sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆.
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- Comment on How can I determine how much to contribute to charity to reduce US federal taxes? 4 hours ago:
Sort of; I object only to the way you presented it, not the facts.
You’re donating to a cause, which I assume you believe in, which reduces the value used to calculate your taxes. If you make $10, and you donate $1 to a charity, you get taxed as if you made $9. This applies to all income taxes, since state taxes are based largely on your taxable federal income. So OP could try to do something like do their fed taxes and instead of copying “$9” put "$10” where their state forms say to use the federal value, but that’s likely to raise a flag somewhere.
My main issue is the portrayal that donations are “spending money.” You could probably successfully argue that “donating” satisfies the definition of “spending money”, but that does a disservice to charity.
Also, just as an aside, OP would never save $0.45 on a dollar donation. No income tax bracket is that high except for the very rich, and they have many other ways to avoid paying taxes that in no way benefit charities.
- Comment on BDSM 7 hours ago:
Shouldn’t that be 11?
- Comment on What is the most toxic instance of Lemmy? 7 hours ago:
hexbear
- Comment on Please advise on this conversation we had over on c/Piracy. Transporters and replicators, basic operating principles? 10 hours ago:
Ah I think I see the confusion.
I was saying that there’s nothing, within our current physics, that is not efficient than a matter/antimatter reaction. You get 100% of the energy. Whether or not it’s useful energy is another question, and I’m doing some hand-waving around the topics of containment, manipulation, etc. However, nothing we know of is a more efficient use of matter to generate electricity. Not fission; not fusion; not radioactive decay. If we could wrap a black hole in a Dyson sphere and capture Hawking radiation, it’d still be less efficient than M/AM annihilation.
I was saying that - barring a magic technology such as capturing usable energy from quantum fluctuation, saying ST has a form of energy production that is a matter-based energy production that is more efficient than M/AM annihilation would violate our known laws of physics, because introducing a hydrogen atom to an anti-hydrogen atom is 100% efficient and costs nearly nothing to effect.
ST is full of magic technologies, and carrying around a bunch of AM as part of a way to play Mozart in the ready room is really dangerous, so - maybe they use it a bit, but they rely on more stable, less dangerous energy sources like dilithium. Anyway, trying to mix hard science and Star Trek is a dangerous endeavor. ST is more hard-sciency than the Space Wizards in Star Wars, but there’s still a vast amount of speculation required to make things work.
- Comment on Please advise on this conversation we had over on c/Piracy. Transporters and replicators, basic operating principles? 1 day ago:
So… and I’m in no way a Memory Alpha-level ST nerd, caveat lector:
- transporters are matter-to-energy-to -matter transformers; which implies
- they have both energy-to-matter conversion technology, and matter-to-energy technology; which means
- assuming the conversion process itself isn’t using vast quantities of energy, they could easily be turning energy into matter, and powering it with matter to energy, losing some energy in the conversion tax; which means
- they may as well be turning humanoid waste into food
It would imply that transporter and replicator technology are, basically, the same thing.
However, there are cannon issues.
- Even assuming metaphysics beyond what we know, they’d have to be violating the laws of thermodynamics to get more efficient energy production than matter-to-energy conversion. Which would make dilithium crystals and such less efficient than the technology they use to create food… so, why use it? Well, because
- The conversion process isn’t low cost. They can transport people, and produce from from energy, but it’s a super-expensive process. Like, you lose 90% of your energy in the matter:energy:matter cycle, out something. Which would mean
- Transporter technology isn’t converting things to energy and back; it’s using some cheat that does the same thing effectively, but with constraints, such as limits on how much you can alter the source object to destination object in the process; and getting pure energy out of matter is really lossy. But if you go from baseball to baseball, but in a different place, you avoid the energy penalty.
