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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Check engine light? That’s fine, if it goes wrong it’s just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

    Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That’s a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

    Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
    If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?




  • Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

    High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

    Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
    Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

    A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

    Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

    Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
    That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
    For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
    Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

    We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
    Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

    All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.


  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.


  • For the most part it’s not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
    It’s an engine for producing text that’s most like the text it’s seen before, or for telling you what text it’s seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

    When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
    This is kinda nifty and I’ve actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

    Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
    Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

    I’ve seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn’t doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as “wrong”.






  • I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

    If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

    You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

    You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.


  • The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
    You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

    Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

    The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

    You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
    Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
    When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

    It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.



  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.




  • I have never felt so old.

    Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren’t home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
    You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by “far away” I mean roughly 50 miles.

    It’s not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
    If you know an address, it’s pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

    As an example, here’s the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it’s really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you’ll find something pretty fast.


  • Most voters don’t have a business and never will.

    The value of a net new business is that it creates more jobs and economic activity.
    Most people benefit from more jobs to either work at or drive up labor demand.
    Per that school of economic thought, incentivizing a new business adds more activity to the market and more opportunity for people to find ways to innovate, provide value and become profitable.
    Giving money to an existing struggling business is subsidizing a businesses that’s already demonstrated that it’s not working.

    However, we’re both putting too much into it. The goal is to say $50k for small business, because people like a business friendly atmosphere.
    Trump gets credit for giving tax cuts to businesses for stock buyback, which only helps investors. The goal is to court people who want pro business policies without literal handouts to corporations.



  • In isolation it’s not great, but in conjunction with your own advocate talking about you not following a doctor’s orders? It doesn’t bolster confidence that the individual would follow doctors orders in the future.

    It means she hasn’t been able to quit drinking!

    Yes, that’s exactly the point. It’s quite unlikely her medical troubles started when she was hospitalized.
    A history of not following medical advice casts doubt about a future of following medical advice.

    Yes, addiction is a disease that the individual may lack the ability to control. That doesn’t change that it’s a risk factor for non-compliance that’s absent in others who need the transplant.