sockpuppet2
20hr ago
Well, where does it explain the bounds of "patently illegal?" All illegal orders direct the commission of a crime, inasmuch as carrying out an illegal order is itself a crime.
sockpuppet2
2d ago
My interior lighting is bright enough and Standard Time has an earlier sunrise than DST - the tradeoff of DST is a later sunrise for a later sunset.
sockpuppet2
2d ago
So my first question to you is this: Do you accept that these are substantially accurate descriptions of the documents that James signed?
Can you show us the documents that James signed?
sockpuppet2
2d ago
Aren't building code requirements for windows partly based on the assumption that they can be used as a means of emergency egress?
https://www.thegreategressco.ca/pages/british-columbia-egress-requirements
sockpuppet2
2d ago
Are you willing to pay for a web-developer's time to fix/maintain it?
sockpuppet2
5d ago
proxy frontend: inv.nadeko.net - give that guy your money, instead of Google.
sockpuppet2
5d ago
I dislike DST, but it'd be nice if sunsets were an hour later in Winter...
Annual cost of daylight saving time (DST): peer-reviewed and policy-analytic estimates for the U.S. range roughly from a few hundred million dollars to several billion dollars per year depending on which effects are counted.
- Narrow, direct estimates (increases in heart attacks, strokes, workplace and traffic accidents) ≈ $0.4–0.8 billion/year (Chmura-type estimates
$672M/year). - Broader estimates that include lost productivity, sleep-related chronic health impacts, reduced educational outcomes, and wider economic effects range from about $1 billion up to tens of billions per year; some academic work (and media summaries of sleep-cost literature) point to much larger figures when chronic sleep loss is included (hundreds of billions for all sleep-deprivation impacts, though not all attributable to DST).
- Bottom line: if you count only acute, measurable harms from the clock shifts the cost is on the order of 10^8–10^9 USD/year; if you include broader productivity and health-channel impacts the implied costs can approach 10^9–10^10+ USD/year (and different studies disagree).
Cost to extend daylight by 1 hour using space‑borne mirrors (back‑of‑envelope):
- Technical concept: a mirror in space would need to redirect sunlight to a region on Earth to extend usable daylight. For a continuously illuminated 1‑hour extension over, say, a midlatitude city (10^6–10^7 m^2 effective populated area) the delivered extra solar energy is enormous.
- Energy requirement example: solar irradiance ≈ 1,000 W/m^2 at noon. For 1 hour over 10^7 m^2 that’s
1e3 W/m^2 × 1e7 m^2 × 3600 s ≈ 3.6×10^13 J (10^10 Wh ≈ 10 GWh) of additional daylight energy delivered to that footprint. *Mirror size and launch/placement costs (order-of-magnitude): - A perfect flat mirror reflecting full-disk sunlight to that footprint would need an area comparable to the footprint projected to the mirror distance and geometry. Realistic space mirrors would be many km^2 for city‑scale coverage. For Earth‑orbit mirrors the required reflective area likely ranges from 1 km^2 to 10^3 km^2 depending on orbit/beam shaping — i.e., 10^6–10^9 m^2.
- Manufacturing, launch, deployment, and operations costs for lightweight space mirrors today scale roughly $1,000–$20,000 per kg launched (variable), and large-area thin-film structures still require many thousands to millions of kg or advanced in-space assembly. Conservatively, building and deploying a multi‑km^2 mirror system would cost at least tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars; more realistic/optimistic engineering might still be in the low trillions if you require durable, steerable, and safe systems.
sockpuppet2
6d ago
I don't keep track of their branded educational content (though IIRC, they contribute to PBS Space Time, which is good), but I've seen that it's SJ-influenced enough that I'll presume there's a kernel of truth to the sports thing, for our purposes. The politics-politics Hank Green has done, that I know of, are:
2008 primaries: Endorse Obama - I'm calling this "normie," because, Green being a college educated then-20-something, endorsing Obama was as basic as Starbucks and fleece.
2015ish: Accepted a WH invitation to be one of a handful of youtubers interviewing Obama - so did Destin from SmarterEveryDay, who tacitly said he wasn't a supporter; who wouldn't interview the sitting POTUS, given the chance?
2018: Interviewed Steve Bullock - Green is a Montanan and Bullock was then the sitting governor, so this is similarly not something that indicates a great deal of political engagement, in and of itself. (I rewatched this, to check if I remembered it correctly - he doesn't come across as being knowledgeable)
2022: Something with a state legislature candidate - like endorsing Obama in 2008, college educated middle-age people wanting politics to be more local in 2022 was pretty basic.
