Posts by Catkin 681 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2023
36mpg seems incredibly low. The average fuel economy for purely petrol driven (not including hybrids) LDVs in France in 2019 was 5.8l/100km or 17km/l or 48Impg
https://www.iea.org/articles/fuel-economy-in-france
I'd also point out that diesel achieves, on average, better fuel economy and, thanks to strike-inclined truckers, is cheaper per litre in France.
The issue with anti-tracking notifications is that they inform the thief as much as the stalked. I would definitely err on the side of caution (giving priority to stalking victims over catching thieves) but it would be nice if a person with a big brain could come up with a way to ensure thieves don't get notified that the item they've lifted is being tracked while preserving the safety feature.
The rate of injury is lower than, for instance, walking
Per-distance travelled but that is for fatalities, not serious injuries. You're also not taking into account the average speed of the transport mode. The same argument would suggest that airbags and a seat belt are essential items for walking but not driving. To offer a little hand holding: the reduction in injury severity offered by a protective measure is as important as the rate of underlying risk.
Regurgitating the myth about helmets being harmful demonstrates an inability to distinguish between correlation and causation. It may, perhaps, assist in guiding policy but it's essentially misinformation when applied to an individual decision.
I think it's easier for cyclists planning to ride on leafy lanes to take note and buy appropriately coloured clothing. The motorist might have to do some rather invasive research to ascertain if a given cyclist is likely to be sharing the road with them on said country lane, to say nothing of the difficulty with appropriately sizing the garment.
I find it challenging enough to wrestle them off their bicycles to fit them with a helmet if I notice one without adequate protection.
"no blacks, no Irish, no dogs,"
A terribly minor point and I'm not denying that racism existed in Britain prior to (and, indeed, after) but the earliest reference to this that I've ever been able to find is in Plays and Players, volume 25, page 44 from 1977. Those words, as far as I can determine, never appear together before then in Internet searchable literature. I believe it is something of a myth that's been Mandela effected into our collective memory.
I presume they're referring to what happened in the Bordesley Green area of Birmingham, including the attack on reporter Becky Johnson. The far right lot were sadly quite cunning in spreading rumours of a protest and leaving a lot of angry counter protesters with nowhere to direct their anger.
I don't think anyone is suggesting equal proportions of violence and non-violence.
Base profit-making doesn't strike me as any worse than the saber rattling of the Space Race. Don't forget that especially the early years of it were basic public exhibitions of how the respective side could kill an entire city without warning or defence at the push of a button. Even space telescopes are basically spy satellites pointing in the other direction.
If a consequence of a rich and unpleasant person getting richer is more affordable access to space, that doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world.
I disagree with your assessment on the basis that a bump stock is not needed to perform a similar operation and that your definition would mean all semi automatic firearms would be defined as machine guns. In the case of the law examined by SCOTUS, it came down to the fact that said law describes 'multiple shots with one single function of the trigger' (not a direct quote) as a key feature of a 'machine gun'. This doesn't apply to a bump stock because its entire function is to use the recoil to actuate the trigger against the finger.
Similarly, it's quite legal to add a (silly looking) crank trigger but as soon as that crank is turned by a source of power other than the user, it becomes illegal.
I'd also add that one of the Justices who voted in favour of the decision voiced support for a ban but correctly pointed out that it was the job of Congress to legislate appropriately.
As I said, please read the judgment. The part of the law that was used to justify the ban was directed against machine guns, which a bump stock clearly is not, nor does it turn a semi automatic firearm into a machine gun. If this is confusing, I recommend looking up how firearms work.
I have no interest in nor intention to argue the rights and wrongs of bump stock ownership. I am only discussing the way Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances work in the United States. A law need not be excessively complex, one could simply define 'devices which increase the firing rate beyond that obtainable through conventional trigger operation' as prohibited items and thwart future ingenuity. Lawmakers had years to make these changes and, instead, they sat on their arses with fingers crossed that SCOTUS wouldn't do their jobs.
