative (weird, but not off-putting) (Insert Tim Pool joke here.)
(2) Neutral
(3) Negative (off-putting)
(4) Neutral
(5) Negative (Can't women wear "pasties" so that their nipples don't show through their shirts? If so, failing to wear pasties, so that people can tell you aren't wearing a brassiere, can be interpreted as intentionally being obnoxious. But I'm far from an expert on this topic.)
(6) Negative (is this person insane?)
(7) Negative (very weird)
(8) Neutral
(9) Negative (off-putting)
(10) I'm not qualified to opine on this topic.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
16d ago
Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy: Justice Kavanaugh to Second Amendment: We're Really Busy Now, Come Back In A Year Or Two
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
And then the sheer fucking balls for the government to turn around and go "Okay, well, now we know that... but it doesn't help you."
To be more specific than my summary at the top of this thread:
- In general:
- The federal Supreme Court did not mention retroactivity at all in its opinion.
- The state supreme court has not yet determined one way or the other whether the federal Supreme Court's prohibition of home-equity theft is retroactive—whether fully or only in lawsuits that were still "in the pipeline" when the federal Supreme Court's decision was issued.
- In this particular case:
- Roman admitted that full retroactivity would be unworkable, but argued that pipeline retroactivity still should apply.
- The trial judge pointed out that pipeline retroactivity is not even available in this case, because the foreclosure process had already ended by the time the federal Supreme Court issued the opinion. The appeals panel agreed with this analysis.
So the question of retroactivity technically still is open, at least in this state (New J*rsey).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
The only thing I can think of here is to serve the house with info on the delinquent taxes before foreclosing. If that were done, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for the sons (Dennis certainly).
That's what happened in this case. A "pre-foreclosure notice" was sent by both regular mail and certified mail in July 2021, and then the actual foreclosure complaint was served in person in November 2021.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
Everyone (but Dennis) did everything by the book
I think Roman can also be blamed for failing to probate the will earlier. If the house's tenancy in common between him and Dennis had been properly reflected on the deed, then presumably the foreclosure complaint would have been served on him as well as on Dennis.
Source? Maybe I'm just in a bubble, but I can't imagine that public opinion of prostitutes is that low.
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