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deo

@ deo @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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0
Comments
100
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

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  • Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.

  • To Fight ‘Shrinkflation’ France Will Force Retailers to Warn Shoppers: Merchants will be required to put signs in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding price cut

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  • or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new "jumbo size" that's as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the "standard" size.

  • It is truly magic

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  • It's not about size. It's the fact that the United States of America has the word "America" in it. And I don't refer to the US as "America" (unless I'm being cheeky, though in those cases, I spell it 'Murica), but I do refer to people from the US as "American".

    And I know this is all kinda pedantic. I just think it's fun to talk about words. I get the feeling you read some snark into my pervious comment, but that really wasn't my goal.

  • It is truly magic

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  • Ok. I get it. There are people in the Americas that are not from the US. But do you call people from the United Mexican States "Unitied Mexican Stateans"? No, that sounds ridiculous. I think that it's silly anyway to call everyone from either Americas "American" anyway; they are two different continents! "North American" or "South American" would be better, if you must get so broad with your adjectives (but really, continent-wide generalizations of people are rarely useful anyway). Sorry for the rant.

  • Do you believe in Aliens?

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  • While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn't any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

    Although, the universe isn't just big -- it's old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it's possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

  • TIL there is no original TI-84 as the TI-84 Plus was an upgrade (like iPhone 14 to 13) to the TI-83 Plus

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  • Some kid in middle school put mario on my TI-83. The buttons were not ergonomic at all, but it was cool. I also wrote my first ever script on the thing; it solved the quadratic equation.

  • Plastic tea bags

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  • I agree that it's nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts -- i'm gonna start doing that. I wish we'd do the per 100g thing, but we don't which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don't always tell the whole story, especially if your country's regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.

  • Plastic tea bags

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  • Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they're mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren't required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.

  • Republican lawmakers in almost a dozen states want to prop up coal plants that face closure amid a boom in renewable energy and a federal crackdown on power plant pollution.

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  • i honestly think that would work...

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • I'd totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i'd spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I'm still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don't care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

    I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren't getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

    I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can't get that at Goodwill!

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills... Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn't there like it is in landfills since there's so much poop to eat, haha.

    Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we're at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

    I'm actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I'm a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug -- so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it's much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.

  • Important PSA

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  • Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I'm trying to draw here?

    And I already admitted that I don't know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • I certainly wasn't intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it's just that the marketing push to conflate "clean" with "green" has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we're running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we're currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that...).

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • I'm in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • best case, you're releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you're also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.

  • Important PSA

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  • I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn't mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one's income and wealth.

    IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we're diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?

  • Important PSA

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    1. stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it's generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you're moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn't).
    2. You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i'm a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don't have to give a shit.

    Edit: for #2, let's use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the "value" of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?

  • Important PSA

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  • if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren't necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables -- like how willing they are to drive dangerously -- remain equal, then the point still stands).

  • xkcd #2875: 2024

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  • Huh. "Elected twice", not "served two terms"... So, even if the insurrectionist ban doesn't pan out, Trump still has to concede that he lost the 2020 election to run again.