• 0 Posts
  • 90 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle







  • Their names are on the titles, they own the homes. Their banks - the mortgage lenders - hold a rights to a lien placed on the property, but they have no title to the property unless they enforce the terms of their lending contract in the event of default.

    The owners making 500k may very well be just a few months from foreclosure if they lose their job, but they likely have at least 20% (likely much more unless they bought at a premium two years ago) equity and can probably salvage at least half - even after fees - if they were to become “destitute” and undertook a regular sale of the property. 10% of a million dollars (or more), for most of the country, is still a healthy sum of money.




  • I think it doesn’t go far enough. Straight up, no one should be permitted to create or transmit the likeness of anyone [prior to, say, 20 years following their death] without their explicit, written permission. Make the fine $1,000,000 or 10% of the offender’s net worth, whichever is greater; same penalty and corporate revocation for any corporation involved. Everyone involved from the prompt writer to the work-for-hire people should be liable for the full penalty. I can’t think of a valid, non-entertainment (parody/humor), reason for non-consensual impersonation - and using it for humor or parody is a slippery slope to propaganda weaponization. There is no baby in this tub of bathwater.



  • Based on videos from one of the major lava-themed entertainment venues who has been posting updates for two months, the “barriers” for Grindavik were barely started, with work only beginning some time after January 4th or 5th. The primary focus of the public work was in building the barriers to protect the regional power plant to the east of the fissures (and hot springs resort area just east and north the power plant). IIRC, those barriers took a month to construct.

    The subsurface dam/inclusion runs pretty much directly under Grindavik, so if an active eruption opens along the southern edge of the magma inclusion there will be no way to prevent damage to those houses adjacent.

    Disc: I’m neither a seismologist nor a volcanologist, but I’ve seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, and I was in Grindavik in October.



  • Solid fuel for rockets burns relatively slowly at 1 atm and in solid form, much like a flare, though still faster than I would expect you’d want for a hot pot unless these were a hybrid (so no oxidizer in the pellets, just a solid fuel source like modified PVC, with a separate oxidizer like nitrous oxide). The water was replacing the jet fuel, which - assuming it was similar to Jet A - is basically kerosene. Though I’d be worried what modifiers or stabilizers were used for a green flame if I were cooking over it. I’ve made green flames with boric acid and methanol for Halloween decorations (outdoor, of course), but who knows what is causing it in their fuel.


  • Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.

    Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)


  • protect the interests of American drug companies abroad

    That’s a nice sentiment, but the drug companies are voluntarily selling internationally at lower prices. There’s no “protecting the interests” drone strike we can make when the big pharma is doing the rate setting itself (negotiating, true, but still a voluntary choice). The proper fix would be to mandate that any drug that had any Federal research may not be sold in the US for more than in any other part of the world and that fee may not exceed (make up a number) 10x the production cost, with distribution not allowed to exceed 50% of the cost of the retail price of the medication and delivery not to exceed 125% of commercial shipping rates.



  • Well, since the original patties have always been 0.1lb precooked weight and the quarter pounder has always been (checks notes) 0.25lb precooked weight, I’d say shrinkflation is one thing that hasn’t come to McDs. Actual inflation? Oh, yes - $4 for a double cheese burger (with 0.2lb of beef) is straight up insane. That’s $10 for a half pound burger - nearly the same cost per ounce of burger as a Five Guys standard burger, which isn’t even in the same league.