Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)F
Posts
0
Comments
160
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It's reasonably common for showers to have a mixing valve and a flow rate valve on separate handles. That accomplishes what you want. You just have to remember which is which and only use the flow rate valve to turn on and off.

    More importantly, hot water circulation systems should be more common. It's the waiting for the cold water in the line to flush out that really makes setting temperature a hassle.

  • I'll start by saying I have all the same concerms as everyone else, and don't fundamentally disagree.

    I do think we should try to look at this in a a balance of power point of view.

    More legislative specificity isn't going to stop a corrupt DOJ. Who is going to bring charges against a corrupt attorney general? Congressional impeachment is the only avenue to remove Bondi et al.

    An ironclad bill would be more likely to be challenged and struck down in the supreme court. The AG's office has all sorts of precedence on witholding files for active investigations and preserving victim/witness identity. Pushing this risks the whole thing being thrown out.

    I think there's reason to indulge in the "this time feels different" optimism. I truly believe that most of congress including republicans hate being under Trumps thumb. Congress critters are almost always power hungry creatures and all want to be top dog, so they have to have compelling motivations to fall in line. So far, the Trump brand has monopolized power on the right. Anyone who has spoken out against MAGA has ended up like Liz Cheney. So individuals can't go against the group without getting punished. The group has been satisfied to go along with Trump because he's a fantastic lightning rod and bully who before now was increasing their power. Congress was able to cut ACA benefits and pass tax cuts for the ultra rich and the MAGA base enthusiastically supported them for it because of Fox News OANN propaganda around Trumpism. Trump also seemed to be making huge strides in permanently securing Republican control in the House through gerrymandering. That's something that House members can't push for themselves because they will righlty be called out for grabbing power.

    So as humiliating as it is to kow tow to Trump all the time, he was more of an asset than a liability. The recent elections showed that the political calculus has changed. Trump is now a big liability that turns out opposition voters in large numbers and if he's not on the ballot he won't turn out the MAGA faithful in sufficient numbers to counter the opposition. This didn't show up in just a couple places, but all over the country. Add in Trump's obvious mental decline, and the GOP needs an exit plan.

    Congress still can't just discard Trump though. His rabid base is still needed if they ever want a chance at winning another election. So the GOP is stuck between needing move on from Trump and still needing his loyal devotees. Here's where the epstein files come in. Q'anon was a huge part of converting evangelicals into devoted fanatics. Conspiracy theorists turned voting for a gross con man into a moral imperative. So what better way to try to peel off supporters than to keep reminding them that Trump at the least knew about the pedophile class and chose to associate with them anyway. The true belivers will cry that Trump was an informant, but even heavily doctored Epstein files will greatly discredit that narrative.

    Not even congress can directly go for the king. The dems don't have the votes, and republican dissenters get punished and lack the moral fortitude to do it out of principle despite the personal cost. So any strategy has to be at a party wide level. Hence this taking so long and the near unanimous votes.

    The american people view this bill as beung about pursuing justice, but for congress that's at the bottom of their list of goals. Primarily, they don't want Q'anon anger turned toward themselves. Voting for this is a pretty good cover. But the bigger play is to start giving congress more leverage again. This whole year, evryone on the left has been asking why congress has stood by and ceded so much of their power to the corrupt executive. I think it's because most of what Trump was doing seemed to entrench GOP power, and they assumed they could just take back control at any time.

    This bill lays the groundwork for congress to start taking back power. It gives Bondi and Patel enough rope to hang themselves, and congress would have the backing of both the left AND Q'Anon to impeach DOJ members who collude in a cover up. So to congress, trying to make a more ironclad bill doesn't make impeachment easier, it doesn't stop a corrupt DOJ, and it makes Supreme Court challenges more likely.

    I see this as putting the Trump loyalists embedded throughout the judiciary and executive branches on notice that congress is considering taking the wheel back. They are sending the message that protecting Trump is no longer the safe play, and the careers of loyalists can be ended if they don't work with congress instead.

    Where this goes from here is anyone's guess. We are now fully reliant on congress to achieve any measure of justice because the DOJ is fully compromised. I hope that this bill gives congress both the motivation and political backing to start cleaning up the DOJ, but that's a delusionally optimistic take at this point.

    I do expect to see candidates in both parties start to run on a reform/anticorruption platform going into the midterms.

  • https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405/text

    The bill is not long and everyone who is tracking this should take the time to read it.

    Your concern is valid, but Bondi isn't given completely free reign.

    SEC. 3. Report to Congress.

    Within 15 days of completion of the release required under Section 2, the Attorney General shall submit to the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary a report listing:

    (1) All categories of records released and withheld.

