gattsuru
23hr ago
It depends really heavily on the type of watch. Cheap watches usually don't even need kits, just a thin flathead jeweler's screwdriver or spadger to get the back plate off, or maybe a single weird screwdriver bit. Higher-end watches can be trickier: the most annoying tend to use either a threaded backplate that can require really annoying tools. But if you're only doing it once every few years, there are some cheap kits (not endorsed) that will handle almost all common watch types, albeit not very conveniently. If you know you have a screw-in caseback, getting a proper tool for that (with a handle and everything!) is a better bet than buying a kit.
For battery size, ideally look up the manual. Otherwise, just take it apart, check it, and order it. The size will be printed somewhere for almost all batteries, or you can just use a set of calipers to measure. The most common size is 1216 (12.5mmx1.6mm), but there's a lot of size charts, and you can get plastic digital calipers from Harbor Freight or the like for dirt cheap. Don't try to memorize the numbers, there's charts available. Do get the cheap plastic calipers; watch batteries have enough internal resistance and limited enough ampacity you're not going to light the house on fire, but it's still a stupid way to warp calipers.
Do keep to a compatible voltage: coin cells come in 1.5V, 3v, and 3.7v (nominal) voltages; using a lower voltage than the original usually won't work, while higher voltages may damage the electronics. Almost all modern watches use 1.5v silver-oxides (SR or SG prefix). While that's compatible with alkaline low-voltage (LR/AG prefix), zinc (PR/Z prefix) and and mercury (MR, no longer manufactured), silver-oxides are cheap and generally ideal for watches, especially mechanical watches. Lithium (CR/BR prefix), Lithium rechargable (LiR), and titanium (CTL prefix) are all higher voltage, and while lithium-titanium (MT) are technically the right nominal voltage they're basically never useful in watches due to high self-discharge and low total capacity. Again, battery type should be in the manual, and printed on the top of the battery.
For mechanical watches, the most common designs only use the crown to hold the balance wheel in place (or disengage it). There are designs where it will disable the motor or disengage the battery entirely, though. It might save some power, but I wouldn't swear on it being a big gain, since self-discharge makes up a pretty sizable part of watch battery life anyway. For digital watches, it will never disable the main circuit, because otherwise you can't set the time.
Big cautions I'll give:
- It is possible to damage the watch or even yourself. Usually just a matter of scratches on the sides, but I've seen people crack faceplates or pry out major mechanisms they misidentified as batteries. Stabbing yourself while trying to pry a backplate off is embarrassing, too.
- You don't and shouldn't touch them, but there's a ton of tiny parts involved. Most of them will be pretty well-secured, still, don't shake the thing or drop of off a table. Reassembly is a nightmare if you're lucky, and virtually impossible if you aren't (eg, balance springs are hilariously easy to bend or fold).
- Expect to see some loss in waterproofing for any previously water resistant watches. There's ways to work around it, some as simple as using some clear nail polish on the edge of the backplate, but it's definitely a thing.
- There is other maintenance that better watch shops will do, and that are harder for casuals to do. Watch lubrication is An Effort, and no mall shop is going to do, but even getting a couple of the bigger gears is useful for longevity... if it's done right. Same for a general-purpose cleaning. If you're just looking to have a watch you can use, rather than a heirloom, it's probably not worth learning, but be aware it is a thing. If you do want a heirloom, that guy has good info for everything from maintenance to serious repair, and he's good for better understanding mechanical watch functionality, but is vast overkill for just swapping a battery.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's been a long time since I read the The Collapse of British Power, but I thought most of the wartime manufacturing criticism focused on pre-WWI, where British on shore manufacturing was an absolute mess of tiny shops with no serious production capabilities. By the 1920s, the Barnett highlights the development of national manufacturing as a turnaround (if with US and continental assistance) from an area where engines, steel, and basic mechanisms couldn't be produced at all. For WWII, the problem is instead political and peacetime economics, with the UK waiting until years after the last minute to start re-arming and then finding itself slow to build the tools to build the tools to get back up to parity, as well as struggling entirely to modernize aircraft work (though I remember Barnett kinda glossed over a lot of interwar British aviation work).
((There was, to return to the topic, some criticism of Churchill in the book... but more under his Treasury policies.))
To some extent, yes, both countries hard major problems moving to mass manufacturing, in different ways. Barnett highlighted some extremely powerful mills and lathes that interwar Britain had to import from Germany, as part of Britain's general issues bringing together general-purpose.... but even where 1930s Germany had as many lathes-per-metalworking-employee as the US they were largely manual work
gattsuru
3d ago
The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population. Especially if you think there's some critical number of humans necessary to keep that automation infrastructure working, there's a lot of ways this pathway goes that don't have directions out.
