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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.

    More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.

    All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.


  • One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

    Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

    But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.



  • From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

    Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

    But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.



  • Unfortunately, all the electric train startups were bought up and closed down by diesel train companies decades ago, and the majority of the rail lines are owned by freight companies as well. This is partly why public train transit is so bad: the government has to lease the tracks from the freight companies, who get priority on the lines over public trains, meaning that if there’s freight traffic the commuter rail has to wait for the freight lines to go through first.


  • I’d agree with you if the devs were being treated better, games should cost more and be shorter. But the price hikes aren’t that. They’re pure greed.

    That extra money isn’t going to pay the developers. EA just shut down multiple studios, including the studio responsible for the critically acclaimed AA game High-Fi Rush, and are already talking about shutting down more. EA has closed more studios than they’ve released games this year, and the past 3 years have seen record high layoffs - even worse than during the 2008 financial crash. All this while companies brag about record-breaking profits.

    And with the rise of digital media, production costs saw a significant decrease. There was a short period of time where physical copies were $60 and digital were $40. Now digital are averaging $70 and execs are already talking about increasing the price to $80-100.


  • Or because the servers went offline or the company didn’t bother to keep the source code. A few years ago, there was a really bad remaster of one of the GTA games where it turned out they used the mobile version of the game as the source code because Rockstar hadn’t bothered to keep a copy of the game. There was another time where it turned out that the copy used for a remaster of a game was a cracked version of the game, and people could tell because they hadn’t even bothered to remove the cracker’s logo. It’s estimated that over 50% of games are now gone forever because companies just don’t bother to preserve copies of the source code.


  • There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.

    Let’s be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you’re looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you’re looking at 10x the throughput.

    And that’s not even getting into transportation that doesn’t use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston’s commuters use the T every day. That’s half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn’t exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?


  • That’s the thing, the number of new cars using that road ends up being at least one additional lane’s worth. So traffic moves at the same speed as it was before the extra lane, just now with one more lane’s worth of cars on that road.

    If anything, you might see marginally better traffic on other roads because of the cars that started using the new lane, but you’d be talking about a handful of cars per road. Probably not enough for any discernible change in travel time or congestion, and each new lane you add later will have diminishing returns because it will be a smaller fraction of the total number of lanes coming from any specific direction.


  • I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”

    Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.

    You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.


  • Also, social media is a major contributor to the isolation epidemic going on, as is the economic situation and the work culture of countries like the US.

    So what I’m saying is, you’re probably right on all accounts.

    I saw a great video once that went into how the economic situation is largely responsible for the cultural shift from “adult” as a thing you are to “adulting” - a thing you do. That from Millenials onwards, generations don’t feel economically secure enough to partake in traditional cultural norms of middle-class adulthood. Things like buying a house and popping out 2.5 kids.


  • They were using the bike locks to claim that the protesters had ties to terrorist organizations, because “it’s not the kind of thing a normal student has.”

    Despite the fact that the exact model of bike lock was part of a deal on bike locks advertised by the CU campus security on Facebook not 6 weeks ago.






  • To put it into perspective, one of the leading causes of death in the US is preventable diseases. Many Americans can’t afford to see a doctor to get stuff checked out, nor do they get sick days or could afford to take the time off if they do, so they just keep working and hope it goes away.

    Their advice basically boils down to “just have a senior level position in a well-paying field, and you’ll be fine.” As a programmer, you might be screwed right now with the massive layoffs currently ripping through the tech sector.


  • I’ll have to see if I can find it again, but I swear I got the hours and jobs from the Census Bureau website in 2020 or so.

    With the rise of the gig economy and businesses refusing to schedule people enough hours to be considered full-time employees so they can avoid giving them benefits, I’d be surprised if it was as low as 8 million.

    I’m getting all kinds of competing numbers even from just the Census Bureau itself, but they all seem to be around the 8% mark - one article saying that it was 7.8% in 2018 and has been on the rise in the past 20 years but notes that these numbers diverge from another census data measurement which put it at 6.3% and falling, while another from a year or two earlier says that based on recently released data from 2013, 8.3% of workers (13 million) had 2+ jobs in 2013.

    Either way, it’s a far cry from the average worker. Maybe I’m misremembering it and the stat was about households or something.


  • It’s like the saying “‘I don’t get into politics’ means that your rights aren’t at risk every 4 years.” If you haven’t experienced it or stepped outside your general socioeconomic class and seen how others live, you wouldn’t know. It’s just this nebulous concept that there are some people who have it bad, but nop context as to how things actually are.

    This is why Republicans hate college, as that’s where most people meet people with different life experiences for the first time, and why the death of third places has been really awful. It used to be that the wealthy lawyer would be drinking with his buddy the coal miner who he first met at that bar.