chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on 10 hours ago:
Yes and no. There was a period of time where they were particularly bad. If you go back to some earlier eras (like the 1970s and even earlier) you can find many capacitors that are still good.
It also depends on the materials. Electrolytic capacitors naturally dry out and then fail. Many kinds of ceramic capacitors should last an extremely long time if they’re kept within a reasonable temperature range.
- Comment on YSK How to cook a perfect (hard) boiled egg 1 day ago:
The temperature of boiling water depends on your altitude. Water boils at 212F (100C) Miami but only 202F (94C) in Denver. This makes a big difference when boiling eggs. It’s why specific times for boiling eggs are so unreliable for people from different altitudes.
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 2 weeks ago:
This one is it for me. The game really does so much with so little. The reality of the game is that it is a roughly linear sequence of closed levels (with some hub levels thrown in) that feels like a cohesive, connected world. It’s absolutely incredible!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 2 weeks ago:
We have lots of wind turbines in the country near here. Sometimes it actually gets too windy for them (risking damage by pushing them above design speed limit)!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 2 weeks ago:
High quality pasture isn’t just grass. It’s a mixture of grasses and legumes such as clover and alfalfa. The pasture should be slow to bolt and mature at different times throughout the season, providing the cattle with a good forage regardless of the temperatures.
I’m aware of plants getting sunburn. I’ve seen it first hand as a gardener bringing seeds started indoors outside.
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 2 weeks ago:
Oh nice! I’ll check that out too! Thanks!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah, I’m an avid gardener. I grow stuff in the shade on purpose. It’s usually in the shade of a tree though. I would imagine a giant array of solar panels that always rotate to face the sun would cast much deeper, more solid shadows than trees do.
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 2 weeks ago:
That’s pretty amazing. I’ve never played the game but it looks pretty chill.
Sometimes I really get in the mood for chill games like Stardew Valley or NetHack! Maybe I’ll check out ETS2 sometime!
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 2 weeks ago:
Commercial driver’s licenses?
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah that makes perfect sense. I’m thinking from my area’s perspective which is the opposite: barely any sunlight at all and tons of rain/snow.
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 2 weeks ago:
How are you supposed to grow high quality, high protein pasture in the shade?
- Comment on xkcd #3161: Airspeed 2 weeks ago:
No. The comic is talking about airspeed: speed relative to the wind.
- Comment on xkcd #3161: Airspeed 2 weeks ago:
It records an air speed of 0. Isn’t that working exactly as intended?
- Comment on xkcd #3161: Airspeed 2 weeks ago:
Sure you can. Just need a pitot tube!
- Comment on Any advice for me a guy turning 18 yo old?? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on If someone evil want to murder a lot of people, couldn't they just add prions to meat and slowly infect everyone with Prion Diseases? 2 weeks ago:
The issue with prions is they’re not that contagious. An infected person is not a danger to other people. This means you need to contaminate all the meat in the food supply because you can’t rely on transmission.
- Comment on mercy merci 3 weeks ago:
Ahhh okay. I live in Canada and I frequently see spiders roaming my house when it’s well below freezing outside. I’m pretty confident they will not survive out in the snow.
- Comment on mercy merci 3 weeks ago:
House-dwelling spiders are usually adapted to life inside the house (likely cave-dwelling species). Their survival rate outside is not very good.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Conservatives like Star Trek because it promotes the values of meritocracy, hierarchy, authority, and military discipline. None of these are commonly held by people in the American left (especially not the academic left, which tend to be pretty anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian).
The people usually referred to as Republicans these days are right-wing populists. They have very little in common with the types of conservatives who loved the franchise in the 20th century. Those older conservatives are almost extinct in the Republican Party today.
- Comment on Any advice for me a guy turning 18 yo old?? 4 weeks ago:
Stay away from gambling sites. If you’ve got extra money and want to watch it grow, invest in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) with a low/no fee trading account. Stay away from meme stocks as well.
If you do invest, diversify your portfolio. SPY is very exciting but it’s heavily tied up in the AI bubble. Try to more international markets, clean energy, minerals, heavy industry. No matter what happens to the AI companies, we still need energy and resources to build stuff and keep our economy going.
Read about taxable and non taxable trading accounts in your country. Try to use those to avoid having your savings eroded by taxes. You will pay plenty of taxes on your income, so don’t worry about that!
