As an American, growing up I used to think so highly of Europe and their better socialist policies (I even wanted to move there), but honestly their spinelessness when dealing with dictatorships has really disillusioned me. Say what you will about the US military-industrial complex, or even how capricious our current aid situation is with Ukraine, but even when our international policy is clearly wrong or misguided, I do think we move forward with real conviction unlike Europe...
Call me delusional, but despite electing an agent of Russia the previous election cycle, I think the US still managed to give more aid to Ukraine when they needed it. Don't tell me that the EU pledged more aid than the US has after the fact. If the US didn't put its foot forward in the first place I have a real hard time believing the EU would have done anything. And yeah, maybe we shouldn't be giving Isreal weapons to bomb the living shit out of Palestinian civilians. And Europe is entirely right when they call us out on it. But since when is Europe willing to accept refugees from Palestine? Their words don't mean much to me. It's always posturing and NIMBY and hoping someone else does it while acting superior.
For the record, the fact that Trump didn't overthrow the government means that it's not a dictatorship - need I remind you that Trump was 3 years ago? And anyways, despite how horrible of a person and leader Trump is, he somehow still had better foreign policy regarding China than Europe did.
If China invades Taiwan, what will Europe do? I have a hard time they'll do anything but thank the heavens they had TSMC build a fab in Europe while conveniently waiting to see what happens: if Japan and the US are able to help Taiwan hold, they'll open the floodgates, but otherwise they'll turn the other way.
Yeah, moving forward might be the wrong way to put it. But I'm not impressed at all with bystanders that point fingers at people going the wrong way when they're at least trying. And if the world wants to literally put their money where their mouth is, maybe they should be adopting the Euro instead of the US Dollar as their world reserve currency (why, if other countries hate our capitalism so much, are they so willing to eat our shit when we print money on their dime?)
See but that's the problem. Instead of pointing out specifics and being clear you've said a whole lot of nothing and just gone back to your echo chamber. Shame on you, not for disgreeing with me, but acting holier-than-thou, walking away in arrogance with your nose held high.
Forgive my previous imprecise language, but isn't this merely a matter of semantics? I was under the impression that the major countries in Europe are socialist (or if you prefer, social democracies, hence what I meant but European "socialism"), and they drive policy in the EU. But as the top comment said, they have agency to do things on their own behalfs.
I think the reason is important. If you stick to something because you think it is the right thing to do, that is conviction. If you stick to something because you think you must continue as you have already invested effort into, that is sunk cost. The point that I'm trying to make, that perhaps I have not worded well, is that you must act with conviction, because if you do not do what you think is right, you either not do anything, or do what you think is wrong. Sure, you may be wrong at the time, and you should be open to reflection, and not be prey to sunk cost.
But coming up with convenient excuses to avoid doing what you think is inconvenient but right is not how leaders behave.
And in this context (if that is what you mean), it is definitely not evident that supporting Ukraine is a strategy that won't work.
Hence my apology for the imprecise language. I meant what you said by social democracy, not a social economic system. Anyways, if we're being pedants, there are no true socialists or capitalists in today's markets. They're all mixed-market economies.
When I say socialist (and what is more accurately social democracy), I first think of healthcare, then I think of transit, then of education, and then of utilities. These are things that the US certainly could do better.
Let me preface that I think using vehicles as a primary source of transportation inherently scales poorly, and you can easily argue this by looking at how much a road costs versus a rail and how much mass you need to move per person on car versus train.
That being said, I really hate this article because it relies on anecdotes from various people and opinions without making any effort at citing relevant statistics. It literally cites the TOTAL number of pedestrian deaths to vehicles in 2022. I tried to find some statistics on right turn on red light, but all I could find were 20 year old or older studies, most of which actually concluded that right turn on red doesn't really account for a large number of pedestrian injuries and deaths. Like this one, for instance, which claims that right turning on green can also result in pedestrian accidents which could result in much more severe injuries (I can see how this might be true but there's no evidence to back this up.)
