You sure got me!

See, as someone who doesn’t live in Europe, I honestly have a hard time telling which horizontal/vertical striped lines of red/white/orange/blue/black/brown/whatever, represent which countries. All I know is: that’s not the flag of France. I have no idea which country it’s for.

I also have trouble with all but a few of the country codes (the two letter notation for a country), and states by their letter codes, with few exceptions… for countries, I know like… CA is Canada, US is the USA, UK is England/United Kingdom (and I know those are two different things, but I don’t know why or how they’re different). For States I know like… NY for new York and CA for California… and like DC for Washington DC (which is different from the state of Washington).

Apart from that and maybe a few others, idfk. And yes, I did not do very well in geography class…

In any case, this joke almost went over my head and I’m still not sure whose flag that is.

Well, have you given them any reason to want to talk to you? Or are you just murdering them all slowly with your mastication?

See, if you just sat there and killed a large stack of my friends and countrymen, I wouldn’t want to talk to you either.

I’m not telling you anything you murderer!

I didn’t realize that they replaced cs:go with cs2 until I was home and noticed an update to install cs2… if it was an independent launch, that would not happen.

The only CS game I’ve played somewhat recently is cs:go, so I put two and two together (ha, pun), and groaned.

I thought valve was better than this.

Where I live, prime isn’t instant shipping. Some things, yes. A lot of things… it’s just free shipping.

We ordered some things for our house which we needed urgently (a capacitor for the air con during a heatwave) earlier this year, around spring time.

Took nearly a week to arrive despite being “prime shipping” or whatever. The shipping was free, but it was not fast.

So all that stuff about prime being fast and free shipping, is at most 50% right most of the time.

I use the clip if I can find it…

… I mean, was RIGHT HERE a second ago…

I live in Canada, we’re not any better. And for someone who lives here, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

Interesting.

“cigarette filters take years to be broken down in the open”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate

Not that I doubted you at all, I just wanted to get a bit more detail. The whole article is rather interesting in how we’ve used CA as a society and what happens to it. In some cases, according to the above, the product can be biodegraded using cellulaise and exposure to 280nm or smaller wavelengths of light to promote the process; the cellulaise is only present in very bio-active soil, which isn’t common in places where smokers will be tossing their butts, the filter is usually protected by paper wrap, so even sitting in the open where it can be bombarded with direct sunlight, there’s going to be a significant delay before any UV can reach the CA in the filter.

I’m extrapolating from the Wikipedia article for that last bit… but it’s logically sound. Between the difficulty of UV reaching the CA, plus the absence of any additional substances to aid in the degradation of the CA, it would take substantial time to degrade. Though it’s derived from either cotton or wood cellulose.

It’s fascinating stuff.

I’ve never regularly smoked cigarettes, and I’ve always had an issue with people just flicking their butts wherever they want. Now I have scientific information to support that discomfort, so thanks

I thought they were cotton. TIL.

I’m not going to argue with you on that point, I think cars are too big in the first place. With electric vehicles they can be reconfigured to ebikes or something much, much smaller. but I’m only mentioning the ICE vs EVs cost of manufacturing and how “green” they are. It’s a step in the right direction; it’s not the whole journey. Walkable cities and more compact designs of metro areas is still something that needs to be done, but it’s an entirely separate argument to the one I was making.

As someone who primarily drives because I live in a small suburb in the middle of a farm region, I’d be happy to park at the edge of a larger city and walk/bike/e-scooter/transit my way into the city. I think transit costs and the costs associated with most of the bike/e-bike/scooter services to be a bit high, given that I just drove to the city in the first place, but that’s a minor gripe among the plethora of other issues it could and would likely solve to have the city more pedestrian friendly.

Personally, given where I live, I’m more or less obligated to have a car, and if that car is a PHEV or full EV, would benefit the world overall; maybe not by a lot, but certainly more than using ICE vehicles to get around.

I agree that battery tech needs to be better. We also need to put in the work now to improve the grid so that when there’s wide scale adoption, the grid won’t collapse under the strain.

For the most part it’s a transit issue… we simply cannot move that many watts of power.

For the rest of it, and hybrids versus full electric vs bikes vs walking, that’s a much larger discussion, since not everyone will be able to adopt something more green than a highly efficient vehicle (whether hybrid or EV or otherwise)…

My main point is that they’ll argue dumb crap like manufacturing, that causes so much pollution, and say it in a way that almost seems like they think that ICE cars are better for that, somehow?

It’s like, we know it’s not “carbon neutral” or whatever… it’s just carbon massively reduced and that’s the point Carl.

Me too. I’m pretty well surrounded by nuclear and hydro-electric here in southern Ontario.