My head cannon is that this is how both replicators and transporters work. If you take a Riker and turn him into Riker somewhere else via a conversion loophole, it’s pretty cheap. If you take a 236g of lead and turn it into a cup of Earl Grey (hot), it costs you some energy loss but you’re using basically the same loophole. But if you try to turn Riker into pure energy to power the Enterprise because the warp core is offline, really you only get a couple of grams of usable energy because you can’t use the loophole and most went into the conversion process – which is why they still need an efficient fuel like dilithium.
Like, matter-to-energy requires antimatter, which is expensive to produce; but the loophole lets you skip over the antimatter part as long as, in the end, you have basically the same sort of matter.
- Comment on My Fault: London (2025, dir Charlotte Fassler and Dani Girdwood) 5 days ago:
Taking advantage of the popularity of step-porn, eh?
If they pass up a chance to do a “help me step-brother, I’m stuck in the dryer” joke, I’ll be very disappointed. Or maybe a Folger’s coffee schtick; that’d make it worth watching.
- Comment on Can cats see color? 5 days ago:
Greeblings. Not ghosts, greeblings.
There are a couple of posts on Red-dit and Thre-eads, but I won’t link to those; here’s another description, although it’s wrong. It attributes Greebles to Red-dit, but the term predates not only that site, but the web entirely. I first heard about greeblings in 1983.
- Comment on Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders has a new release date and it's next week 5 days ago:
Looks fun! I hope someday we have holodecks where you can ski a mountain with a never-ending run, with no crowds of people to navigate, and no snow-boarders.
Not trying to dis snow-boarders – they’re fine; I just think everyone is better off when alpine skiers and snow boarders are segregated. Ideal conditions are different for each group, anyway.
- Comment on Could space mining alter earth orbit? 1 week ago:
Overthinking. Just mine a bunch of iron, or gold, or whatever you can get and drop it in big chunks right on the planet. Don’t bother trying to land the stuff. Aim for Mar A Lago. Then drive in and surface mine the payload.
- Comment on Not promoting violence or anything. But stupid quest since Iran has an 80 million bounty on Trumps head. If someone would follow thru do they just go to Iran and be like pay up? Why or why not? 1 week ago:
Well, it’s mostly robots of some sort, but they’ve been mounting machine guns on robot platforms, and explosives on what are essentially RC tanks.
In not suggesting they’re inventing plasma rifles in the 30 gigawatt range; it’s fantastical to me because they’ve changed the nature of warfare through some impressive innovation using cheap tech.
And I have no idea what other things they’re doing; I don’t have some inside source. Maybe they post videos about all their new innovations… but I’d bet they aren’t. I’ll bet they were using ground drones long before they started releasing clips of their use.
- Comment on Not promoting violence or anything. But stupid quest since Iran has an 80 million bounty on Trumps head. If someone would follow thru do they just go to Iran and be like pay up? Why or why not? 1 week ago:
I think you have four issues:
- How to do it, with the security. Honestly, I think with Trump it’d be easier than with other presidents, because he’s a fucking moron who doesn’t listen to experts
- How to get away. I think this may be the most difficult part, since you have to flee the country and make your way somewhere relatively safe
- How to prove to Iran it was you
- How to enjoy your gains, with what would be probably the largest manhunt on the planet likely through to your death
DB Cooper proved 2 and 4 are not impossible, although technology, forensics, and surveillance have drastically changed since Cooper, and I subscribe to the theory that he didn’t survive to spend the money - not only surviving the jump into dense forest, but then trekking out of deep wilderness to civilization were both challenging obstacles. Anyone who’s been through a parachuting course knows the last place you want to land is into a bunch of pine trees (Ok, water can be pretty bad too, but still).
I digress. Assuming you can pull off 1 and 2, and assuming Iran’s not just going to ghost you, 3 is sincerely a difficult problem. How do you contact the right people in Iran? How do you prove it was you, without the support of US intelligence? Maybe some GoPro footage, routed through a scope? Would that be enough?
