That does absolutely sound more realistic to me, I was a bit skeptical of the numbers I quoted, but I saw them come up in a few places after a quick google search and I was open that I didn’t fact-check those numbers.

It seems like OP is probably pushing a bit of an agenda here (maybe a good one, maybe a bad one depending on where you land on the whole Israel situation, I’m not gonna go into that right now) but in case you’re just out of the loop

There’s recently been some incidents in Lebanon where pagers and radios have been exploding. Not just defective Samsung Note battery bursting-into-flames exploding, but packed full of actual explosives, detonating, and killing people exploding

Long story short, Israel intercepted a shipment of these devices going to Hezbollah, and planted remote triggered bombs in them.

And some people are concerned about this, and probably rightly so, first of all these pagers have caused some collateral damages, killing and hurting bystanders. Secondly, we don’t exactly know how widespread this has been- are there other people out in Lebanon or other parts of the world walking around with literal bombs in their pocket? What if those devices get lost, stolen, sold/traded in? What if the target had been onboard a plane or something when the pager detonated? What if the bomb doesn’t go off as intended- is it gonna go off in a trash truck, recycling facility, or incinerator when they decide to get rid of it?

Little back of the envelope math based on some quick google numbers that I didn’t fact check, and making some assumptions that I probably shouldn’t make.

Cargo ships emit around 10-40 grams of co2 per kilometer

It’s something like 11000km from the port of Shanghai to the port of Los Angeles (I don’t know the exact shipping routes, or which ports they’d actually be using, but those are the largest ports in China and the US west coast.

It takes about 14-40 days to sail, and another 1-3 days to load/unload the ship. So let’s call that around a month round trip and 22000km, so up to about 12 trips a year max.

The biggest car carrier ships can carry up to about 8500 cars, I’m having a harder time finding what a more average load of cars is, but I saw an article about a Canadian record in 2005 being 5214 cars in a single shipment so let’s say 5000 to keep the math easy

Typical passenger cars emit around 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year

Gonna round some of the numbers up to be pessimistic, make the math easy, and account for some of the other emissions besides CO2, emissions from manufacturing, etc. so let’s say 50g/km for ships, 25000km round trip, and that cars emit 5 metric tons/year

So at 12 trips a year, 25000km round trip, emitting 50g of co2 per km, a ship emits 15,000,000g or 15 metric tons of CO2, as much as 3 passenger cars do a year.

Assuming that all of those cars are EVs and sold to replace ICE cars, that those old cars are then taken off the road and not resold, and that the new cars are being charged with green energy from renewable sources or nuclear that aren’t emitting carbon

5000 new cars per shipment × 12 shipments per year × 5 tons of CO2 per old car - 15 tons of co2 emitted by the ships = potentially 299,985 metric tons less emissions per year

Now that’s probably an insanely high estimate, I’m sure there are about 2000 other things I didn’t even try to account for on top of what I mentioned, and some of my rounding probably wasn’t entirely appropriate.

But even if all of my assumptions are way off and the actual emissions savings are only 1% of that, that’s still almost 3000 metric tons of CO2 saved per year. I think it’s definitely within the realm of possibility that shipping EVs from China could reduce carbon emissions.

I consider myself to be a fairly tech literate person. Not a professional, but better than average. The guy my family comes to to troubleshoot computer problems, basic working understanding of programming and networking but not nearly enough to do it professionally.

I think you’re shooting too high on some of these.

Basic hardware is good, but don’t spend too much time on it or go into too much detail, just kind of basic overviews. Boot chain is probably pushing it, but basic overview of operating systems is good.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as having them install their own Linux distro, that feels like you want to take a week of your class time to troubleshoot all the potential issues that come up, if you do it on school computers you’re probably looking at a nightmare getting that cleared by your IT department, and if it’s their personal devices you’re probably going to catch an earful from some parents for messing up their/their kids computer.

I do think it’s a good idea to have some computers running Linux for them to use so they can see what it’s like, and probably some macs too, I’m not an apple guy but there’s a lot of them out there and people should be at least a little familiar with both.

I don’t know what the current state of things in schools is, but you can certainly hand out some flash drives, but there’s a decent chance they already have some. I know over a decade ago when I was in high school pretty much all of us were already carrying around flash drives.

Programming is good to introduce them to, python is a solid choice, but unless these are kids who are pretty sure they want to go into computer science I wouldn’t go too deep. It’s not a particularly useful language for actual usage but I think that BASIC still has a useful role as a way to teach the fundamentals of programming to people in an accessible way to see if they may want to pursue it further. I know programmers hate it, but visual basic is also kind of satisfying because it makes it pretty easy to crank out something that looks like an actual finished product.

