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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Parachute effectiveness is a very reasonable thing to study, it’s pretty important to know how one parachute design performs compared to other designs and the obvious baseline is no parachute. A lot of things which appear to be self-evident have been extensively studied, generally you don’t want to just assume you know how something works.

    Though throwing people out of a plane at altitude with no parachute probably isn’t the most ethical way to study parachute effectiveness.


  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).




  • There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.

    Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.

    So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.



  • It’s possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn’t consider that “highly trustworthy”.

    Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
    “Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting”
    “Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead”

    Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources “highly trustworthy”?





  • Bit of a misleading title, I’ve not watched the video but based on the video description and article they cite (also written by them, I think?) it should read “95% of Deaths from Extremism [in the past decade] in the U.S. are [Committed by] Far-Right”. The title as it is now suggests 95% of people killed were far-right, not that 95% of people killed were killed by far right.

    Personally I’d swap “are” for “were” too. Present tense is a bit of an odd choice since it’s data from the past, for obvious reasons.


  • I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

    See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

    You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

    Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

    --- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
    611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms
    

    It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

    I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.


  • So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

    The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.