((I'll ignore the financial clusterfuck, since tbh even with saner fertility numbers it's still gonna be a clusterfuck.))
gattsuru
3d ago
When it comes to mechanization, he gives the US and Australia pre-WWII, which basically just means the US. I don't know for post-1938, since Tooze doesn't get into the numbers for that and I've had trouble finding any serious efforts to pull apart the results of policy from the results of everything with wheels getting blown up. Much of the productivity difference beyond that is more prosaic: German agriculture focused more than the typical country on staple crops than cash crops or animal products, run by small and often inefficient farms, which had major labor shortages, while dependent on external feedstocks of fertilizers and vulnerable to bad weather.
But Tooze's argument is more:
What is more surprising, from our early twenty-first-century perspective, is Germany's marked inferiority relative to Britain. According to Clark, Britain not only had a higher per capita income than Germany; he believed that despite the much smaller size of the British population, the British economy was still somewhat larger than that of Germany. This conclusion has been modified by more recent calculations. We now believe that the German economy in the 1930s was slightly larger. However, the claim that per capita incomes in Germany were substantially lower than in Britain has proved robust. This difference was clearly not attributable to any qualitative difference in the productivity of British and German manufacturing. In virtually every industrial sector, German and British firms were closely matched. What dragged Germany down was its large and highly inefficient agricultural sector and the substantial tail of small shops and workshops in the craft and service sectors. In the 1930s productivity per head in German agriculture was only half that in German industry, at a time when more than 9 million people were still employed in farming.
The comparison is unfair, and Tooze knows it's unfair -- the British economy shrunk its agricultural sector by having someone else do it, in a way that post-WWI and pre-Nazi Germany wasn't going to be allowed to do. But it's the argument he makes.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Toozian argument is that, before WWII, a large portion of the German economy remained focused on 'conventional' production, matters like textiles, farm labor, mining, etc, while more advanced or complicated technologies were either unavailable or made up smaller portions of the full sector. The Nazis were very much able to exploit this; despite often tragicomedic levels of incompetence, there were so many low-hanging fruit in a country with a lot of industrial technology but not anywhere near as much industrial economy that they could pick winners.
Tooze focuses a lot on textiles as one particular example: in 1933, the German textile industry was a vast part of both German labor force and total import balance sheet, but it was also not especially advanced or unusually automated by the standards of its time. Nazi policy squeezed the entire sector hard (Tooze has a chart showing nearly a 15% drop in total employment in the sector), and at the same time pushed the remainder toward more emphasis on synthetic fibers and final productions, mostly a side effect of their autarky policies.
Similarly, while agriculture was a massive portion of the German economy in 1933, with just over a quarter of the working populace, much of these people were just barely above sustenance farming on tiny parcels of land, while agricultural automation and electrification had stalled badly post-WWI. Germany had pioneered artificial nitric acid and ammonium nitrate during WWI (and the Haber process was a good part of how Germany had been able to fight as long as it did), but there was no German 'green revolution'; these technologies were focused almost entirely into the military, industrial, and transportation sectors.
((To its credit, this lack of focus on agricultural automation and efficient use of labor is probably why some local populaces in conquered territories were supposed to be useful after invasion... as, uh... 'not-quite-voluntary labor'. So not much credit.))
By 1938, the urban areas and military matters had been heavily revamped, but large sectors were basket cases, both urban and otherwise -- Tooze highlights the extent that rural agriculture was often overlooked in the buildup with a lengthy segue about Nazi ponderings to encourage farm labor that, after politics hit, turned into a counterproductive tax on the dairy farms somehow. And while Tooze doesn't focus on it, a lot of the Nazi policies emphasizing centralized control of the electricity infrastructure pushed toward urbanization and against agricultural automation.
((That said, I do think Tooze's argument overlooks the extent this was a choice. Tooze says:
But to see [settlement inside German territories] as a fundamental solution to Germany's problems was [perceived by Hitler as] a dangerous illusion. It was one more instance of the liberal fallacy that Germany could prosper through an ever more intensive utilization of its national resources.
But, to borrow from Hellsing Abridged, if you call heads, it matters what face the coin falls. The liberal fallacy about utilization of national resources not only ended up working in Mexico, it ended up working in no small part thanks to pre-Nazi German technology!))
gattsuru
3d ago
“Meaning that he could no longer fulfill that job because of a lack of trust, I feel pretty comfortable that we’re in an okay place. I feel certain we’re in an okay place legally, no issues on that.”...
