domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
Even the estate variant doesn't look half bad, so I appreciate the rec! Let's hope something fits into my budget haha.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
Thanks. I don't think the marker for second hand cars in the UK ever got that red hot though I'm no expert, but at any rate, I need a car and will inevitably settle for something in my budget.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
An AM is frankly excessive unless you're trying to pickup supermodels or the daughters of multimillionaires (in USD). Even a humble BMW will more than suffice for signalling purposes after one point, it's not like most girls have the prices and desirability of cars memorized right?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
If I could find a bottle, I'd be drinking Old Forester 1924, but alas, I cannot find a bottle.
As it is, we're headed for the first really warm weekend day of the year and I strongly suspect that's going to entail an afternoon on the porch with some Foursquare rum (I think I have a few pours of Nobiliary left) and a cigar.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
29d ago
I think the guideline should be "the topic keeps coming up over and over again in the threads for separate weeks, and the conversation in the new week tends to reference the conversation in older weeks". Covid, when it was a thing, absolutely qualified as that. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were somewhat less of this, since each week's thread tended to be about current events more than about continuing to hash out an ongoing disagreement. Trans stuff, I think, qualifies for this, as it does seem to be the same people having the same discussion over and over. Can't think of too many other examples.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
What I really like about it is the Bayesian reasoning for parenthood. They even thought of identical twins. (Of course, requiring posterior odds of 0.99 with prior odds of 0.5 will mean a lot of false positives. Especially as most labs will probably not say "ok, p=0.98, so that is a negative", but instead do more tests to get over 0.99. Or it might be that modern genetic tests have much higher predictive power and this is moot.)
I drove a corolla until it started giving me trouble (around 300,000 km), followed by a prius until that started giving me trouble (around 400,000 km), both were IMO quite good cars. I think you should be able to get a lightly used one that is <10 years old within your budget in Scotland, and that should have all the creature comforts you want.
That said, for bluetooth specifically, for $20, you can get a thing which plugs into the cigarette lighter of a car and does bluetooth pairing and then broadcasts to a radio frequency (choose a dead channel), which you can then tune your car radio to. In my experience they work well enough that you never think about them once you've done the initial 2 minutes of setup - your phone just automatically pairs when you get in the car, and the car speakers play what your phone is playing.
I'd like to say I'm a connoisseur, but I normally go for a good single malt that I can mix with water, or dry ginger ale. Jamesons, Glenfiddich, heck even Chivas Regal.
I learnt a long time ago that alcohol tasting is a sham. Just pick something you like and don't try to compare against others.
drmanhattan16
29d ago
I think that's the defensible stance, in the sense that it doesn't indicate anti-Semitic beliefs. But "Jews have assigned the Holocaust a unique position in Western history" is a far weaker stance to take, imo, that most revisionists don't seem to hold. If they just hated how the history was distorted, I think there would be fewer revisionists overall - there's simply less of an axe to grind.
I think SS and the revisionists do genuinely hate the Jews. Not in the childish sense of "look at this bitch breathing", but in the sense that they think it's acceptable to declare a heuristic like "Jew? Morally suspect, opinion discarded".
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
Huh. That's new to me. I really hope I don't have to resort to that, but I appreciate the information, it might even come in handy should my budget prove optimistic.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
If you are particularly adventurous you can also just replace the whole head unit and get something with all the features you want. Not even that hard to do.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
I've been nursing a bottle of Blender's Pride, a midmarket whiskey here, for about 3 weeks since my breakup.
It's a step up from the true dross, but not considered fancy unless you were a broke med student. Which I once was, so the association with a taste of something better remained.
I have a shot every time I feel like shit because I miss my ex, but never so much I feel the need to call her, which is why the bottle is yet to finish.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
29d ago
Also useful if your car has bluetooth but it's janky.
HaroldWilson
29d ago
10-15k is a fair bit higher than you really need to spend to get something decent imo, if 'every penny saved helps'. Hatchbacks tend to provide much better value than other body types, and imo for a relatively young person look better anyway. Saloons are very middle aged. Automatics command a premium too as you doubtless know, and after a while driving a manual it really becomes second nature.
Still, even if you do want an automatic it's hard to beat a Vauxhall Corsa for value - yes it's a hatchback, but all the 2010s ones look good. There are automatic versions with <40k miles for less than 6 grand on autotrader.
If you really do want a saloon, a Volvo S40/60/80 might be decent value and pretty reliable? There are S40s with <30,000 miles in the £5-6k range, a handful of them automatic.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29d ago
Yeah the races=subspecies is a racist talking point and professional geneticists and other scholars do not consider it valid, but all it practically means is that we commit to call human populations, no matter how distinct, only that – populations, at most races, not subspecies. It's much the same construct.
Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."
No, there's no solid quantitative reason to say that eg. Australian Aborigines and Germans are that less distinct than two recognized subspecies of Canis Lupus and thus can't be called subspecies. It's simply not a matter of quantity.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
Any opinions on Paul John whisky? I occasionally look at it on the menu at my favorite whiskey bar or on the shelf with the other less common countries and want to try it, but have never pulled the trigger.
No_one
29d ago
That's limited by geography.
Very few places could get days of storage that way, without NAWAPA style megaprojects.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Texas will end 2024 with 12 GW of battery storage- I guess pumped water isn’t a factor due to geography or technical barriers. I’m not sure if this is an expansive definition of battery or if this is literally just a bunch of lithium-ions.
No_one
29d ago
There's an insane startup promising to crash the methane market with solar powered methane synthesis from directly captured CO2.
No_one
29d ago
Extremely high voltage grids for thousand km transmission aren't cheap.
They're an eyesore to some. I love them though.
You need a lot more of them with a fluctuating grid like you're proposing.
Ioper
29d ago
I mean, it's possible but just horribly inefficient. Even just hydrogen is really inefficient.
No_one
29d ago
Look up what Terraform is promising. Methane synthesis from water and captured CO2
I feel like it can't be real, that the numbers don't make sense, that making and running the machinery in a cost effective manner is impossible
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
I've heard multiple energy-industry insiders say freely that most renewables such as wind exist entirely because of the subsidies and aren't even remotely defensible without them.
Have you looked at the numbers for pumped storage? A kilo of gasoline stores enough energy to raise a similar kilo of water more than four thousand kilometers. The sheer volumes you'd need to lift to match the energy density of a single floating roof tank (or oil tanker) would be absurd, and you'd need to scatter pumped lakes the size of Lake Mead all over the country, and even then probably couldn't handle seasonal variation. Not to mention that reservoirs are themselves not that environmentally friendly or that there aren't many good sites to start from that aren't already used.
IMO generating hydrocarbons is the most viable storage technology (plus it works with existing supplied energy infrastructure), but even there robust, scalable chemical processes are lacking. Hydrogen is easier chemically but harder to store.
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