I’m entertained by the fact that everyone gets hung up on how EVs are still not totally green because the electricity comes from coal fired plants or that there’s still manufacturing emissions and stuff…

It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.

It’s like doing less harm isn’t valuable to the people arguing against it, but then again, those are probably the same people who drive their V8 truck to get groceries.

I like you kid, you’ve got grit.

That the bottom 25% of scorers in standardized tests are in the bottom quartile of the distribution, which is literally defined as the bottom 25%, but the Twitter user seems to be using that fact to justify something yet he’s literally just stating a fact?

The bottom 25% will always exist and there will always be 25% of the results contained within it.

Not sure how anyone doesn’t get it, but this Twitter screenshot exists, so there’s that.

Oh, sorry, this “x” exists. Dumb fucking name.

Born in '83, I don’t remember anyone bothering with it too much. It was all over the news and such, sure, but I don’t recall anyone I knew caring about it all that much; both adults and children.

I’m 40 now and living through all this crap has definitely taken a toll. I didn’t get into a house until last year, so I missed the cheap housing, and I’ve been significantly affected by most of this. I still live paycheque to paycheque, and I have no significant savings or retirement money put away.

I have had a pretty strange experience in life though, even compared to my peers. I dropped out of HS, then after about 5 years got my highschool equivalency, went to college, did two different two year programs in about 5 years (there’s a story there too, it should have been 3-3.5 years, ended up closer to 5), got into some disappointing jobs, unemployed for a while a couple of times for nontrivial amounts of time each time… it’s been a ride. I’m fairly stable now, though my financial situation is fairly fragile. With the new recession/inflation, it’s causing some stress and worry.

Life. Fucking life.

They don’t do $3.4b stock buy backs every year I imagine.

No… but they could give everyone a $2/hr raise, which isn’t trivial, and sustain themselves at that level for FIVE YEARS on the current excess.

Another option is to give everyone a bonus; doing the math on 3.4bn/167k workers, is around 20k each; even if they “only” gave half of that back to the workers, a $10k bonus is pretty nice and one-time. There’s no excuse…

I did mention that in my previous ramble. The connector is good, the cables that Apple used were basically trash.

I’m pro USB C all the way, but I definitely appreciated the lightning connector. It’s smaller, fewer things to go wrong with it, less delicate… so to speak… at least the female side seems to be from my experience. The male side isn’t half bad either, but the cables apple used for their USB to lightning wires was basically trash. Every time I witnessed someone with a bad iPhone charging cable, the connector was generally fine and the wire was torn to shreds.

The biggest weakness of the standard was that it was stuck on USB 2.0. Beyond that it was pretty good.

I still like USB C more, both for speed and for how ubiquitous it is; but, being fair to lightning here, the center area were the pins are is a failure point, one wrong move and it’s toast. Granted it’s nestled in there pretty good and the chances of that actually happening is pretty small, but lightning doesn’t have this issue.

Lightning is far from perfect, but they did a good job… for the time. Right now the only benefit to lightning is twofold, it’s everywhere, and the connectors basically never broke with normal use. At the time micro-B was horribly fragile. C is way better than micro-B was, but I still think that lightning has the crown for durability IMO.

With all that being said, USB C all the things. Lightning was a shining example of a better way, and hopefully we learned from that. I don’t know what comes after USB C, but I hope the improvements are significant. It will be a while before C goes anywhere though.

The poster is being sarcastic.

In all seriousness, you can have two completely independent routers operating on different channels that don’t interfere. This is how large wireless systems work. A large number of wireless access points (same basic premise as a wireless router, but with more wireless features and fewer router features), each will operate on their own frequency that won’t interfere with it’s neighboring access points. There’s a limit to how far this goes, since there’s only so many non-overlapping wireless frequencies…

The idea is to move the access points into places that are far enough apart that when you run out of non-overlapping frequencies, you can re-use a frequency that’s been used, but is in use far enough away that it won’t interfere.

The idea that adding more radios will boost your signal… that’s valid, but the radios need to be very carefully managed to ensure that everything is working in a way where that goal is achieved. This is the foundation of how beamforming works. Each wireless interface is a set of radios; you’ll see this advertised as something along the lines of 3x3 or 2x2, on spec sheets. More is better, but both sender and reciever needs the same number to get the full effect. Most cell phones and laptops are 1x1 or 2x2… how this makes beamforming happen is that one will transmit slightly before the other, and because of the difference in their placement the two signals create what’s called “constructive interference” and they effectively combine into a stronger signal.

The big trick to get all this working with wifi, is that all the radios are effectively on the same chip. They’re about as closely bonded as they can be. Trying to do this with two different radios in two different devices is nigh impossible. It’s certainly impractical.