“Let me just say that she lost yesterday fairly overwhelmingly. Up to a week ago, Jon would articulate that they were under the impression, he in particular – speaking to his sister – that they were gonna win. So there is something redeeming in the fact that that was rejected clearly by the people of Missouri where she was running for office,” noting Valentina Gomez’s sixth place finish in an eight-candidate field.
[I'll caveat that this is just from a quick browse: I absolutely don't find Cooper interesting enough to read at length.]
If you trust this transcript:
Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead. There you have letters as early as July, August, 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they're rounding up. So its two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we cant feed these people.
We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? And so this is like two months into the invasion. Right? And my view on this, I argue with my zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.
I don't think it's a SecureSignals level thing -- he does recognize the whole 'and then the Germans started 'humanely killing' them' -- but it's definitely not limited to prisoners of war, and it's pretty heavily in contradiction with the Standard History Generalplan Ost where Einsatzgruppen were already a policy in Poland back when the USSR and Nazis were allies, and simply brought East.
gattsuru
4d ago
Hm. If the PVC sheets give you too many issues, I'd heard of prototypes for fursuit cooling vests use vacuum sealing or sous vide bags. They're not going to be as puncture-resistant as PVC, but if it ends up being too heavy or too annoying to form, may be worth trying.
There's a 'copycat' theory that certain types of murderers (and a few other classes of bad actors) tend to attract other bad actors, intentionally or unintentionally, by their works, and as a result making publicly available. These followers are inevitably not-mentally-well to some extent, but the resonance gives them a way to formalize that and point it at their own interpretation of a 'class' of overlapping targets.
This is part of why I don't write shooters' names, whenever possible, instead identifying the location or target; it's also the charitable explanation for companies like LinkedIn purging spree shooter accounts. I'm skeptical that it applies for these sort of narrow details -- the shooter here comes across as a loser -- but I don't have a good mental model for the sorta crazy people that turn into serial killer fans, and it definitely has widespread adherents across the political aisles, many of whom directly evangelize to the victims of shootings and to judges around them.
Less charitably, there was a theory (or more often insinuation) that the shooter had been motivated by severe mistreatment by an employee or student at the school, on the level of assault or sexual assault rather than deadnaming. Progressives assumed that the writings were being hidden to obscure that; conservatives that they were being hidden to avoid exculpating the victims.
gattsuru
4d ago
Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).
gattsuru
4d ago
I'll caveat first of all that I'm not sure federation is a solution (and, thus, that Matrix's bad implementation is the problem). A clever and correct federation protocol might be technically interesting (though I'm not entirely convinced it's even possible without trimming off a lot of the core criteria, but like a lot of structural efforts to solve governance problems, there's no guarantee that it's the right fix.
In the modern sphere, federation pushes to one of three local maxima:
- Sites disagree about moderation remove each other from federation, leading to one large group of servers that have such a wide 'shared set of values' that the different servers mean little more than having rediscovered sharding badly, and a broader set of subgroups disconnected servers that are basically invisible to anyone not on them. At best, you might Zif yourself into a half-dozen clusters. See Mastodon's various blocklists for one example.
- Sites agree about a moderation in all meaningful ways, which means that they've rediscovered sharding badly.
- Sites disagree about moderation, but semi-federate, such as setting a distrusted server's users to whitelist only, or add varying opt-in requirements, running into the more general problem of 'mediated group hallucinated reality': some people in your sphere seem to be talking about things you can't see or touch.
Does the restriction of compliance tools such as photodna to major players act as regulatory capture against smaller players?
While PhotoDNA restricts its use to 'qualified customers', at least in theory relatively small outfits can apply and be recognized; RocketChat has a plugin based on the assumption that your individual outfit will enable it. The on-premise version does seem more restricted, though.
There are also a few other tools with at least different availability requirements, such as Cloudflare's implementation.
But I'm also not sure that on-server images (or video) is really that critical.
What is the future picture of interoperable messaging? Is it an email-like level of federation? EU has mandated interoperability but will it promote free speech or stamp it out? (anyone want an unhinged rant about "RCS"?)
I'm not sure I understand the advantages of a lot of the more complex proposed technologies, compared to something like an IRCv2 or even a much-more-rapid self-hosted or mail-list like RSS seem much more valuable -- improve the ability to read old messages or set some messages to specific channels, implement some sort of direct client-to-client file transfer capability a la wormhole, let the server operator optionally set some up-to-server capability, give 'rooms' a better interface and discoverability, give some basic protections for account creation, done.
