booly

@booly@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill Gates Bought His Daughter A $16 Million Horse Farm As A Graduation Gift — But Ex-Wife Melinda Says The Kids Were Raised Very 'Middle Class'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it might be public relations, but the malaria nets and polio vaccines and HIV treatments and guinea work eradication did actually save millions of lives.

  It’s one thing to argue that doing good doesn’t make up for doing bad, but it’s another thing to refuse to acknowledge the good at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.

  And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That’s an incentive for fraud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fintech founder charged with fraud after 'AI' shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it’s not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Massive X data leak affects over 200 million users.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn’t have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn’t really a helpful argument to make today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nearly half of U.S. adults

  Half of LLM users (49%)

  No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re relying too heavily on your anecdotal experience here. Maybe you’ve never seen a gun fired in anger, but there are about 13,000 gun homicides per year.

  Plus, the nature of gatherings mean that a very small number of events can have many witnesses, especially if defined to include people who heard gunshots.

  Take the most extreme example, the 2017 Vegas shooting, the single worst mass shooting event in American history. There were people killed and injured in the event. Under anyone’s definition that was a mass shooting.

  There were 22,000 attendees at that music festival. How many staff, crew, contractors, vendors, performance artists and their own staffs? How many cops and first responders were there? How many were in the 3200-room hotel and casino who had to be evacuated during the response? How many people heard gunshots in the open air, or saw muzzle flashes from the hotel room? 50,000?

  Same with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Lots of people were within hearing range of the shots.

  These types of events have a lot of people present. If 4 people are dying from a shooting, what’s the average number of people wounded? How many are present?

  The math is somewhat counterintuitive, and can explain a lot of the high number.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI nabs worker at DVD company for ripping prerelease blockbusters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People generally aren’t sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it’s not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t know eggs come in metric outside of the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chicago keeps its New Year's resolution: All city buildings now use 100 percent clean power⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes it’s hard to explain negative numbers in real world contexts, but credits are real impact to total coal/gas demand.

  If the credits are used to fund someone else buying renewable energy in lieu of fossil fuels, then the impact is that fewer fossil fuels are consumed.

  So if I pay someone $10 to buy solar energy instead of coal they were otherwise going to buy, while I buy that same amount of coal, then the net effect is zero additional demand for coal. You can say that it’s just an accounting exercise, but the real world effect is actually real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BACK IT UP⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, he knows. They took him on an airplane and made him eat food he had just called “poison” for a photo shoot.

  He couldn’t say no, because of the implication.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

  The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

  Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

  Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

  There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

  There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

  I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Singapore Approves 2,600-Mile Undersea Cable to Import Solar Energy from Australia⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  High voltage DC lines lose about 3% per 1000km, so this project with 4300km of lines could theoretically be set up to lose 12% in losses. There’s also some experimentation with ultra high voltages that would be more efficient, but probably more complex to engineer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Energy-Generating Floors to Power Tokyo Subways⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn’t enough.

  Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.

  There’s an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.

  A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you’d need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Energy-Generating Floors to Power Tokyo Subways⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The numbers don’t make any sense.

  A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.

  A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That’s not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.

  And of course it wouldn’t come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people’s biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. approves mega geothermal energy project in Utah⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.

  They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.

  In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.

  Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.

  Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.

  So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What a musical genius⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dress Codes⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dammit for the last time you can’t wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor’s office.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unions are legal in all occupations.

  One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

  There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

  But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨reDUcTIon iS gAIn⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What in the name of waluigi is this