But I’d be most worried about 4. I can’t imagine enjoying life constantly looking over my shoulder, and even then, there’s no defense from a sword missile once they’ve ID’d you. So you’re going to, what, hide in Iran for the rest of your life? Depending on your race, your options could be limited merely by how much you stick out - a rich white guy living like a king in Papua New Guinea. Maybe try to buy a new identity and continue living in the US, hoping the IRS doesn’t take an interest in you?
It might be accomplished by a terrorist group, planned and tracked hand-in-hand with Iran for verification, via a disposable fanatic and with funds going to the group upon completion. But I think if they could pull that off, they would have already. Terrorist groups tend to be a sledgehammer, rather than a scalpel: effective against unprotected soft targets, impotent against hardened ones.
I think of someone gets Trump, it won’t be for a bounty; it’ll be for ideological reasons, and they won’t expect to survive it. Heck, with the Patriot Act, I wouldn’t want to survive it, b/c they may just decide to torture you for the rest of your natural life and Americans signed away their rights to due process after 9/11. It’ll be another Thomas Crooks, only a better sniper, or some novel approach like some tech coming out of the innovations being developed during the invasion of Ukraine. If I were the Secret Service, that’s what I’d be terrified of. There are some intensely smart, innovative people in Ukraine figuring out fantastical ways of eliminating people, and I think we, the general public, are seeing only the most mundane, oldest examples of what they’re using.
- Comment on Wish there was a toggle for it like there is on phones 1 week ago:
Midnight is 00:00 is 12am. They accounted for 12pm, but need to subtract 12 if it’s 12am.
So, you’d do away with 12 entirely and make AM/PM 0-based: 00:00am - 11:59am, and then 00:00pm - 11:59pm? Makes sense if you’re a programmer, but 0 is a fairly recent invention, and most daily measuring concepts are fundamentally 1-based. Heck, we couldn’t even get all programming languages to agree on 0-based array indexing (looking at you, MATLAB, and you, bash).
- Comment on Wish there was a toggle for it like there is on phones 1 week ago:
Yeah, I never found adding 12 to or from a number to be particularly challenging. Still, I do wish AM/PM would go away, not to mention DST. Can’t escape UTC and time zones, though, not reasonably, anyway. If for no other reason than doing the conversion makes you aware of how inconvenient your suggested meeting time is for the other party.
- Comment on New setup for 2025 1 week ago:
🖖
- Comment on New setup for 2025 1 week ago:
Oooh, a connoisseur!
- Comment on New setup for 2025 2 weeks ago:
Whew. At least this one doesn’t have Windows in the background. Almost lost my lunch on that one!
- Comment on Anon doesn't wash 2 weeks ago:
That’s just wasting water and accelerating the water wars! I re-use my chicken water to wash my vegetables, and then my dishes. It’s such a first-world mindset to callously single-use water like that!
- Comment on Anon's PC works 2 weeks ago:
Greentext based AF for once.
- Comment on Anon doesn't wash 2 weeks ago:
Better not wash them:
My source is the CD Fucking C.
Hostile response aside, seriously: cooking chicken kills the bacteria. Trying to wash it just splatters disease around your kitchen.
- Comment on Mildly McInfuriating 2 weeks ago:
I mean, do whatever you want to your own body, but for gods sake don’t feed that utter shit to your kids!
- Comment on if you are a doctor or registered nurse, what's the point of manipulating a patient to stay at your unit even if he wants to leave against medical advice? 3 weeks ago:
I guess you could also ask what’s the reason for working at a suicide hotline? Seems similar enough in many cases.
They aren’t similar, though, are they? OP’s hypothetical is that someone came for help, got some advice about care, and said “no.” In the hotline case, someone’s actively reaching out for help. They start the same, but in the case of your hotline, the caller can hang up at any time and pull the trigger; you can’t trap them on the phone.
- Comment on If God is all powerful and created human. How come God in endowed with human emotions? Shouldn't he or she be beyond that? 3 weeks ago:
The running joke in between me and my wife (who was raised Catholic) is that I rail against papists and she laments the rise of the heretics. The last time either of us set foot in a church was a couple of years ago showing visitors the local cathedral.