I’d keep networking pretty straightforward. Network stack and OSI are probably a little too high level to go into, but basics about WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are good to know.

Basic typing and general computer use are probably something a lot of kids could use some work on. A lot of kids these days have a lot less experience with keyboard and mouse computer use thanks to smartphones and tablets. Don’t shun the touchscreen devices though, they’re more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for, and since that’s the way technology is trending figure out how to push the borders on what you can do with them.

I haven’t, but I live in PA, so we have scrapple which sounds pretty similar.

I once drove through Ohio, don’t remember my exact route, but came up north from Kentucky to Cincinnati, then east into Pennsylvania

There may be more boring drives out there, but I haven’t made them.

Cincinnati seemed like a nice enough city though. Can’t think of any particular reason I’d ever want to go back, but I didn’t hate it, so that was pretty much the high point of my time in Ohio

I don’t know. I’m pretty sure every high school had at least one student who would shit in a litter box just because and then brag about it

I remember maybe a year or so ago, overhearing some of my coworkers who seemed to genuinely believe that schools were installing litter boxes for alleged students that identify as cats.

These idiots will believe absolutely anything, and it doesn’t need to be even remotely anchored to reality.

I take part in a lot of outdoorsy activities, there’s kind of a split. Lots of conservation-minded folks like myself, and lots of assholes who don’t seem to realize or care that they won’t be able to go hunting, fishing, etc. if they develop over all the woodlands, poison the waterways, etc. and just want an excuse to shoot something or justify their much-larger-than-needed, lifted, coal-rolling truck.

Also a fair amount of people who don’t feel particularly strongly either way.

Sales of hunting/fishing licenses and such do end up funding a lot of conservation efforts, though arguably in a lot of cases the money doesn’t necessarily go where it’s most needed.

The more conservation-minded folks tend to be quieter about their interests and don’t make it their whole personality, they’re usually not the ones posing with a deer or fish in their profile pic.

6% weight increase doesn’t necessarily mean a 6% efficiency loss, it’s not a simple linear relationship like that. Depending on the power of the motor and a few other factors that 6% weight increase could mean a huge hit to efficiency.

A roof only needs to be a thin piece of sheet metal, weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2lbs per square foot

Most solar panels are going to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-4lbs per square foot. So is likely the panel would weigh 2-4 times as much as just a plain metal roof, plus possibly a metal roof under it and/or additional framing to attach the panels to, so power to weight does absolutely come into play.

This chucklefuck:

“babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”

What trump was trying to scaremonger about and claimed democrats support in the debate:

He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay

Seems he’s once again confused

Politicians lie and use all kinds of weasely doublespeak bullshit all the damn time, it’s pretty much their signature move, everyone knows it, it’s been the punchline of countless jokes, no one likes it, but anyone with half a brain understands that it’s part of how the game is played and how you get the morons that make up a lot of this country excited to show up and vote for you.

So why are Kamala and so many other democrats so bad at just doing that when it counts?

How many undecided idiots does she think have fracking as their big tentpole issue, who are saying “gee, you know, I kind of agree with everything else she’s saying, but I don’t know if she agrees with me that fracking is the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I guess I’ll stay home on election day or maybe vote for the guy who’s skin looks like it was stained orange by fracking chemicals”

Compared to how many people in her base who are strongly against fracking, and feel that by supporting it she is just plain not listening to them and who may choose to stay home on election day because they feel so alienated and hopeless about the state of politics in our country.

How hard is it to just say nothing about these kinds of issues? Or if it’s something you absolutely have to comment on, why not just dance around it and say some vague bullshit about making fracking safe?

Play the fucking game, and play it to win.

I know she’s in the pockets of megacorporations that support fracking, her record speaks for itself for anyone with half a brain who cares to look into it, most people aren’t going to look into it though.

I don’t support fracking, but I also know if Trump wins then it’s game over, and oil and gas companies might just start a fracking operation from my bedroom and dump their waste in my dog’s water bowl just because they can, and since we’ll be living in a fascist dictatorship hell scape, there’d be no clear path forward to do anything about it.

If Harris wins, fracking stays more or less as it is now, and there’s a path forward, even if it’s a narrow one, to get a better candidate next time around.

But like I said, a lot of people are idiots who refuse to see that bigger picture, they’ll see Harris doing shit like this and just lose interest and not show up on election day or throw their vote away to some third party because they think they’re making a stand.

