Security theater in action.

Out of the loop

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” -V for Vendetta

I used to think about governments in terms of the things I had to do for them (pay taxes, jury duty, carry my license while driving) or else what they’d do to me (fines or jail, usually). This quote helped me understand that this transaction is not one-way and that if a government fails its people then the people should hold it accountable.

Whether that’s healthy for a given person, realistically possible, or if there’s enough people who’ve been wronged to hold it accountable are different questions, of course.

Man you’re making me want to replay New Vegas but I’m not sure I have that sort of time commitment right now. But it is so good tho…

The only thing more frustrating to diagnose than a circuit that fails all the time is a circuit that fails some of the time. Trying to correct the issue becomes a lot harder if you don’t have a way to reliably reproduce the problem.

With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely. And I think if the manufacturer started cheaping out on those chips after the fact then it would be a stain on their reputation as suppliers of no longer reliable parts.

For every few cents the manufacturer might save on lowering the quality of an existing part they’re likely going to lose many more dollars on engineers no longer trusting that manufacturer to continue to provide parts they want to trust will be good when they’re producing their second 10,000 unit batch for the same circuit, or when that engineer is 5 projects down the line and needs that chip again.

Ah my bad, I guess it’s been longer than I realized since I’ve last seen the movie.

They’re making a reference to Office Space.

From what I’ve read, that’s only a story that it was based on climate temperatures in his hometown. According to the story phycist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit defined the 0 and 100 degree points of his scale as the highest and lowest temperatures regularly observed in his hometown of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, then later when he needed to recreate the 0 point of his scale he came up with a brine that stabilizes at a specific temperature.

What we do know for certain is that the brine existed, was made of water, ice, and ammonium chloride, it did indeed stabilize at 0°F, and according to a letter he wrote the scale was based on the Rømer scale, but adjusted in magnitude so he could make 32 divisions between the brine stable temperature and the freezing point of a regular water solution, then 64 divisions between that point and what he observed to be the normal human temperature. The reason for 32 and 64 divisions was that since those numbers were factors of 2, they would be easier to divide linearly between their respective upper and lower bounds.

Fahrenheit observed that using this scale water boiled at roughly 212°F then after the popularity of the Celsius scale some 50 years later redefined his scale so that it kept the original freezing point of 32, but now had 180 divisions between Fahrenheit’s boiling point. This kept his existing scales fairly accurate to the new definition (the upper bound which was 96°F was now measured to be 98.6°F and the lower bound of the brine was 0°F now measured at 4°F) and used the new convention of defining the scale by water while keeping some nice number of divisions between their points, although they are a little more arbitrary now than they were before.

Yeah in less interesting of times I would much more understand where they’re coming from. That being said in this specific context it was the quoted person (person A) not understanding why a friend of a friend (B) would no longer speak to them after learning A voted for Trump multiple times.

The subtext I was picking up from the conversation was that B (I assume) is one of many groups being specifically targeted by Trump so they refused to be in the presence of or communicate with someone who’s by proxy targeting them. A on the other hand just seems to see it all as politics and doesn’t understand what the big deal is about.

In another country or in another time I could understand but given the time and place, their confusion came across to me as showing how oblivious they were to the policies they voted for, who was going to be affected by them, and how negatively they were going to be affected by them.

On a related note: “I don’t see why you’d stop being friends with someone over politics”

Especially these days with what basic human rights have been made political, politics is probably pretty high up there on my list of reasons I’d see in why not to associate with someone.

Well I can only speak to my experience, and my experience has been that manga is fairly popular among people around my age and younger, but still far from ubiquitous. I still regularly have to explain what manga is to people my age and especially those older than myself.

Regarding kpop, the fact that my phone’s keyboard doesn’t recognize the word and the fact that I’ve never heard a kpop song on the radio much less any sort of radio station dedicated to it I feel kinda demonstrates that it’s still pretty far from mainstream.

“Manga” is the Japanese word for basically “comic”. In the English speaking communities it generally refers to Japanese comics where the primary difference is that the panels are generally read right to left whereas the text inside (if it’s been translated) is usually read in our typical left to right.

There’s more cultural differences largely stemming from how in the West (or at least my experience here in America) comics were often considered for kids or niche nerd communities, whereas in Japan it’s been more acceptable for a wider audience to read them for a longer time, but webcomics have been making the medium more accessible and thereby more acceptable for wider audiences so that stigma has been slowly being diminished.