When I was growing up, in the mid 20th century, I don’t remember “fundamentalists” being a thing. Bible study was pretty common in every church we attended; we moved around a lot between my 8th and 18th birthdays. It was just bog standard Protestant Christianity. But we did attend church a fair amount. For the few years after the divorce, dad had us in church twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday evenings. And I know we switched cities and churches three times in that period.
I think there are people who wear their religion as a justification for lamentable personal opinions but who know little about what it’s really about. Then there are people like my father who’ve made religion their personality and are deeply read, and who still somehow have focused on the most horrible take-aways. And then there are folks who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk, and this is probably the majority.
- Comment on Wanderer in the Rain 3 weeks ago:
The raindrops look like they’re falling up.
- Comment on If God is all powerful and created human. How come God in endowed with human emotions? Shouldn't he or she be beyond that? 3 weeks ago:
Yes. Some do. I was raised by a fundamentalist; they read the Bible constantly. Like, book clubs, a couple, three times a week, reading and discussing different parts of the Bible.
By the time I left that home (went to live with mom at 14), I’d read the thing myself four times all the way through, and various sections of it far more often. When dad visits, I hear audio book versions of it playing in the night as they’re getting ready for bed. Self-indoctrination.
IME, they’re not all that unusual in their church.
- Comment on If God is all powerful and created human. How come God in endowed with human emotions? Shouldn't he or she be beyond that? 3 weeks ago:
This is “no stupid questions,” but asking rational questions about religion is a waste of time. In most religions, the answer ultimately “you are too stupid to understand the great plan of god.”
You can debate interpretation of religious texts, or how best to follow the laws religions set down; but questioning articles of faith is fruitless.
Christianity is especially full of self-contradictions and paradoxes: can God create a rock so big he can’t lift it? You can spend a lifetime poking holes in The Bible, and you will never get a rational, satisfactory answer that isn’t based on a version of “you are too stupid/not meant to know.”
Many religions are less paradoxical, but the monotheistic ones are mostly just an unbelievable shit-show, unless you’re especially susceptible to self-delusion.
No apologies to Christians: your religion is a fucking mess. You have to be particularly dumb to read the old and new testaments and come away thinking those are the same God. That the loving, caring one who sacrificed his son for people is the same one who allowed Satan to torture his most faithful worshipper on a bet.
Buddhism and most pagan religions make more sense. Buddhism in particular lacks most of the dependency on mysticism and unprovable articles of faith, and is almost more a philosophy than a religion. Buddhists, I can respect. But Christianity is all sorts of dumb.
Actually, taken by itself, the new testament is mostly OK; if you follow only Christ’s teachings, and ignore the peyote trips of post-crucifixion books, like, Revelations, it’s a solid basis for a society of decent people. But Christ was a liberal socialist, which is why most organized Christianity leans so heavily on the old testament and ignores Christ’s teachings of acceptance, communism, and forgiveness.
- Comment on Catch these jolly hands 3 weeks ago:
Don’t let my white duds and pleasant demeanor fool ya! I, too, have been known to violate the statutes of man, and not a few of the Almighty!
- Comment on Carcinisation has got the furniture too! 4 weeks ago:
Prador second children!
- Comment on Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of AI Datasets Now [404 Media] 1 month ago:
Legislation is so far behind these issues, I expect AP to be replaced by whatever comes next before legal considerations have any impact. And what’s Joe Smallserver going to do? Sue Google?
I agree with your theory, but while in theory, theory is the same as practice, in practice, it doesn’t.
- Comment on huehuehue 1 month ago:
1P gives me anxiety. It’s on my no-fly list.
- Comment on huehuehue 1 month ago:
And there’s such a thing as bad LSD, which really sucks. Those quasi-legal, almost LSD analogues often sold as genuine LSD, but with glitchy side-effects.
Legalized drugs can be regulated and quality-controlled, and should be. Fuck Reagan for many, many reasons, including his “war on drugs.”