It's interesting for me to look at this from a utilitarian perspective: Surely there is a tradeoff between the amount of time wasted due to traffic increase due to right turn on red, and the time equivalent to the amount of lives lost due to RTOR (assuming RTOR results in more deaths). This of course is an incomplete/flawed way to look at things as we don't give highway collision motorists the death penalty for causing huge traffic blocks; iirc though it is how a lot of safety studies are done (look into how the statistical value of a human life is determined from highway transport administrations).
I would really appreciate if someone could chime in with some actual stats and numbers (though I doubt they're readily available) about the topic, rather than some anecdotal comments. I'm not a fan of symbolic legislation that doesn't provide real benefit (think plastic straws bullshit), and I would like to see a convincing take on whether or not this is that.
" All-way stops and, of course, roundabouts are both provably FAR safer often with no impact or a positive impact to overall congestion." This is a pretty big statement to make, and I was wondering if you could provide me the sources for this.
"The city values keeping more cars moving faster over both safety and financial responsibility."
But isn't keeping cars moving faster financially beneficial? From an energy perspective, needing to stop for every stop sign is way worse on fuel economy than going through a string of green lights and stopping every now and then. Don't get me wrong, I think using cars as a main mode of transport is incredibly stupid, but I think there must be some tradeoff between time/money/resources wasted due to traffic and time/money/resources lost due to premature deaths or poor living quality due to (non)fatal accidents.
"Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving." I don't disagree with this, but the problem is that in the US there often aren't any alternatives to cars to get around. And to be frank, I'm not gonna be walking around on the streets of LA (where I live, insert your crime-ridden US metropolitan here) unless I have good reason to. Getting hit by a car due to RTOR is the least of my worries as a pedestrian. I think a lot of change is necessary (such as locations of stores, etc) beyond safe streets to reduce the need for cars. For instance, if costs of living in the city were better, people wouldn't need to use cars to commute. Maybe it's a starting point to fixing our transportation issue but honestly I don't see it.
"A minute or two delay... actually doesn't amount to very much, and that's what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle." You say this, and it might be the case the vast majority of the time, especially if the stoplights are separated by a large distance and there aren't many cars, but traffic is a distributed problem and without seeing some sort of study that indicates this I don't buy into it. During heavy traffic, if the cars from one intersection back up into a previous intersection due to reduced throughput I can't imagine how an additional cycle is the only cost. Maybe this is just dependent on the traffic situation, because I have a natural bias to think towards traffic situations in LA (which don't necessarily represent the rest of the US).
"The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts." Can you tell me who the authors of this paper are or maybe offer me a link? I would like to read it, thank you.
"Studies on roundabouts being safer are... even more conclusive and abundant. I really can't cite just one because damn, there's so damn many."
Yeah so I'm pretty sure roundabouts are better in every way except for space. But if only getting more space would be easier, because surely we could just replace a lot of our roads with trains at that point right? I think roundabouts are a red herring because they literally don't fit in most of these intersections (they don't even have space for a left turn lane in many of the intersections I drive in). Heck, if we're talking about space-throughput tradeoffs we could just theoretically make every single intersection a graded interchange and that would provide a huge amount of throughput (but this too is a red herring).
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don't get it. If they can't sell your data and can't serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There's so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it's not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don't think it's just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.
People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn't welcome them. And then they get upset that they don't want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I'm willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren't. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don't expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.
If you aren't willing to eat ads, and you aren't willing to be the product, and you aren't willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you're entitled to content?
They're definitely still tracking their premium users, I agree. But my counterpoint is, what business, online or not, doesn't track me? If I go out and buy something at a retail store I'm gonna bet my ass I'm being tracked. If I don't want to be tracked, then I should be making sure information I consider to be sensitive is not being exposed. If there is no reasonable expectation to privacy in the public, then I think it's fit that there's no reasonable expectation to privacy when I'm surfing the internet.
If you read around you'll find (perhaps surprisingly to you) that YouTube operates at a loss. So in response to your points:
You can pay to get the ads removed. They make less money off of you when they can't serve you ads, and I'm sure they're trying to operate at less of a loss.