My mental health is pretty solid, but it’s in spite of capitalism. I do pretty well at managing stress, I don’t have any real mental health concerns or other issues. I’m physically pretty healthy, have a decent head on my shoulders, and am lucky enough to work a job thats very secure and for me is pretty enjoyable and pays well enough that I’m not struggling in any significant way.

But damn-near every ounce of stress or anxiety I ever experience has to do with money. What if I lose my job, what if I have a health problem, what if I need a new car, what if my house burns down, etc.

Big one-time infusion of cash or a decent enough raise would eliminate just about every source of stress I have.

Poland and Hungary have historically been very close allies since the middle ages, lots of shared culture, history, they’ve faced similar struggles over the years, and generally they’ve always held each other in pretty high regard. They each even have a little poem about how much they like each other

Them polish version translates to something like

Pole and Hungarian brothers be,
good for fight and good for party.
Both are valiant, both are lively,
Upon them may God’s blessings be.

The Hungarian Version

Pole and Hungarian — two good friends,
fighting, and drinking at the end.

Unfortunately there’s been a lot of tension between them in recent years over the war in Ukraine, and their relationship has been deteriorating.

I don’t know, I’ve met a decent amount of Canadians over the years, never got any bad vibes from us. I think the problem is America has more than our fair share of assholes, so they approach us a little skeptically, but if you show you’re not an asshole, I think they like us just fine.

Of course, my biases should be disclosed. Most of the Canadians I’ve met have been from roughly the Toronto area, plus a good handful of French Canadians.

Couple of the officers at the border when I went to Montreal were kind of dicks, but I think that’s more of a universal feature of border crossing and customs officials around the world. Once I was there though no one gave me any shit.

I love treasure planet, and I hate that Disney sort of refuses to do anything with the property. I’m not clamoring for a remake or sequel or anything, I just want there to be more merchandise and such out there for it. The map would make for a great knickknack to display on my shelf (yes, they’re out there, and I may buy one someday)

I went to Disney world for the first (and so far only) time a few months before the movie released, and I feel like someone who had some sway over park operations was excited for it to come out and was trying to drum up some hype, I remember there being some behind the scenes stuff on display somewhere and it had me excited to see it.

And yeah, reading in another language is an interesting experience, like I said I’m far from fluent, so I have to stop a few times every page to look up some words, or cross-reference the English version to make sure I’m understanding a sentence properly (luckily it’s in the public domain so it’s easy to pull up on project Gutenberg) I think this was a good choice for me as a first book in Esperanto, it’s an easy enough reading level, I’m very familiar with the overall story so I have a general framework for what’s supposed to be happening but have no famiarity with the actual text, so imcant just coast by on having read the book before to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

And I’m just fluent enough to have the occasional opinion on whether I like how something was translated or not. The first time that happened was kind of cool, I figure it means that I am kind of getting the hang of the language if I have an opinion on something like that.

Names are definitely interesting, I’m not sure which other languages have similar features to this, but in Esperanto nouns end with O and there’s various suffixes that might be added on for various reasons, so if you have a name that doesn’t end in an O some of that can get a little awkward. Sometimes names end up getting esperantized, other times they just let it be and you just kind of have to roll with it.

Stop reading here if you don’t want a mini Esperanto lesson. I’d stop myself but I find writing this kind of thing out is helpful for my learning process.

To kind of illustrate what I’m talking about, there’s the English saying that “Hurt people hurt people” meaning that people who have been hurt tend to hurt other people

In Esperanto the sentence would be something like “Vunditaj homoj vundas homojn”

You have the root words vund- having to deal with injuries (from the rame root as “wound”)

And hom- meaning person (same root as the homo in homo sapiens, or the French “homme” for “man” for example)

-o- makes it a noun

-as is a present tense verb

-j- makes it plural

-a- in an adjective

-it- shows that something has been done to something. “Vunda” would be “hurtful,” and “vundita” is “hurt” or “injured”

-n indicates the direction of the action, so which person is the one being hurt and which one is doing the hurting, sentence structure is a little flexible in Esperanto so “homojn vundas vunditaj homoj” in essentially the same sentence as the original, it would probably be understood more like “people are hurt by hurt people,” and if you move the n around to make it “vunditajn homojn vundas homoj” it would be “hurt people are hurt by people”)

So without those vowels at the end of nouns and adjectives, it gets hard to add the j, n, and other suffixes on

And you can kind of play around with those and other suffixes. “Vundo” would be an injury, -e is adverbs, so “vunde” would be something like “hurtfully” or “injuriously,” “vundito” would be a person or thing that has been hurt, “homa” would be an adjective describing something as being human-like, “homas” would theoretically be a verb meaning something like “personing,” (which feels like it pulls from the same millennial slang dictionary as “adulting”) etc.

