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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.

    Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.

    I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.

    But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.

    Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad


  • Yea basically the main contamination issue is that radioactive substances were spread around. Contamination of the surrounding area isn’t the only issue we have to deal with, nor is it the most serious, but it is generally is the most costly remediate.

    The contamination problem is caused by radioactive matter spewed into the air and settling on the trees, buildings, ground etc… in the surrounding area.

    The main remediation strategy is to remove everything in the surrounding area including the top ~3 ft or so of soil of the and haul it off to an underground landfill to slowly decay for at least a few hundred years safely separated from humans.



  • I think I have you slightly beat… mine was an Apple II+, circa late 1981, with a disk drive, and a monochrome green screen monitor.

    First cell phone was around 1997. Though I honestly don’t remember what it was. I recall having a Nokia model from before they made that indestructible model in all the memes, as well as a Kyocera one that I could connect to a laptop and have wireless dial up internet at some abysmal speed like 20 kbps. (0.02 mbps). I had at least two more phones, including a Treo 650 “smartphone” before getting my first iPhone, a 3G. I’m on my sixth iPhone now.


  • The pro-lifers that think there should just be an exceptions when mother’s life is at risk need to also hear that the Texas law already has an exemption for when a doctor uses their “reasonable medical judgment” that the life of the mother is at risk or the pregnancy poses “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

    All pregnancies are a risk to the mother’s life, anytime a doctor performs an abortion in Texas they risk losing their license, and possibly even prison time. Which is why we have these case of mothers with unviable pregnancies that aren’t terminated until they’re almost dead.

    If you care about life, why on earth would you support a law that takes informed medical decisions away from doctors and their patients to put it in the hands of lawyers and lawmakers?



  • Lived in a house that had a heat pump with resistive electric heat as a backup in Canada. Never noticed a significant difference between that and other houses I’ve lived in that had natural gas furnaces.

    Aux heat would kick whenever it was below about -5°C. That house would be about 20 years old now and had decent insulation for the location and age. It never really felt like the furnace struggled to keep the house warm, or was running all the time.

    Cost wise it didn’t seem significantly better or worse than natural gas. It was definitely using more juice in the winter when there was a cold snap, but it wasn’t crazy amounts. The electric bill was actually highest in the summer when the heat pump was cooling.


  • It’s ridiculously unusual for a board to actually fire a CEO. Usually if the board thinks a new CEO is needed, even if the CEO doesn’t agree with the decision, there’s a transition plan announced the CEO “stepping down”, or “steps aside”, of the “next phase of growth” or whatever. It has a massive positive spin on it and the departing CEO is paid a ridiculous severance to go along with the plan publicly.

    It’s very negative press to have to outright fire a CEO. Especially in a case like this when the CEO saw the company through the kind of growth that every startup has wet dreams about.

    Something huge happened, and the world is speculating rampantly about what that was.


  • Climate change isn’t caused by just using fossil fuels to make a product, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gasses, (primarily carbon dioxide and methane), into the environment.

    Asphalt is a problematic material, but not so much because it’s made from oil. It’s problematic because we burn fossil fuels to harvest the raw crude and to generate the energy needed to refine crude into asphalt. The carbon in the asphalt itself remains sequestered there and doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect as long as it isn’t burned later.

    If we figured out how to extract crude and generate the vast amount of energy needed to manufacture asphalt without actually burning fossil fuels we’d eliminate the vast majority of asphalt’s impact on climate change.

    In fact it’s been shown in a lab that it’s possible to make asphalt from CO2. It’s currently cost prohibitive to do so, but in theory asphalt could be part of the solution to climate change.

    Now Asphalt does have other environmental issues, like leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water table and the fact that it’s usually black which absorbs more the sun’s radiation than almost anything else which would reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. But those problems aren’t necessarily solved by using non-petroleum based bioasphault, nor are they unsolvable with bitumen based asphalt.

    About 20% of a barrel of oil gets made into products like plastics or foam, that’s not what’s causing climate change. What causing climate change is the 80% that gets refined and burned for cheep energy. So it’s less “Just stop oil” and more “Just stop burning oil”