    (2) A summary of redactions made, including legal basis.

    (3) A list of all government officials and politically exposed persons named or referenced in the released materials, with no redactions permitted under subsection (b)(1).

    So if Bondi were to follow the law, the AG's office will have to provide congress a summary and justification for everything that is redacted.

    Which isn't to say that I have any faith in the AG's office following these requirements, but it should give us reason to pressure congress into holding Bondi et al. to these requirements and would give them cause for impeachement of Bondi if she does not comply.

  • And the bill preserves carvouts for active investigations. Congress should not leave it up to the DOJ to determine what is suitable for release.

  • What does it mean when light hits something? Is light "hitting" the air around you? If so how can you see at all?

    For light to measurably change when it interacts with a particle or group of particles, there has to be a separation of electrical charges. The light also has to be close to the energy of an available energy state transition. There's lots of diffferent types, but remember electron orbitals? Most visible light interactions involve electrons jumping to higher energy orbitals or falling to lower energy orbitals. There are only very specific interactions that are possible with specific wavelengths of light. Fortunately, visible light spans a wide range of wavelengths that interact very strongly with the forms of matter that surround us.

    There are lots of things that won't interact with light at all. Nuetrons and neutrinos don't have a charge separation and don't interact with light at all. You could shine very strong lasers through a cloud of neutrinos, and as far as the beam path would indicate, it would be identical to vacuum. They have to be studied by how they interact with other matter that does interact with light. It may sound counterintuitive, but single free charges like a bare hydrogen nucleus or free electron also don't absorb or emit photons. It is only when charges can interact with eachother that we get light interactions.

    So nothing measurable happens when light propagates through a volume where dark matter is. There is no mechanism by which the two can interact, except gravitational lensing.

  • The supply side of power generation is coordinated by a bid system. So the cheapest sources are activated first. As demand goes up increasingly expensive forms of power generation are turned on.

    For daily and seasonal variation, this is fine. The amount of time that really expensive generation is active is only a small portion and the base rate can stay low. However, if you add a bunch of baseload without adding equivalent generation, your utility will be stuck buying at the top end of the capacity market auction. The datacenter will have negotiated a discounted rate though because constant demand is good for the utility in the long run. That leaves everyone else paying a big rate increase.

    Source: none given, but the capacity auction is a real thing, and the predicted behaviour of such a system can be reasoned.

  • And yet, botanists still send out excited newsletters when they bloom because it's so rare.

  • Schumer can't let the party actually eat the carrot, then they might stop following him.

  • Discuss

    Jump
  • Market cap is average sale price times the total number of outstanding shares. So with normal trade volumes the market cap swings can far exceed the value of the trades.

    Say a company has 10,000,000 outstanding shares and trades at an average price of $100, the market cap would be $1 billion. Let's also arbitrarily assume that stock has been trading at $100 for a very long time and almost everyone has a cost basis of $100/share. Now a bad news story comes out and 10,000 shares are sold at $90 dollars. The transacted value would be $900,000 dollars and the new market cap would be $900 million. That's a $100million drop in market cap, but only a $100,000 realized loss for shareholders. Market cap is precisely as volatile as share price and is only useful as a shorthand for nominal value, but should not be used as a measure of total value.

    Purchases and Sales are double entry and by definition have to be balanced. 1 billion in sales is always matched to 1 billion in purchases. Unless shares are being created or destroyed.

  • Terrible headline. $1T change in market cap does not mean $1T was transacted.

  • Normally I would agree with this take, but a corrupted US military is a problem for the whole world. See Venezuela.

  • Discuss

    Jump
  • I didn't know there was an xkcd for this. Nice! Thanks for sharing.

  • Discuss

    Jump
  • We're going to have to put the Arrested Development banana meme out to pasture soon.

  • Inventory would measure $ worth of goods missing, but wouldn't ascertain the number of incidents that caused those losses. So the $/incident and incident count figures should be treated as if they have high uncertainty even if the $ figure is accurate.

  • That almost seems worse because it implies the contamination happened in the canning facility and not as the result of improper shipping/handling. I hope you report it to the manufacturer.

  • Normally I wouldn't bother on something that is pretty cheap, but if one failed to seal, they really need to sample the batch and see if a recall is necessary. Botulism is no joke.

  • An increase in the number of known shoplifting incidents would be conflated with increasing surveillance. It would be hard to distinguish observability vs actual increases.

  • I think that might actually send the US into a debt spiral that would require leaning into printing and inflation. Net interest for FY25 is $933 Billion putting servicing debt as the third largest federal expenditure. Any bailout will either be insignificantly small or will tank the dollar.

    I'm not saying you're wrong, but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.