But even if that were The Ideal Chat Form, a large part of the problem today is that Everything's Good Enough now. Discord, Matrix, RocketChat, and even a lot of lesser-known competitors are workable for communities currently using them, the costs of transition are vast, and new Western-culture communities aren't forming anywhere near the rate they were in the USENET, Eternal September, or early Smartphone era. If you build a better mousetrap, they will not beat a path to your door. They may not even hear about you.
gattsuru
5d ago
The lawyer metaphor reminds me a bit of the discussion ymeskhout brought up comparing TWA Flight 800 as compared to certain sanctionable lawsuits, and what I contrasted with the Subway Tuna lawsuit allegations.
From a lot of points of view, all of these lawsuits had what a serious literal reader would consider were made 'recklessly or in bad faith'. And I don't just say that given what's happened since in Krick: even at the time, it was clear that several core claims, including one that ymeskhout highlighted, were presented with either ignorance of their context or willful misrepresentation, and that a good many others were paraphrased commentary from randos taken as gospel truth.
Some of that difference in treatment is politics, and the electioneers are treated as a dire threat while Krick is a tragic sob story. But I think there's something deeper.
There Are Rules, some explicit and some the sort of thing that are like describing water to a fish. It matters if your phooney balooney claims are things that would be in the possession of a specific named other party you've sued in this case, or if they're something that would require 'discovery' of an unrelated third party. It matters if you've got an affidavit from one rando with credentials or a dozen without. These change the extent courts can interact with matters, and also the extent that they'll treat you seriously.
But these norms aren't about what's 'real' or not, or even if they're not-intentional-lies.
That's not even limited to things like lying or not. I've got an effortpost brewing on how some politicians are Nice and some aren't, and how little it has to do with them actually being kind, even to the people around them, and it has a lot of overlap.
Musk reportedly banned the word "cis" on twitter despite his aura of a free speech warrior.
I don't think this is a accurate summary of this policy, and the implementation is more limited than the policy. There's supposedly an interstitial on mobile (app?), but on desktop, I don't even get that (and I've gotten interstitial for 'fuck'!), and I'd know.
gattsuru
5d ago
- My lay guess would be something something expelled kidneys, since that happens both to non-immunized users today and is pretty much the standard. They threw some related drugs in for cross reaction, though the risk of unrelated immune response is probably something that can’t be seriously tested until later.
- While not a tested endpoint for this study, a lot of the paper nudges and winks to theorizing a small number of shots that would a) have a very long term effect, months if not years, b) reduces the high from fentanyl, and most importantly c) reduces the heart and lung function impact of fentanyl.
The latter matters a lot to harm reduction proponents. To their perspective, the problem is not that people get addicted, but that addicts often die, as the drug has a thin range of of recreational use before health risks kick in, and because it is often used as a filler/replacement for other more conventional opioids. These harm reduction proponents probably assume (hope) that users will substitute other drugs, at least some of the time.
(Charitably, they’d would provide this as an option to general opioid users to protect them from developing an addiction to fet or an acute case of death if encountering adulterated drugs. Less charitably, a three dose regimen is the sort of thing that could be judicially ordered, or even put in the kits with Narcan. Though the latter has enough legal risk cynics don’t have too much to worry about.
gattsuru
6d ago
The Chinese Thousand Sails/G60 project just got its first batch of satellites launched earlier this month, though I don’t know the target timeline for operational use.
gattsuru
6d ago
More charitably... there's one coherent position where the complaint isn't about compliance with complainer's principles, but that X-era Twitter is claiming a set of principles and not following it. You don't have to believe in free speech yourself to notice if someone wearing a Free Speech T-Shirt is also ignoring it. And in Musk's case, the economic incentives to drop principles when China or the Saudis ask are pretty overt.
((Though in practice, it's based on a strawman. For better or worse, Musk has never been a free speech absolutist so much as a formalist, and much of the high profile bad behaviors by X-era Twitter have reflected jurisdictions with weak or no formal right of free speech. And the 'higher' compliance-with-takedown numbers are Goodhart'd to hell and back: we know that the Official Requests have always been swamped by the unofficial ones.))
Less charitably, "who whom".
gattsuru
6d ago
For another variant of the problem, see the wildlife 'separate populations' discussion Kagan brought in Loper-Bright was about this case asking if the Washington State population of the squirrel subspecies sciurus griseus griseus was distinct enough from the Oregon and Californian populations of the same subspecies to 'count' as a species-as-legal-term for the Endangered Species Act. Or where local regulations effectively traded off unproved harms committed by politically disconnected actors against much-more-established risks by powerful ones.
gattsuru
7d ago
Back in the long-ago of the 2007-2009 era, various electronic freedom groups established and encouraged a wide variety of individual users to establish limited VPNs and forwarding services, as a parallel-but-less-fraught alternative to the then-new Tor network. I'm... not so optimistic we'll see a recurrence of that.
gattsuru
9d ago
That'd be a fun norm, but :
- It'd be nice to have some other actual way to find truth from trustworthy sources, unless you want the inevitable LBJisms to be indistinguishable from actual pigfuckers. And we don't have such sources.
