I knew that motion sickness is triggered by frequent starts and stops and frequent turns, but even I was not aware of how big a contribution the engine vibration makes until I got to experience a ride without it.

I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don’t think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.

This is a great gotcha! I just recently learned that 700C, the “29er”, and (some) “28 inch” are all the same wheel.

To be fair, when I was little I too was guessing that “C” stands for centimeters or something metric. Now I know that “C” in “700C”, the most popular road/hybrid wheel size, stands for the third size in the French “ABCD” notation, where sizes “700A”, “700B”, and “700D” are obsolete and are no longer manufactured.

I’d love to use ISO sizes, but even if I know that I need a 40-622 wheel, there is no way to search for it on the storefront if every single seller made gross mistakes in labeling their product! I have to ignore the specs shown entirely and make educated guesses based on title alone. For example “WHEEL AL 700 FRONT ALEX AP18 QR Silver UCP” in the picture is almost certainly a 700C wheel and NOT an 18-inch wheel. The “18” in the title probably stands for 18mm rim width, which means that this wheel will fit my bike and tire, but is a bit more narrow than ideal 23mm. The sellers must be copying the title verbatim from the manufacturer, and then haphazardly filling out the specifications without knowing or understanding the actual numbers. The ISO size is not mentioned at all.

I wanted to go with this, but had to go even bigger. The largest mine truck according to the wiki is BelAZ 75710 (as seen in the picture) which has “59/80R63” tires that are merely 402.7cm big.

But then you have to watch Picard 😢

Can’t access the article, but wasn’t China the one most vulnerable from the Malacca Strait being a chokepoint? As in, their trade towards Europe and fuel from the Middle East being potentially threatened? How does Thailand pitching to the US make sense then? How would a Thai bypass even increase security, since both routes are in the same area and can be equally blockaded? There aren’t any problems with throughput capacity at Malacca, unlike say at the Panama Canal. Maybe it will make the travel distance slightly shorter, but is there really any way it could ever be cost-effective to offload and reload ships for a few hundred kilometers savings?

Thank you for your detailed input!

It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy.

You got me 😁. I love drawing supply-and-demand curves. Seems pretty hopeless then if to even begin to understand how to vote “correctly” you need 5 years of game theory PhD. Hearing someone say “just trust me bro, the optimal strategy is that one” is not good enough. Voting was supposed to be for the masses…

drop everything to just start suing states and protesting for voting rights

I could get onboard with ranked-choice voting. My city used IRV for our latest mayoral primary election, and even though none of my ranked candidates won, I felt extremely satisfied that at least my voice was finally being heard. When a literal police-mayor got elected (winning primary by only 7000 votes), I had the comfort of full knowledge that this was not due to any spoiler effect on my part, but solely simply due to more people voting for him. If we’d campaign for ranked-choice voting in federal elections - presidential primaries and general - we can eliminate all the above hand-wringing. The Democratic party should be totally on board with this since they could finally get the Green protest vote.

So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.

I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble.

Thank you for being aware! I’ve experienced this on github.com. I’ve tried to submit issues several times to open source projects, complete with proposed code to solve a bug, but github shadowbans my account 6 hours after creating it (because I use a VPN? a third-party email provider? do not provide a phone number? who knows). I can see the issue and pull request when logged in, but they only see a 404 on their project page even if I give them a direct link. I ended up sending them a screenshot of the issue page just to convince them this was even possible. Sad to hear gitlab does it even worse now by making phone mandatory.

the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing

If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.

The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.

Am I the only one for whom "open"subtitles.org hasn’t worked in years? I literally cannot find the download button, like in those okboomer memes. Never used the API. Switched to subscene.com and haven’t had problems since.

more evidence we need Civics back in our schools

Maybe we need more math as well - have you heard of the Ultimatum Game? Sometimes the rational strategy is to reject unfair split offers, even if that makes it a guarantee that you both get nothing.

I know traditionally the dream fantasy of book readers has been to own an expansive physical library, with shelf after shelf full of book spines, but I just could never get into it. I’m a data hoarder, not an object hoarder! All my books are digital, mandatory in plaintext DRM-free format, sorted and backed up. I find joy in the knowledge that everything I have ever read is instantly grep’able, ageless, and can fit in my pocket (on a thumbdrive) wherever I go.

I do prefer to read on e-ink as well, because the device is lighter than any book, guaranteed to fit in my pocket, can hold multiple books, and gives me control over font size. The only downside is when the battery gets old it needs more frequent recharging. A paper book will not refuse to work for lack of power!

German is perfect. Everyone will agree how to spell Schifffahrkarte the moment they hear it.

Oh I was well aware what community I was in 😁. I hate cars and exclusively ride bikes myself and here I was making a joke how I managed to get !fuck_cars of all places to downvote me for not watching fox news. All because my groupthink is not exactly identical to their groupthink (I am not the grandparent comment btw).

The secret is that karma does not matter anywhere! However, as long as the comment sorting algorithm is the way it is, I will keep believing that the downvote button is for posts that are non-constructive contributions, not for disagreement. Burying discussion is not constructive, but that’s what the algorithm will do. Maybe this is a hopeless task, but I wish that after a conversation I have learned something new, or taught someone something, not just made myself feel better.

far more maddeningly, some sites tell me that my username and password combo are incorrect when I’m using a VPN

Brb, gonna wiretap the judge’s house. It’s not a crime as long as I don’t act on the information I hear so there is no injury.