Alphabet is a public company, and it must release certain information about YouTube. Anyways, I'm pretty sure they aren't using the money to directly line the shareholder profits. The reality of it is that it's probably just another arm that Alphabet uses as part of its monopolistic tech deathgrip, so it's not gonna be a straightforward computation. Maybe Disney could be used as a metaphor here?
If you don't wanna pay to support that, I don't exactly blame you. But practically, I don't really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return. Either you eat ads, you pay for a subscription, or you become the product (unfortunately this last point might be true irregardless).
Perhaps YouTube gets all their content for free, but it certainly isn't free to transcode video, host it reliably, and distribute it while moderating it (given how bad Twitter is right now I'm sure they have a decent number of measures in place, even if they aren't even "good" at it). And if it was remotely easy, believe me, there would be a lot of competition in this space.
Yes, I make Alphabet x dollars richer (or really, I make YouTube operate at a slightly lesser cost) every month by paying a subscription. And actually, I'm okay with it. A tiny cut of it goes to content creators and I get a nice piece of tech. And I support the branch of Alphabet that has technology that I think is incredibly useful and beneficial. If there's a content creator that I like especially then I'll support them directly.
The reality of it is that things cannot be free. Or at least it seems that way, because we have not been able to provide a free video hosting service that doesn't take advantage of its content creators or consumers.
In a sense I agree with that piekay though. If they can't serve me targeted ads on YouTube they lose that money trying to develop technology to track me in that regard. How much money that is I guess is hard to say, since the tracking on YouTube certainly can carry over to other parts of Alphabet.
Well, the devil is in the details. People like you, who has actually figured out how to use an adblocker properly for YouTube, and me, who is willing to actually pay for YouTube premium (you're welcome for the subsidy), surely form a small proportion of the actual number of YouTube content consumers.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my view is that the majority of users just want to watch videos without having ads and they aren't willing to devote time (for adblockers) or money (for subscription services) and are completely ignorant that they are the product regardless. And those users act like they are entitled to content and that leaving YouTube is somehow significant to the big picture.
There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying....
Having personally played Rocket League, (1800 hours), Valorant (500? hours), CSGO (2000 hours), League of Legends (2000? hours) and a variety of coop multiplayer games, I can tell you that the most toxic communities tend to be the competitive ones. Something about competitive games draws out the most hardcore crowd and that crowd tends to be a lot less friendly. Maybe it's because people who play ranked games care about their ladder MMR, and the ones who are able to keep playing must have some kind of ego - you have to understand that a lot of people get fun out of winning, not from just participating in the game.
Regardless, the mechanism that rewards players is skill. And in these games, being polite, being nice to your teammates, none of it really matters if you aren't skilled. Inherently there is a pecking order because higher ranked players are better than lower ranked players. Most games don't reward direct toxicity of higher ranked players towards lower ranked players, but they don't forbid it. Smurfing, for instance, allows a player to assert their superiority over lower skilled players. A carry on a team can be significantly more toxic towards their teammates since their teammates want the MMR from a win and will be willing to put up with being bullied or harassed. Just like another commenter mentioned, players compete against each other, and you will not really be friendly with your opponents in most ranked settings. But additionally, players also rely on their teammates. I think this is where a lot of the toxicity comes from.
When your friend dies to the enemy and gets t-bagged, your teammates aren't pitying your friend for getting t-bagged. They're mentally rolling their eyes that your friend was outplayed by their opponent and that's why when you post on a forum the result is usually "git gud" and not "we should be more friendly". I don't think being toxic is positive to the health of a game. I could go into detail, but this post is already pretty long. But I want to point out, if the setting is a competitive game, merit is usually the driving factor regardless of toxicity or kindness. If you don't gain that dopamine hit out of outsmarting or beating your opponents but rather simply from playing the game or socializing with other players, you probably should not bother touching these games - you aren't the core audience for these games and you'll find more enjoyment in other settings.