Justifying transgressions as responses to emergencies invites tyranny and if lawmakers cannot pass effective, well written laws then perhaps they aren't the best people for those jobs. Emergency powers acts are written for this precise purpose and having what politicians and agencies can and cannot do in response to emergencies allows for consent of the citizenship to be obtained prior to emergencies through acceptance or objections to these powers.
I would suggest reading the specific judgement. SCOTUS didn't rule that it was cool for Americans to own bump stocks, they ruled that the currently enacted laws don't prohibit them.
Broadening the scope of existing laws through loose application of the wording bypasses Checks and Balances and the onus is upon the legislative branch to rewrite and pass an updated law that is either constitutional or is passed after an appropriate amendment.
I would say so. Neuralink does not, as far as I'm aware, feed information back in in its current iteration and this system, while providing proprioception (great for more natural walking) would not be applicable to a paraplegic individual.
Both offer the potential of massive quality of life improvements without detracting from the other.
It's a bit weird that you're so eager to comment if you're unaware of the timelines but you can brush up here:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline
I would say that saying it only affects a 'very small number', then releasing a software patch with no mention of the performance hit before finally admitting to having degraded performance almost a year later, when test results become undeniable, is a lie of omission.
The only way thermal throttling would be an apt comparison is if something happened along the lines of a manufacturer discovering a bad batch of thermal paste was used on a GPU, then issuing a hotfix that throttles the power further rather than admitting to the fault and offering replacements before their arm is twisted. Perhaps the underlying mechanism is similar but that's like saying the VW emissions scandal is okay because all modern IC cars manage their emissions through the ECU; it obfuscates the cause for criticism.
Yes, I'm well aware. The difference is that this was rolled out well after the device launch and installed without disclosure, likely because Apple didn't do effective validation of their device's operation after battery degradation (easily simulated). Worse, when caught, they basically lied.
The thermal throttling comparison makes no sense because that performs the same as at launch and is a demonstration of good manufacture diligence. Perhaps a better equivalent would be Spectre. In that instance, it was made clear that the fix would slow the affected processors, like all good manufacturers should do with updates.
It was a reasonable technical fix for a design flaw. The issue is that end users weren't made aware of it and were even gaslit by Apple tech support, though this may have been inadvertent due to non-communication to technicians. If the performance of a device is deliberately degraded, even if said degradation is necessary, the customer should be made aware.
If I'm missing something, I suppose I fall into the category of a complete moron so I'd really appreciate you pointing it out.
Just for the sake of clarity, I would point out that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story was the FBI, who claimed that the story was made up by the Russians (though presented no evidence as it was a request, not a legal order). It was the later shutting down of a Biden family account which was done at the behest of the current administration.
That's not the case, part of the original lawsuit is posts relating to the Hunter Biden laptop 'story' and claims about changes to laws surrounding postal voting. These may have still been untrue (in part or wholly) but I personally cannot see how they are health-related.
Moreover, the same individual (Rob Flaherty) who was using priority channels to Twitter to fight C-19 misinformation used those same channels to request the takedown of a parody account for a member of the Biden family. This is all in the original lawsuit, if you have a read through the original district court motion.
In my view, this is not a good look because it seems to be very harmful to attempts to fight health-related misinformation if those same tools are used politically.
If those restrictions have been breached then it seems like it would be the job of the judicial, not the legislative or executive branches to take care of it (separation of powers). In the event, it does not appear that this speech is criminal, merely harmful; certainly, it has not found to be criminal by any court.
I believe it is a broadly valid concern given that, while laws and court judgements are public record, quiet chats are not. Perhaps the best way forwards would be for the precise contents of these quiet chats to be retained for future scrutiny, in the same fashion as PRA 1978.
Like for example the stealth plane technology they "received" from the German scientists.
