ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How exactly are people lighting Teslas on fire?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

  The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
  The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

  Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
  We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

  Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

  As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

  There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

  A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Please let’s try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word “AI”.
  Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
  This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it’s just mimicking it.
  People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it’s relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it’s easy to apply.

  There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don’t look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.”

  What I’m saying is that if they can set “$0.50 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone, they can also set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.

  That’s you. That’s what we’re talking about: why they can’t “set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5”.

  You were told it’s because of the unions contract that they can’t cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
  You then replied about how that wouldn’t work because everyone left the union so they don’t have bargaining power.
  And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don’t have a good contract, but that’s aside from the point of “a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim”.

  I’m treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can’t cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn’t stop that, in which case they can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.

  Literally the first reply I sent you.

  If you don’t know the basics of labor law and how companies are ostensibly prohibited from preventing organization, you really don’t have a lot of room to get upset when people think you don’t know stuff.

  That… is literally the thing being discussed here.

  No, it’s a nonsequitur you brought up out of nowhere. You asked why the company doesn’t just pay the union less, and when people told you replied assuming that everyone knew that all the workers left the union.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And you won’t, or can’t, respond to my point. It doesn’t matter that it’s a nonsequitur, you’re still obligated to respond to it premptively, you fool.

  Yes, if everyone leaves the union it doesn’t have power. Fucking duh. It doesn’t work that way because it’s illegal to pay people to not be in the union, since it infringes on people’s rights to collective bargaining. Which I politely said in my first reply to you when I just thought you were ignorant, rather than obstinate and rude as well.

  You just started randomly attacking me for no reason

  Crystal more. You’re the one who kicked off being angry when you found out I thought you were just genuinely ignorant, as opposed to properly stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You also didn’t take into account every person in the state being in the Union, and the company only employing union workers, and the one non-union person, the CEO, was so afraid of loosing business at his company that only makes pro-union T-shirts that he wept openly at the thought of not capitulating to the unions every demand.

  Clearly a bird has eaten most of your frontal cortex and you’ve confused the concept of negotiations with women’s freestyle swimming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point I’m fairly certain you’re just trolling, since you asked a dumb question, responded to answers with nonsense scenarios and indignation, and then responded to clarification as though your scenario were a given.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it’s not a negotiation, and “why wouldn’t the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut” is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn’t know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn’t know how bargaining worked.

  Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.

  Okay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The workplace is deducting the union dues from union workers checks automatically.

  Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don’t just lower union pay outside of negotiations.

  There’s no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you’re weirdly smug about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They can’t cut union rates since they have a contract. So they can, within reason, pay non union workers more but not lower the pay of union workers. One of the benefits of being in the union is that they can’t just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.

  There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

  It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
  Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

  Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?

  I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
  I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Least extreme biophysics phd⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, usually less than you would expect. We’re really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it’s been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.

  We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn’t get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.

  It’s how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we’re intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don’t and look at them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSLA gonna rebound. Proof:⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First it goes into free fall, then it slows its drop, but the ticket starts going backwards in time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, the size of the key doesn’t directly relate to the size of the cipher, which also doesn’t directly relate to security. AES is 128 bit , can have 128, 192, or 256 but keys and is currently not known to have any workable weaknesses.

  Largely a cipher isn’t weak if guessing the key is the only weakness, since every cipher is vulnerable to brute force. It’s weak if you can figure out the message without needing the key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s no longer a one time pad. That’s closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

  Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.

  To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

  There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

  Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.

  It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
  If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
  With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

  Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

  What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
  I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?

  I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.

  Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
  A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I was a Health Care CEO after Luigi and felt in fear of my life from someone else how would I hire security? What would be a good deal? And does security act like the Secret Service to take a bulle⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
  You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
  If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

  The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

  In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon stops showering⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Different people have different skin, oils, water supplies and diets.

  Everyone needs to clean themselves regularly, but the exact details of what that means varies by circumstances.