- Comment on Australian Government gets a taste of what everyday people have to deal with in terms of data breaches as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's mobile phone number released online 4 weeks ago:
Sure you can have a unique identifier. That’s not the issue. The issue is that anyone can contact you via your phone number! This is not a problem with chat apps where people need permission to add you to their contact list. Why not have a system like that?
Same goes for credit cards. They should need to ask for permission to charge your credit card. Merely knowing your credit card info should not be enough.
- Comment on It's interesting that we have multiple appliances in the kitchen who's sole job is to turn electricity into heat. 5 weeks ago:
Oh yeah! Like soup! Love soup!
- Comment on It's interesting that we have multiple appliances in the kitchen who's sole job is to turn electricity into heat. 5 weeks ago:
They’re really moving refrigerant. It’s just that the refrigerant keeps changing temperature (heating up at one end of the journey and cooling down at the other end).
- Comment on It's interesting that we have multiple appliances in the kitchen who's sole job is to turn electricity into heat. 5 weeks ago:
And taking water out!
- Comment on One iPhone led police to gang who sent 40,000 snatched phones to China 5 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had guards armed with SMGs and full body armour guarding the shipments as they leave the factory.
Since Apple shrunk the packaging they could probably fit a million iPhones in one shipping container. Think how much that’d be worth!
- Comment on [Technology Connections] Catalytic converters are simple, but getting them to work is not [41:46] 5 weeks ago:
This video is fantastic! Alec went all out with it!
- Comment on "Valve must stop making excuses": Steam under fire for "significant price disparity for PC games," causing regional pricing that's "often 20% to 30% higher than the dollar equivalent" 1 month ago:
You a can also buy common university textbooks from India at a fraction of the price they sell for in the US. I say take your deals where you can get them!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I have that book. It has an absolute ton of practice problems. They were not very helpful for my electricity & magnetism final!
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 month ago:
The rich aren’t paying the inheritance tax because they don’t own farming capital, just a homestead on cheap land. This is an inefficient tax if it’s meant to target the rich. It’s catching family farmers (working class people) in the crossfire and driving the process of farm consolidation (corporations that own many farms and don’t pay inheritance taxes because corporations never die).
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 month ago:
Because farming is notoriously capital-intensive (the equipment costs millions of dollars) and low margin (the supplies you put into each year’s crop cost a fortune as well). This means a farmer has very little liquidity because most of their wealth is tied up on equipment and seeds and fertilizers and everything else. On top of that, there’s a huge element of climate and weather risk where an entire year’s profits can be wiped out by a few days (or sometimes a single day) of bad weather at the wrong time. Many farmers go out of business after one bad crop causes a huge loss and they can no longer afford to buy more seeds or they miss a payment on their tractor or their mortgage or whatever.
Compare with something like the restaurant business where the equipment is vastly cheaper (hundred dollar frying pan vs million dollar harvester) and so are the supplies (hundreds of dollars worth of food vs tens of thousands worth of seeds and chemicals). Restaurants are also much shorter in turnaround, as you’re generally aiming to sell out all your food the same day it arrives, whereas a farmer is waiting for their crop to grow all summer long.
And it’s really not wealth hoarding. The capital equipment (tractors, harvesters etc) costs a ton of money but depreciates in value rapidly over time and costs huge amounts in maintenance as well. Furthermore, the maintenance element for equipment can add another risk factor to your crops, as an equipment failure at the wrong time can result in a total crop loss if you’re not able to get it fixed right away.
That harvester can be sitting in the shed all year in perfectly working condition and then break down 2 minutes into harvesting this year’s crop. Unfortunately, all the other farmers are harvesting at the same time and so the harvester mechanics are overloaded with work and can’t get to yours in time to save the crop. Too bad!
Anyway, the other reason farming is different than other businesses is because farming produces the food supply that feeds everyone. Governments are acutely aware of the importance of food security and so they provide subsidies and other support programs for farmers. However, these programs can often be a double edged sword because they make it even harder or more capital intensive to get into the business (for example, by requiring new farmers to purchase quota to be allowed access to the market).
Lastly, I should point out that none of these issues matter if you’re just a rich person who wants to retire to the countryside. You can buy agricultural land cheap (far cheaper than land in the city) and you don’t need to buy any fancy equipment or quota, you just move into the farmhouse. When you pass on your inheritance to your children, the lack of capital equipment means they pay a lot less in taxes than a farmer would.