booly
@booly@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
They’re killing the middle class though
Some schools might be, but not places like Chicago or Harvard. At least not through their tuition policies. They give financial aid to those up to a pretty high income threshold.
UChicago, for example, gives free tuition to anyone who is the first in their family to attend college, or makes less than $125k a year. Harvard, as I mentioned, essentially gives free tuition up to $150k. MIT’s threshold is $200k. Families in these income ranges are doing pretty well for themselves.
And then when students graduate from these schools they have a pretty easy path to being rich themselves. The degree, the connections, and possibly the education itself provided a pathway towards six figure jobs, maybe $200k+, before the age of 30.
So no, I think these schools are a pretty good value proposition for even the middle class. Upper middle class has to pay the highest percentage of their own income, but it’s still worth the cost for them.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
All the schools rip off the rich to subsidize the middle class. You’re essentially subsidizing a bunch of students who are paying close to nothing.m, because you can afford $70k tuition.
As another example, Harvard is free for anyone whose family makes less than $85k per year. Not just the tuition ($56k per year), but also the housing (worth $13k), food ($8k), health insurance ($1600), books, and a modest living stipend designed to cover things like a computer, commuting/travel, other expenses.
And those who make up to $150k per year are capped at 10% of their income to pay for all that. In the end, the average cost of Harvard for the typical student is about $15,000 per year including housing and food.
In other words, attending Harvard is cheaper than not attending school for anyone whose families make less than $150k, which is basically 75% of the nation. So if you’re actually paying full tuition, you’re probably pretty rich.
- Comment on We need a new Amazon 4 days ago:
I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.
One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.
The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.
- Comment on Desks 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, a nuclear blast is gonna be totally deadly within a particular radius, no matter what you do. And then at some larger radius, everything outside that radius will be safe, regardless of what you do. So the area in between is going to be the area where the response can make a difference.
And as you mention, the area of the “can actually make a difference” zone is much larger than the “dead-no-matter-what” zone, because it scales by the square of the distance. So if the outer safe radius is twice the inner death radius, the area of the in between zone is gonna be about 3 times the size of the death zone (π(2r)^2 - πr^2 = 3πr). If it’s 3 times the radius, it’ll be 8 times the area.
- Comment on conditional probability 2 weeks ago:
There’s no legitimate reason to intentionally take losses (or refuse to take revenue) for tax reasons, though.
If you lose $1000 and get a tax benefit worth $200 on those losses, it’s still a net loss of $800, so you should rather get at least some money back. Getting $500 back might mean that you lose $500 and then get $100 back in tax benefits, so that your net loss is $400 instead. That’s an improvement over losing $800, so it’s worth doing.
More likely, the contracts around the movie had them needing to pay rightsholders, actors/writers/directors, and producers based on certain formulas on the gross revenue, or would be contractually obligated to spend a minimum on marketing and promotion if there was going to be a release, etc.
Taxes just alleviate the degree of losses (or reduce the amount of profit), which can change behavior around risk taking, but it wouldn’t make sense to abandon a finished movie solely for tax reasons.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Well, efficiently, at least.
You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you’re gonna lose a lot of energy that way.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Nuclear gets more expensive. That’s worse.
- Comment on 1+1= 2 weeks ago:
Also, Relevant Username?
Probably. I don’t even know how I came up with this, but I do love me some logic.
- Comment on 1+1= 2 weeks ago:
Sometimes 1+1 is 2, like when you’re counting stuff.
Sometimes 1+1 is 1, like when you just need a Boolean indicator of whether something is true. Pressing the elevator button multiple times should behave the same way as pressing the elevator button once. Planning out a delivery route requires a stop at every place with at least one item to be delivered, but the route itself doesn’t change when a second or third item is added to that stop.
Sometimes 1+1 is 0, like when dealing with certain types of rotations, toggle switches, etc. Doing a 180° rotation twice is the same as doing it zero times. Same with doing a reflection transformation twice.
A good engineer understands the scope of what they’re doing, and its limits.
- Comment on I live in the green part 2 weeks ago:
That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.
There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.
And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).
- Comment on I live in the green part 2 weeks ago:
Altitude is an appetite suppressant.
The trend of altitude being inversely correlated with obesity rates is really obvious from county-level data. That trend persists across multiple countries, but the specific correlation varies from country to country, in a way that suggests that rich countries have a stronger inverse correlation between altitude and obesity.
- Comment on BACK IT UP 3 weeks ago:
Oh, he knows. They took him on an airplane and made him eat food he had just called “poison” for a photo shoot.
He couldn’t say no, because of the implication.
- Comment on Whelp 1 month ago:
Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.
And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.
I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).
- Comment on Whelp 1 month ago:
The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.
There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.
There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.
- Comment on Whelp 1 month ago:
I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.
Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.
By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.
In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?
- Comment on You're not you when you're dooming. 2 months ago:
You could put Wendy’s, Walmart, Northrup Grumman, Tyson, Bank of America, whatever, into this, and just change the last line a little bit, and I still would not be able to determine if its satire or not.
I read this as an oblique reference to the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. It’s a bit of a reach, but it works.
Corporate Advertisement in general is almost completely stylistically played out
It’s like any other thing with fashion or styles. Trends come and go, different eras have distinct markers, later eras may intentionally evoke references or tributes to earlier eras, or other contemporary trends in other fields.
- Comment on Cheeky 2 months ago:
Teeth can need work from physical trauma, too. Getting hit in the head while hunting or fighting or just hiking might cause a cracked tooth, which can be deadly in the absence of dental care. Or just while eating, sometimes a stray rock or bone fragment or shell might cause an issue.
Lots of other species can regrow teeth in adulthood, even a handful of other mammals. All sorts of animals can have tooth problems in the wild, so I wouldn’t assume that prehistoric humans were exempt from that general danger.
- Comment on You're not you when you're dooming. 2 months ago:
The sign of a successful ad campaign is when the campaign itself gets satirized to continue to build on brand awareness.
- Comment on Cheeky 2 months ago:
- Comment on Cambrian Park!!! 2 months ago:
At this price point, he can hit.
- Comment on Anon finally touches grass 2 months ago:
The ifunny watermark really tips this over the edge, comedically.
- Comment on Anon browses ancient memes 2 months ago:
Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn’t as funny as it was in 2011.
Which I’d say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn’t really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.
For mainstream culture, there’s still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.
Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.
- Comment on Anon is straight 2 months ago:
Hobosexual
- Comment on What a musical genius 2 months ago:
Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?
- Comment on Dress Codes 2 months ago:
Dammit for the last time you can’t wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor’s office.
- Comment on reDUcTIon iS gAIn 2 months ago:
What in the name of waluigi is this
- Comment on Anon plays Overwatch 2 months ago:
I didn’t know until this thread that this character is from Overwatch or that there is apparently a lot of porn of her. I only knew it as a random meme format.
- Comment on Empires fall 2 months ago:
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.
Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).
- Comment on In honor of the start spooky season (yay!), I have a question about an apparently beloved spooky meme/skit. What about "David S. Pumpkins" is so funny? 2 months ago:
It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.
This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.
The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.
In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.
- Comment on Anon has a discord gf 2 months ago:
It’s definitely Viet Cong.