  Most people are fine with shampoo, a gentle soap, and warm water.
  As long as you’re getting rid of old dead skin, excess oils and any grime you’re fine though. Soaps make that easier, but they’re not a requirement.
  I’m prone to dry skin and greasy hair, so I use a shampoo, cool water and a scrub brush instead of soap for my body. Perfectly clean, just need to scrub a little longer to make sure I get everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Copying a bunch of unsourced text at someone without context is a great way to get them to not bother reading it. Why don’t you type the point you were hoping to make?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What do you think profit is? It seems like you’re conflicting profit with income.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Heh, “revenue is not profit”.

  Non-profits are specifically not allowed to have revenue in excess of expenses. If they take in too much money, the excess has to be put back in for operational expenses in the future, an endowment or something like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure that’s entirely true.

  Image

  Most of their money comes from retail, either the site, subscriptions, or the seller services they provide. AWS, while massive, isn’t what’s keeping them afloat.

  You’re entirely correct though that competition with Amazon is difficult because of those additional sources of revenue. Having additional stable sources of income gives them the ability to accept lower margins in retail with less risk.

  The way they make money selling things with no profit or at a loss is to ensure that someone else is always paying the difference. “Free shipping” with a paid subscription means that rather than providing shipping for a loss, they just need to do it for less than the subscription. Turns out “guy with a van” can deliver a lot of packages for quite cheap. So many that he’ll be out delivering from 3am to 9pm, and for $5 they’ll drop your package off first and call it overnight.
  In some cases they can get the seller to pay for shipping as a promotional incentive, since Amazons conditioned people to look for free shipping as a precondition to considering a product.

  Only give away for free what you got someone else to pay for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you spend the same amount of money to get more things that you were going to buy, you’ve saved money.

  If I need bread and cheese and one store sells bread for $10 and cheese for $5, and another sells $10 bread half off if I buy $5 cheese with it, I save money going to the second store, even if I only came into the store looking for bread.

  Amazon is using dirty tricks to ensure you buy from them even if it’s at a lower margin. A smaller profit is better than no sale. It also gets consumers more accustomed to just buying stuff on Amazon, and increases the sales producers see through the Amazon platform. Some producers entirely offload their commerce to Amazon since enough of their sales come from there it makes running their own less viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't wash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What soap do you use to wash your chicken?

  Washing the chicken doesn’t fix the problem you’re concerned with though. If it did you could wash the chicken and then just eat it raw.

  The bacteria is inside the chicken, potentially, where you can’t possibly remove it by washing. That’s why you have to cook it.

  Cooking kills the bacteria, and if you have to cook it then the only thing washing will do is spread any surface bacteria around to other surfaces and gives you wet chicken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't wash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like you maybe learned about food preparation in a factory setting, which is different than in a kitchen setting.

  Per USDA and CDC guidelines, you shouldn’t wash poultry before cooking because you’re more likely to spread any contamination, you’re unlikely to remove contamination that’s present since it’s not like it just lives on top of the tissue, and it’s already been washed during processing.

  Obviously if you’re the party doing the actual processing for distribution then things are different since you need to remove potential traces of feces, dirt or other surface contamination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't wash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll have to be more specific about what “this field” is. Restaurant sanitation? Food safety? Chicken washing? Microbiology?

  Whatever your degree, it’s not the recommended practice.
  ask.usda.gov/…/Should-I-wash-chicken-or-other-pou….

  You render meat safe to eat by killing the bacteria with fire, commonly called “cooking it”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon visits America⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because fastfood places need to compete on either value or quality. They can also try to do both by primarily aiming to convey quality and having a special menu or set of offerings that promise the same quality but at a better price.

  Wendy’s mostly brands themselves as quality focused as compared to other fast food places. So their “good deal” offering has to promise to offer the same quality at a lower price, which means smaller. So they call it big to camouflage that it’s actually smaller.