For the record, if you get t-bagged in a competitive game, the recourse is to either not look at the kill cam (CS:GO lets you turn it off), or try to improve so you don't get t-bagged as often. Ragequitting, or going to complain that it should be turned off will get you nowhere. BMing your opponent is a popular thing in most competitive games, and it's part of the reward for outplaying them. In many eyes, it's not really all that different from a giant defeat screen when you lose. If you're sensitive to this kind of stuff, I think you should find more friendly communities. Coop games generally tend to be better, as do more casual games, or FFXIV if you're looking for an MMO. I would say most players (me included) consider the option to t-bag a feature and not a bug, because really the thing that upsets me the most is not getting t-bagged; it's getting outplayed by my opponent so they're able to do it in the first place.
I don't know if I would see it as a pure money grab. Pretty sure game consoles, just like inkjet printers and the like are sold with zero or near zero profit (or even at a loss). The benefit the console manufacturer gains from the platform lock-in far outweighs whatever greed they might have trying to reap gains from the hardware. 10 year old hardware is roughly 30x slower in FLOPs, so we might be looking at a desire for better games or easier software development - I for sure would not envy the developer needing to target 10 year old hardware, though it's not exactly unheard of.
That's mostly correct but I don't think it's entirely accurate. Distillation is useless at the azeotropic point but ternary mixtures are used to break the azeotrope. Once you move past the azeotrope you can continue distillation to high purity. You could also do pressure swing distillation but my guess (even though I'm not exactly a chemical engineer doing unit operations for a living) is that it wouldn't be economical. Of course, getting "100%" pure anything is really a different story...
Not that this comment is all that relevant to you, but here's a wall of text for context:
The devil is probably in the details here. My assumption is that your denatured alcohol is referring to ethanol mixed with other toxic alcohols (such as methanol).
This can't be 100% pure ethanol because it MUST contain denaturants to discourage drinking, otherwise it would not be denatured and would legally require an additional excise tax. In that case, you might find it as Everclear (190 proof or 95% or ethanol by volume at highest concentration). It can be close to 100% alcohol, of course, because methanol is an alcohol.
I HAVE seen (at least in the US) food grade USP purity ethanol for sale (with additional cost due to excise tax inclusion) that's at least 99.5% pure. I have also seen 99% purity isopropyl alcohol (IPA). My point in the reply to the original content is that it's not accurate. Distillation of binary mixtures results in azeotropes that prevent purity of more than 91% IPA (by volume) and ~95% ethanol. But there's ways around it such as adding a third solvent for a ternary mixture, salting out (shown in some chemistry demonstrations), changing the pressure of distillation, or using molecular sieves to remove water content. Alternatively, you could use freeze distillation, or even zone melting if you chose to freeze the mixture instead of boiling it. In fact, once you PASS the azeotrope, you can actually distill at standard pressure albeit what you want and don't want in the column would switch places.
Getting the last few percent of water out of it definitely costs more, but it's not something so hard that you can't find commercially available alcohol solvents at purities above the azeotropic point. I know this is the case since I've acquired them for home use and have used them in multiple lab settings before. The annoying part for those who REALLY don't want much water in the solvents is that at that point your solvents are hygroscopic and unless sealed properly or kept in a desiccated environment they're gonna tend to absorb water back toward the azeotropic point.
Ethanol is similar to IPA in solvent properties but they won't be the same. I don't have enough wet lab experience to give a good answer in this regard though. If you're able to take things apart, I've cleaned PCBs the Louis Rossmann way, which is with Branson EC solution and sonication. Drying is really the most important step there ;)
Hungary blocks €50bn of EU funding for Ukraine (www.bbc.co.uk)
Right turn on red? With pedestrian deaths rising, US cities are considering bans (apnews.com)
Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish (infosec.pub)
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
Visas and entry conditions in (North) Korea (www.pyongyang-airport.com)
Look at the map:...
(Partial rant) Why are gaming communities for multiplayer games so often filled with toxicity? Why aren't game developers doing more to stop this?
There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying....
Microsoft Next Console Coming 2028 (www.gamescensor.com)
What happened to denatured alcohol?
I’m in US-GA and I cannot find denatured alcohol locally. WTF happened? I need something 100% alcohol for cleaning electronics.