In a way it’s almost like someone built a language after really enjoying the Calvin and Hobbes strip about how “verbing weirds language”

Also, now that I’m thinking about it, “dolor-” might be more appropriate than “vund-” it’s sort of the difference of being “in pain” vs being “injured.” But that’s sort of in the realm of poetic license and word choice, and it’s kind of cool that I’m at the point where I can start thinking about that kind of thing. I’m too lazy to go back and change what I wrote so I’m leaving it as-is, it illustrates my point well enough.

I used to read a lot, but I lost my love of reading somewhere in high-school/college. Before then I always had a book going, often 2 or 3 at a time. My high school, however pushed reading really hard to the point that certain math classes even assigned books, which left me without enough time to read my own books and just kind of burned me out on reading and I’ve struggled to get back into it. I occasionally manage to get into it for a bit but inevitably fall off of it somewhere after a while.

I started making my way through the dune books a couple years ago. I made it up to God emperor, and stalled out. I was enjoying, but it’s the kind of book I really need to really dedicate some time to reading through it. So that’s been on the back burner for a while. Probably need to restart it when I get back to it. Chunking my way through it a couple pages at a time on my downtime at work like I tend to do isn’t gonna cut it for this one.

I had just started reading The Road before the pandemic, and that just had the wrong vibes for me at that time. Was really enjoying it until I suddenly couldn’t buy toilet paper, then it was all hitting a little too close to home. Haven’t picked that back up yet, but definitely intend to.

I’m slowly working my way through an Esperanto translation of Treasure Island, I’m far from fluent, so that’s slow going but I’m making progress. I’ve seen and loved just about every adaptation of the book, the 1950 movie was a pretty important cornerstone of my childhood and started a lifelong love of pirates, but somehow I never read the book, so I’m killing 2 birds with 1 stone reading the book and working on my Esperanto.

I’m starting to get into Warhammer 40k, so while I save up a bit to start buying and painting minis I’ve started reading some of the books. Decided to start with the Horus Heresy series. I’m currently on the second book, I’m probably not going to read all 60 or so books in this series because I can already tell there’s some definite quality differences between the different authors involved. This seems like it’s gonna be a good fit for me though, there’s a ton of 40k books so there’s always going to be something for me to have lined up as my next book, but they’re light enough reads that I’m not going to burn myself out on them.

Some glow in the dark chemicals are called phosphors, and while they’re named after phosphorus, they usually do not contain any phosphorus, zinc sulfide for example. These are the kinds of things you might find on a watch face or stickers or whatever that need to absorb light from some other source first.

To make it even more confusing, phosphorus isn’t actually phosphorescent, its glow is from chemiluminescence, the result of a chemical reaction.

And for what it’s worth, stuff that glows under a black light is fluorescent.

I don’t think phosphorus has ever been used for glowing tattoos, and if it was I’m pretty sure no one is still using it. We’re well outside of my realm of expertise, but it should also be considered that how a chemical enters your body can make a difference in how toxic it is too, there’s a whole lot of chemistry at work in your body, and ingesting something and absorbing it through digestion isn’t necessarily going to have the same effect as absorbing it through your skin, there’s a reason different medications have to be taken oral, allowed to dissolve under your tongue, given as a suppository, intravenously, intramuscularly, subdermally, etc. that said, I’m pretty sure phosphorus is bad no matter how you put it into someone’s body.

An independent artist probably isn’t going to have an employer-sponsored retirement account like a 401k or a pension, etc. like many of us with “normal” jobs have, and are counting on to help our spouses, children, or other dependants should we die before them. Allowing them to retain the rights to an artists work for after death seems to me like it would help fill that same kind of role and also provides them a little protection, since not all artists are wildly successful and may not have been able to save much or anything for retirement/funeral expenses, etc. on their own. I don’t think it needs to last their whole life, their kid could potentially live 100 years which seems excessive and against the spirit of allowing things to go into the public domain, but I think seeing them into adulthood is fair.

Edit: I’m personally contributing to a pension at my job, my wife has never worked there but she still gets to collect that pension after I die, that’s a big part of our collective retirement plans. If we had kids, I’d want to make sure those kids are being provided for out of that pension at least until they’re old enough to live on their own. I think artists would also like to have that kind of safety net for their loved ones after they die.