He's been a public figure for almost 19 years, so he of course has done stuff, but I think paying attention to nuts-and-bolts governance is as good as any distinction between "normie" and wonkish, making Green's burgeoning wonkishness an example of these issues getting increasing attention by the masses.
sockpuppet2
6d ago
Or 7, which had a pretty similar user experience. I like the Cinnamon UI, but I'm sick of Ubuntu crashing and lack of professional software - it's so bad, I'm considering getting a Mac. :'(
sockpuppet2
6d ago
A normie made a video about the Trump administration declaring the necessary quantity of pennies minted to be zero. (proxy frontend for youtube)
Not just any normie; Hank Green, OG vlogger, educational youtuber, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, and novelist, with 4 million subscribers to the channel he shares with his brother (where this video was posted) and 2.8 million subscribers to his "personal" channel, plus however many followers on however many other platforms. He's been fairly transparent about his politics, in the past, but only in generic "good mainstream liberal" ways, so far as I know; I don't know of him showing deep curiosity about the "nuts and bolts" functioning of government, before 2025. Him making a video contrasting Obama saying he couldn't discontinue penny production, without Congress, and the Trump administration doing it through executive policy processes, titled "The End of The Penny (and of Congress??)" suggests the topic has legs with smart people and this particular smart person has a big, very engaged audience (the Green brothers run an annual philanthropy event based on viewer participation).
Is this good or bad? Green raises the point towards the end of his video that Congress refusing to legislate can legitimize strongman-style claims about the Presidency. As these issues get increasing recognition among progressively less engaged voters, will those voters want to restore the role of Congress or will they accept claims from Presidential candidates that "Only I can fix it?"
sockpuppet2
7d ago
My condolences as well.
Thanks.
I'm going to a funeral. Any recommendations for funeral-friendly jokes? (I'm not going to tell risky jokes at a funeral; I just thought "funeral-friendly jokes" would be a good "Friday Fun" prompt.)
Edit: Someone wore navy slacks with black shoes and a black sweater. Another guest wore a blue jacket with tan slacks and looked fine, albeit a little out of place, but the navy slacks with an otherwise black outfit just looked bad and tacky. (I, admittedly, do not have any black shoes, so wore matte dark brown shoes with an otherwise black outfit, but I figured that if everything else you're wearing is black/grey, anyone who cares about the difference between black and matte dark brown shoes is paying too close attention.)
sockpuppet2
7d ago
I don't even know what interview you're talking about - including a quote of the controversial part would have been a start...
sockpuppet2
7d ago
Yeah, if enough philosophers and mathematicians disagree on the interpretation of the question that a Veritasium video gets made about it (agree or disagree with them on any given thing, they have good taste in topics...), the question is poorly formulated.
sockpuppet2
7d ago
That is probably more danger than most adults experience in their lifetimes.
IIRC, that's what Hermione said, when pitching it to Harry. But I like ZanarkandAbesFan saying "I'll willingly suspend disbelief for a giant spider, a troll, an evil tree, a basilisk, a board of animated chessmen, death eaters and several incarnations of Voldemort, but I draw the line at 16 year olds accepting lessons from a 15 year old!" (High and low concept elements should be considered separately, but it's still amusing to see.)
sockpuppet2
7d ago
Most of the lower enlisted rungs of the US military are on food stamps.
Seriously, source? That's major "foreseeable downfall of empire" levels of blunder, and the USA only just ended its 20 year long invasion of Afghanistan...
sockpuppet2
7d ago
They have a (delusional) persecution complex related to their dysphoria. They believe the world is out to get them and deny their innate female nature.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
But what is actually happening is that the majority of trans individuals are mentally ill men, who are obvious fetishists/have no hope of passing/who were autistic to begin with. This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against. They want to be treated like women, identified as women.
But they're ugly women. Ugly women with penises. Most tend to call those kind of women 'men'. To come to any other conclusion is fantasy.
Oh, so you already know!
sockpuppet2
7d ago
I'm also white. The trans community near me seems pretty racially divided. I'm sure that things are considerably worse for African American or Latina trans women who transition young, but I wouldn't guess how that all shakes out.
Well, what can you say about it?
sockpuppet2
7d ago
Because it means that failing is virtually impossible.
No, 50% brings down your average pretty quickly, if you get 50% frequently; it just doesn't tank the overall grades of students who get them on a "shit happens" basis.
sockpuppet2
8d ago
Why oppose "morphological freedom?"
sockpuppet2
8d ago
I thought Rowling wrote a compelling enough internal monologue that one could empathize with his reasons for being whiny, but those kinds of reactions are individual. shrug
sockpuppet2
8d ago
Or they rank it low among candidates for greatest utility.
sockpuppet2
8d ago
Tell that to the person who proposed it.
sockpuppet2
8d ago
I kinda don't believe in utilitarians, they tend to use "utility" to cover up their actual values. For example, I'd say that a utilitarian would recommenend improvimg the diagnostic process so that there's less people detransitioning for "identity evolutions" reasons (they hurt their health only to end up where they would have been anyway, without thebmedical interventions), but another utilitarian can just as easily say "well, if they don't regret it, have they reaaaaally lost any utils?". Similarly there aren't really utilitarian reasons for favoring hormones and surgeries, over coping strategies to deal with body image / identity issues.
How do you disentangle this from the uncertainty of measuring utility and estimating effects on utility, given the complexity of the policy questions?
American Civil War II: The Troubles Goes Hawaiian
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