- There demonstrably already are exceptions. At minimum, we have a Kari Lake exclusion, and more seriously a large portion of plausible threats that are so deadly not even complete morons risk them.
- Palin was not a politician in 2017: she resigned from the Alaskan governorship in 2009, and would not join another political race until 2022 (which she lost).
gattsuru
9d ago
gattsuru
9d ago
Maybe it's changed since mumblemumble years ago, but back in my day it wasn't like each meeting started off with everyone sitting in a circle and exchanging distaff American Pie jokes, or spin the bottle, or gay sex ed. When there's a new student you'd go around for introductions and have the option of disclosing your orientation, and then mostly a sit-around-and-bullshit social club. There were teenagers that were hooking up who'd met at the GSA, but even the people who'd brag about it weren't going to do that in front of as varied a crowd as you'd get at a club meeting proper (there were girls there!).
(uh, second-hand from my brother, band camp was closer to the actual gay relationship or 'relationship' space. I'd expect that was somewhat specific to the cliches at the school we went to, though.)
@SteveKirk's "oh boy relationship drama" is closer to my experience, though I tended to run into where it was most an annoyingly creepy teacher wanting a bunch of disposable and impressionable activists. Which is a problem, but a different sort.
(probably not universal, but pretty damned common).
EDIT: if you'd like a more recent and undisclaimered example, this was from 2021.
From what I understand, the law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.
Which would be fascinating, given the official Army response was not that the photographers were specifically the problem, but that regulations "clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds". And no one at the Army is pointing to the specific rule either way directly.
Some other groups have pointed to CFR 32-553.32, but that doesn't care at all about photographers, and depends on a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity' (here, largely devolving into "but Trump"), and the regulation allows nothing more than the ANC's Executive Director to ban someone, which can't be delegated. Worse, the Trump campaign claims to have gotten explicit permission from Arlington beforehand, albeit. The closest I can find for an actual statutory, rather than regulatory, prohibition is one on demonstrations separate from ceremonies, which doesn't apply here. Others point to the Hatch Act, but that applies more to use of video and imagery taken during a political career -- the Hatch Act excludes the President and VP, but doesn't allow everyone working under their orders a Get Out of Hatch Jail Free Card.
((Uh, overlooking the bit where the Hatch Act is also basically unenforced.))
I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?
No small part of the point of this particular circus is to highlight the Abbey Gate families, and implicitly that the Biden-Harris administration has generally not met with or supported them. Since Abbey Gate happened in August 2021, that would be after Trump left the Presidency.
Really cheap snap backs can be especially annoying to pull, but usually the concern in those cases is about scratches or cutting/stabbing yourself. The backs are really not supposed to take that much force to pop off to start with; if it could be bent with just a jeweler's screwdriver that sounds more like a manufacturing problem.
You can get specialty tools for it ("bench knife" or "watch case knife" for the traditionalists, but I don't recommend them; pry tools are safer and even vice-style ones exist if you're worried), but I've usually been able to work fine with normal electronics repair kit screwdrivers.
You want as wide of a flathead tip as you can get, while still fitting under the notch (or pry tool, or whatever). If it's really tight, using a plastic spadger or guitar pick around the edges while prying up from the notch can help a lot, but you don't want to try to dig anywhere closer to the center of the watch than that notch, and trying to slide metal around the edge will scratch stuff to hell.
There are special presses for pressing back on snapbacks (or you can even use button presses), but I've never found them particularly useful myself. Grab a hardcover book or softwood lumber, put the watch face-down on a clean and slip-resistant surface such as a mousepad. Start by pressing evenly from the top, and then give a little side to side pressure. It doesn't take that rigid of a shape and shouldn't take much force; I've seen people do it with a plastic level before.
Square notches along the back would point toward a twist-off threaded back, so the HF case opener tool should be the right one. There are different sizes and shapes of notch for threaded watch backs (and different configurations for even- versus odd- numbered notches), but that HF standard tool comes with a pretty wide variety that covers basically everything I've seen. Like above, these are better used with the face of the watch being pressed down into a clean slip-resistant surface, or you can get (or make with a few wood pieces) jigs to hold them in place so the watch doesn't spin while you're trying to unscrew the backplate. There are other variants of the tool if you know the notch type and count (and some weirder things like stress-ball tools that work great for cross-threaded backs), but most of them are worse to use in practice, so I don't really recommend.
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