jerkface
@jerkface@lemmy.ca
My gender is my concern, but you may use any pronoun to refer to me
- Comment on Posting in honor of my nieces back to school week 😆 2 hours ago:
Learns fast.
- Comment on Does putting clothes in the closet protect them from dust, or is the dust in there too? 1 day ago:
Memento mori.
- Comment on Does putting clothes in the closet protect them from dust, or is the dust in there too? 1 day ago:
Wait, what is dust doing to my precious clothing? Should I be alarmed? I’m going to be until you tell me otherwise.
- Comment on Black Holes 5 days ago:
You are describing a Schwarzschild black hole. I am describing a Kerr black hole.
Schwarzchild black holes may not exist in reality, though it is thought that rotational energy could sometimes be removed from a Kerr black hole through natural processes resulting in a Schwarzchild black hole.
- Comment on Black Holes 5 days ago:
pbs.org/…/how-black-holes-spin-space-time-klqijt/ talks about passing through the ring
- Comment on Black Holes 5 days ago:
It is, and you won’t believe what happens!
- Comment on Black Holes 6 days ago:
okay what does infinite density mean in avant-garde mechanics?
- Comment on Black Holes 6 days ago:
Keep in mind that all the cliches about black holes are about non-rotating black holes, which don’t exist in reality. In reality, a spinning black hole has a ring singularity, not a point, and behaves much weirder and even less intuitively than the hypothetical non-rotating counterpart as it smears out spacetime into taffy.
- Comment on Black Holes 6 days ago:
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though
You know, except for the actual singularity
- Comment on Black Holes 6 days ago:
It’s a scam, you get there and find it’s all horny housewives.
- Comment on Black Holes 6 days ago:
There are no naked singularities
- Comment on Why do neurotypicals like AI slop? 1 week ago:
It’s an observation, not a conclusion ya nitwit.
Also you: “If everyone was as stupid as me, we never would have formed civilization.”
- Comment on Why do neurotypicals like AI slop? 1 week ago:
Check yourself, man.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 1 week ago:
Nice try, Samuel Hahnemann!!!
- Comment on So, Linus Torvalds is a jerk 1 week ago:
What’s he getting away with, exactly? The value that we get from him dwarfs whatever you think he’s getting out of us.
- Comment on So, Linus Torvalds is a jerk 1 week ago:
That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.
- Comment on Gamers have you ever been in a game competition or something similar? 1 week ago:
In the 80s I went to a public event featuring the California Joy Stick; “Joy” referring to the brand of dish soap. There’s probably a more common name for it. It’s a device made of a large fabric loop on a stick with a nut for holding the loop open. You dip it in a solution of water, dish soap, and glycerine, and then open the loop to the breeze or walk with it. You can create bubbles tens of metres long, and wide and tall enough for a person to stand inside. I’m surprised it isn’t still a thing people do, you could easily make one.
There was a bubble making competition. Most of the competitors seemed to be quite casual, but most of them found it fairly easy to be competitive.
- Comment on The White House Rose Garden was replaced by pavement 1 week ago:
that new gold wing
- Comment on What do you think is the largest number a human can actually grasp / truly comprehend? 1 week ago:
There’s also conflation with the number of “chunks” we can hold in mind at a time, which is often estimated at about seven things. But that doesn’t mean we don’t comprehend what eight is.
Numbers are DEEP. You can’t just know things about a number, you have to discover them empirically, experimentally. Every number has essentially infinite properties and you can’t know everything about a number, but you get a familiarity with them. Still, even the simplest numbers have the capacity to surprise in the right context.
- Comment on Ohm My God!! 2 weeks ago:
He is grooming his poodle, he is living comfort eagle
- Comment on Ohm My God!! 2 weeks ago:
That’s it’s relationship to voltage and current, but does not define what resistance is. It’s incorrect to say this is what resistance is because fundamentally resistance isn’t actually a function of voltage and current; an object has the same resistance even at zero current.
- Comment on What do you think is the largest number a human can actually grasp / truly comprehend? 2 weeks ago:
Visualization and symbolics are not the only way we comprehend numbers. My mind has the ability to recognize astonishingly broad temporal intervals with remarkable accuracy. I can express the interval using numbers. Does that mean I am able to fully comprehend a number like in “90 minutes?”
I am able to remember sets of things, and distinguish all of the members of that set, up to very large numbers. It would not be unusual for a teacher to be able to call to mind every one of a couple hundred students currently attending their school. If I can manage a set of a particular size in my mind (whether or not I can visualize all the members of that set simultaneously) do I not have some comprehension of that number?
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
but not wire brushes which are a huge source of serious injuries
- Comment on flowers for the lost 2 weeks ago:
I feel like this probably isn’t the preferred terminology.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Don’t understand how the same people that condemn sponges as unsanitary use a brush. Use a launderer cloth that can be regularly sterilized for crying out loud!
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Brushes are the worst. If there’s a residue on the plate you can see that a plastic bristle brush just draws lines through the residue
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
WELL I DO NOW
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
In 2025? Nah, look at what’s happening around the US.
Record gun deaths?
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
tongue in cheek of course but it still makes a point
- Comment on Anon breaks up 2 weeks ago:
To compare dead children to the cost of failing to check government power, we can reduce both to life-years lost:
🔫 Current Cost: Child Firearm Deaths in the U.S.
- ~2,000 preventable child gun deaths/year
- ~60 life-years lost per death
- 120,000 life-years lost annually
- Over 30 years: ~3.6 million life-years lost
🏛️ Hypothetical Benefit: Preventing Tyranny
Assume a worst-case scenario:
- Authoritarian collapse kills 10 million (based on 20th-century examples)
- Avg. age at death: ~40 → ~35 life-years lost
- 10M deaths × 35 = 350 million life-years lost
Estimate risk:
- Without civilian arms: 0.5% chance over 30 years
- With civilian arms: 0.4% chance
- These figures are speculative; there’s no empirical support that civilian gun ownership reduces the risk of tyranny—many stable democracies have strict gun control.
In fact, high civilian armament may reduce stability:
- Greater availability of weapons increases the lethality of civil unrest, crime, and domestic terrorism.
- Armed polarization can accelerate breakdown during political crises, as seen in failed or fragile states.
- States may respond with harsher repression, escalating rather than deterring authoritarian outcomes.
📊 Expected Value Calculation
- Without arms: 0.005 × 350M = 1.75 million life-years at risk
- With arms: 0.004 × 350M = 1.2 million life-years at risk
- Net benefit of arms: ~550,000 life-years saved (generous estimate)
📉 Conclusion
Even with favorable assumptions:
- Civilian firearms cost ~3.6M life-years (due to preventable child deaths)
- And prevent only ~550K life-years (via marginally lower tyranny risk)
Bottom line: The ongoing cost vastly outweighs the hypothetical benefit, and high armament may worsen long-term stability rather than protect it.
