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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Quick counter: lower kelvin lights are terrible for color reproduction. Pure sunlight is around 5000K, and has a CRI (color rendering index) of 100. Switching to warmer (lower kelvin) lights is going to also alter your CRI, and will change the way that you perceive colors. If you need high color discrimination, that’s going to be bad.

    For outdoor lights, in most cases that’s not a problem.

    Usually. In most cases, you aren’t going to notice just how much the colors have shifted, because your brain automatically adjusts. Youre perception of color is usually how colors appear relative to other things; you will see a red as red because your brain is comparing it to other objects with a known color. OTOH, if you’re taking photos under poor lighting conditions, you’ll see a significant shift in color. If you’ve ever taken film photos under fluorescent lights, you’d see that everything looked sharply green, when you don’t perceive them as being green at that moment. (Digital cameras often make color adjustments, and the sensors are often not as sensitive as film can be.)

    Going to an extreme, if you use a red filter on a light source, all colors are going to end up looking brown and grey; switching to red lights does the best at minimizing light pollution and loss of night vision, but at the cost of most color information. That’s not bad, just a thing to consider.


  • First: How do you reconcile that view with the idea that animals also experience the world as people do with the idea that animals kill and eat other animals? Bears, for instance, are roughly as intelligent as a kindergartener, and yet happily kill and eat any other animals that they can. Pigs and crows are also omnivorous, and will eat any source of meat that they come across. They can all likewise avoid killing if they choose, yet they don’t. Are they immoral? Or does morality only apply to humans? (Even animals that we traditionally think of as herbivorous are opportunistic meat eaters.)

    Second: What would you propose replacing animal products with, when there are no alternatives that function as well? What about when the alternative products also cause greater environmental harms?

    Third: So you would not have a problem with, for instance, hunting and eating invasive species, since those species cause more harm to existing ecosystems than not eradicating them would? What about when those invasive species are also highly intelligent, e.g. feral pigs? Or is it better to let them wreck existing ecosystems so that humans aren’t causing harm? To drill down on that further, should humans allow harm to happen by failing to act, or should we cause harm to prevent greater harm?

    Fourth: “Exploiting” is such an interesting claim. Vegans are typically opposed to honey, since they view it as an exploitative product. Are you aware that without commercial apiaries, agriculture would collapse? That is, without exploiting honey bees, we are not capable of pollinating crops?

    Would you agree, given that all food production for humans causes environmental harm, that the only rational approach to eliminate that harm is the eradication of humanity?


  • …And how exactly do you think people are going to be able to eat meat otherwise? Or have dairy, eggs, wool, etc.? Do you think that people should e.g., raise chickens in the city?

    And that’s ignoring the small obligate carnivores that make up most of the pets in the world.

    Hey, I’d rather hunt my own food too, but we no longer live in tribal or feudal societies where you can reasonably expect to engage in animal husbandry yourself.


  • “Truth” is a matter of conclusions and meaning, not of facts. Factual information would be something like–and this is an intentionally racist argument–53% of the murder arrests in the US come from a racial group that makes up 14% of the population. This is a fact, and it can be clearly seen in FBI statistics. But your conclusions from that fact–what that fact means–that’s the point of rhetoric and logic. Faulty logic would make multiple leaps and say, well, obvs. this means that black people are more prone to commit murder. A more logically sound approach would look at things like whether there where different patterns in law enforcement based on racial groups, what factors were leading to murder rates in racial groups and whether those factors were present across all demographics, and so on.



  • ‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

    …Which I agree with. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don’t give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don’t want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it’s their own neighborhood.

    I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn’t rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted… :(


  • It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don’t make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

    This is compounded by urban planning that doesn’t prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands–so that wealthy communities can’t prevent high-density housing–you aren’t ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that’s why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn’t being built.)