Not to disagree with your wider points but, if you refer to the Horten, that's just a shaky anecdote from the designer that he 'totally would have made it stealth with charcoal paint'. It's further undermined by him making the claim after public revelations about US stealth technology. Further still, when the design he claimed he'd planned was tested, it was found to be ineffective against even primitive WWII radars.
Additionally, for the B-2, there's a clear lineage from Jack Northrop's YB-35, which entered development a full two years ahead of Horten.
There's interesting features about the far side that suggest the Moon may have formed in stages, such as its thicker crust. Also, the almost absent mare (which is unlikely to be purely due to impacts) indicates potential differences in lunar tectonics post-formation.
It's a tad short-sighted to 'like' it, since that puts more money in the hands of the criminals to further their criminal enterprises. It's somewhat akin to 'liking' a drunk driver who hits a sexual predator; you don't hand them another bottle of gin and praise their extrajudicial actions.
I wouldn't discount them just not caring about the impact, on the basis that they can easily suck enough out of the system to retire comfortably by then. The danger of passive neglect, however, is that it opens the door for populists.
I could understand that approach with a great many products but, given that they've put moratoriums on IC vehicle engines, it seems to massively undermine their purported intent if they throw financial obstacles in the way of getting more people into EVs.
Fume spewing old bangers staying on the roads or ever more people becoming unable to afford transportation are both terrible outcomes.
'Abject' seems pretty strong to me. Mistakes were made, people did shitty things but we got multiple safe, effective vaccines to the masses at a speed never before seen and conducted testing (most notably rapid whole-genome sequencing) on a scale that would have been science fiction just a decade prior.
I think Don't Look Up is an appealing fantasy for those with a certain mindset but I also don't think it overall tracks with reality as far as an asteroid approaching the Earth.
Look at how much was spent during the Cold War on both the Space Race and, dwarfing that, weapons systems. If anything, every two-bit populist despot with a space capability would be tripping over the rest to be the one to save the Earth and gain eternal credibility. Unlike climate change, it's a very appealing target because it offers the opportunity to hold a thumb up to the camera and declare 'mission accomplished'; plus spending public money is far easier than imposing rules upon the public.
The issues raised by the exercise weren't ones of apathy but, rather, poor coordination.
Kessler syndrome isn't a pressing issue at the sort of altitudes used by Starlink et al.. Remember, they need active thrust just to stay in orbit; smash them up and the drag is suddenly hugely magnified and orbital mechanics/conservation of momentum means that nothing will be flung up to a higher circular orbit (at most, a portion of the debris will gain a higher apoapsis, with Oberth rapidly curtailing this). Think of it like a bag of densely packed feathers vs. all those individual feathers flying through the air separately.
Unless the paywalled paper is citing other sources, it seems a bit damning for the contributors to denounce that conclusion. Further, though the data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated isn't public, we can look at excess deaths between countries and, if vaccines were a significant contributor, would expect to see higher excess death rates in countries with higher vaccination rates. Sure, it's worth looking at long term but the data doesn't seem to point to vaccines at all.
For a vaccination to have an effect on a virus the virus has to be "caught" and in your body, replicating before your vaccine boosted immune system can react to it.
That's certainly one way the adaptive immune system can respond to a virus (antigen presentation) but the other way is through direct antibody action upon the virus particles (neutralising antibodies). This is where some of the bad science came from for the Covid vaccines, suggestions that a falling antibody titre was necessarily indicative of a loss of immunity.
Ah, like the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2006)
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198529170.001.0001/acref-9780198529170-e-20458
any preparation of immunogenic material suitable for the stimulation of active immunity in animals without inducing disease
I'm not interested in a discussion about what you consider to be or not to be a valid level of efficacy or precisely how effective the range of vaccines used were. I'm purely interested in discussing definitions in this context, not policy.
In any case, they were used in a way that, in my view, meets the defining function of a vaccine, even if past explanatory sections to definitions from some groups are insufficiently broad.
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