• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 8th, 2024

help-circle
  • I have a gut feeling that his talk of tariffs is a bluff. Even if it’s not my gut still tells me there’s going to be exceptions for certain things that are big money makers for Trump and his allies. Trump’s administration is not going to tax themselves unless they can provide a loophole to get themselves out of it. Ultimately it’s the consumer who pays for tariffs, but they’re entire purpose is to slow down trade and if that costs Trump and his allies too much of their wealth it won’t happen.

    Trump is as predictable as he is unpredictable because he doesn’t stay consistent. He changes what he says and does to be perceived as best he can in that moment. Which makes understanding his actions a little easier, his past actions are irrelevant to his future decisions, it’s just about what’s in his head in the moment. Which is just a lot of words to say that Trump, his administration, and his allies are just chaos, and you never really know what chaos will bring except a change in the status quo. It’s not looking optimistic though.




  • If you wanted to take a second crack at it, it is easier than ever to learn how to use Linux. The one thing I have found ChatGPT useful for is guiding me through setting up a new program or daemon or to explain to me what that super cryptic error message means. ChatGPT is not perfect and requires whoever is using it to sanity check the result it gives, but more often than not I find I walk away with a better understanding of what I was doing.


  • Just a bit of history, in WWII the Allies didn’t know for certain that the Holocaust had occurred. Remember that it was the 1940s, information could travel quickly but only so much. It wasn’t as easy for them back then to pickup the metaphorical ‘signal’ of the Holocaust happening to the ‘noise’ the rest of the war was making. So while there were rumors of mass executions of Jewish people as early as the summer of 1941, it’s often said that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until winter 1945. Now when the Allies went from ignorant, to suspicious, to all but certain but with doubts and finally to certain without a doubt has been debated for decades and will probably be debated until the sun expands and swallows the earth whole. There was definitely a lot of hateful rhetoric being spouted about Jewish people in the 1930s that maybe should have been stopped before it nearly took over Europe, but looking back at history we have the advantage of hindsight.


  • It depends on the bacteria, when in it’s lifecycle half of it is killed, and what half is killed. To keep things short, the odds are in the bacteria’s favor. Suppose if half the bacteria in your gut died right now how long do you think it would take for the bacteria population in your gut to return to pre-snap levels? A month? A year? Decades? How about less than an hour. Bacteria reproduce exponentially and on average, a bacterial generation lasts 20 minutes. Meaning that every 20 minutes the population doubles, assuming there are no deaths in the population during this time. If there is space for bacteria to grow, they will.



  • Yeah I’m going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I’ve had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.


  • I can’t find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It’s a small comfort.


  • While there can definitely be some legitimate discussion and ambiguity over which culture/country gets to inherit Mayan artifacts, for example, saying that the British, for example, should inherit it is a very weak argument. It’s not like the entirety of an extinct societies people just dropped dead. Some survived and after some time rebuilt new societies. Using Mayan artifacts as an example, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras have a better claim to them then the British. It’s not propaganda or useless to say that items of cultural heritage should be returned.

    So how about this what about-ism, if you live in the United States, the British took cultural artifacts from your lands too and aren’t giving them back right this moment. Where did you think all those native American artifacts in British museums came from? They didn’t make them and it’s not like North America was spared from British plundering. Might be nice to get that stuff back.


  • There is no moral grounds for stealing cultural artifacts. Even if it means the culture that rightfully possesses it wants to destroy it. That choice is entirely that cultures decision to make. Even if we disagree. It’s one thing to clutch your own pearls but so much worse to do that to someone else’s.