  • If we extend this thought experiment to a physical key, then that argument falls apart. A physical key is ‘real or physical evidence’, while a password (and apparently combinations?) ends up being considered ‘testimonial’, despite both serving the same function. While I may not be required to provide testimony against myself, I can be compelled to provide real of physical evidence. If, for instance, I have committed tax fraud, and my accountant has already told the IRS as much, but I have the only copies of the tax documents encrypted, I can be compelled to decrypt them, because the ‘testimonial’ value of the password is negligible since the gov’t already knows that I have the fraudulent documents. But if they can’t already demonstrate that they know what–roughly–the real evidence that’s encrypted is, then no password for cops.

    This seems inconsistent to me, since a password and a physical key serve the same function.


  • As far as the US goes, that’s incorrect. The issue is a 1A issue, not a 5A issue.

    tl;dr - you are required to provide keys, combinations, fingerprints, etc. when there’s a warrant. You might not be required to provide passwords.

    Let’s say cops have a search warrant for your house, and you have a safe in your house that they think the evidence of the crime they’re investigating is hidden in. But it’s locked. You are obligated to unlock that safe for them, whether it’s a physical key, a combination, or a fingerprint. If you refuse, you can be compelled, and can be held in contempt of court and held in jail until you comply. (Or course, in the case of a physical safe, refusing the provide the key would mean that they’d hire a security expert to destroy the safe in order to retrieve the contents. But that’s not possible with encrypted data.)

    The problem is that a password is both a key and speech. I can be compelled to provide a key, but I can’t be compelled to engage in certain speech. So far, courts have been divided on what a password is, and I don’t believe that the question has been addressed by SCOTUS yet. (Although, knowing SCOTUS, I wouldn’t expect them to be tech-savvy enough to make a good ruling.) In some cases, people that have been under court orders to provide passwords have been held in jail on contempt charges until they’ve divulged the password, even when they say that they’ve forgotten the password in question.

    Keep in mind that the people that this is often applied to are not usually people you’d want to be friends with; most of that cases I’ve seen in the news involve people that are accused of having child pornography, either uploading or downloading it, or terrorism. But obvs. revoking rights to deal with exceptionally scummy people also means that those rights get revoked for everyone else…



  • All grocery store margins are tight. Historically, grocery stores are not enormously profitable. Most of the price gouging that you’ve seen in food lately has been at the manufacturer level, not the retailer level. That’s why you don’t see a lot of price difference between substantially identical items at different stores in the same region; the same size box of Cheerios is going to have roughly identical pricing at both Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. You start seeing price differences when you go to an upscale store like Amazon’s Whole Foods (prices go up sharply), or when you’re buying in bulk at Costco or restaurant supply stores (such as Gordon Food Service). That’s also why you see self-checkouts everywhere now; once one company cuts their labor costs by introducing them, everyone has to, because otherwise they can’t remain competitive. …And then prices stabilize across the industry at roughly the same very slim margins. The company that cuts costs first sees a slight initial uptick in profit, and then competition forces them to cut their margins back again.

    At the store level, there’s not a helluva lot that can be done. The obscene profits are farther upstream.

    See this as an example. Grocery stores are making profit in volume, but not a lot of profit per item. Typical margins are 1-3% per item. That means that, if you cut off every single bit of profit that a grocery store makes, your $200 worth of groceries would cost you… $198. Maybe as little as $194. Saving you a whopping $2-6. But when you have hundreds of transactions each day, that 1-3% per transaction adds up to profitability for the store.







  • I’d need a Real Attorney to chime in, but I think that, once you’re actually in a trial, you can’t dump your client without the permission from the judge. (You also can’t intentionally stop providing your best service for any reason at all, not unless you want to be sanctioned or disbarred.) So while an attorney could insist on money up front, if the money they were paid didn’t cover the real expenses, they could still end up getting stiffed. I suppose the ‘smart’ thing to do would be to have $100M put in an escrow account, and the money can only be released from the account if both parties agree. So if Trump tries to stiff you for the bill, he’s still out the money since you don’t have to release it back to him. Kinda like what The Silk Road used to do, only even shadier, since you’d be working for Trump.