merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on I need an adult 8 hours ago:
I’ve always hated the “blue, indigo, violet” end of the English words for the rainbow. I only recently found out that the 7 colours of the rainbow in English is especially BS.
At the beginning of Newton’s time, there were thought to be 5 colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Newton added Orange and Indigo because he thought (for spiritual reasons) there should be 7 colours. There were 7 days of the week, 7 planets (known at that time), 7 notes in the (western) musical scale, etc.
But, Newton’s blue isn’t our blue today. For newton, the colour “blue” is what we currently call “cyan”, so the 7 colours of the rainbow were really red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (blue), blue (indigo) and violet. That makes a lot more sense.
But, there really could be arbitrarily many colours in the rainbow. We could have “rust” as a colour, in between red and orange, or “gold” in between orange and yellow. We could even have a spectrum that didn’t include “green” but included “lime” which is between today’s yellow and green, and cyan on the other side, and no “green” at all.
- Comment on Billionaires hate democracy 2 days ago:
I’m sure that’s part of it. Selling enough stock to meet a 5% wealth tax would sometimes mean that selling those stocks would really drop the value of those shares, and therefore drop their on-paper wealth.
But, the simpler explanation is they don’t wanna.
- Comment on Billionaires hate democracy 2 days ago:
What’s crazy is that he’s only spending less than 1% of what the tax would cost him.
If he spent $10b and managed to save himself a $13b tax bill, he’s still save $3b.
I suspect he’s actually spending much more than $100m. He has probably hired expensive attorneys, expensive accountants, expensive PR firms, etc. We have to hope he hasn’t hired private detectives, hackers, hit men, etc.
- Comment on Housing prices 4 days ago:
That’s not the reason it’s apples and oranges.
- Comment on Housing prices 4 days ago:
I’m mean, once you’re comfortable with a monthly payment why would you leave if the house suits your needs?
You could say the same about a pair of shoes. If they’re in good shape, why not keep using them as long as they still suit your needs? If you get a good pair of leather shoes they can last decades needing only the occasional repair.
The difference is that you wouldn’t expect your shoes to go up in value every year even while you’re wearing them.
The reason why it matters is that someone with a good job can’t afford a house anymore, and shelter is right there at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
- Comment on Housing prices 4 days ago:
Houses should be investments… in the same sense that a good, durable pair of shoes is an investment.
In a well designed system, the value of property should stay pretty flat over time, and the value of a structure built on that property should slowly go down over time as wear and tear sets in.
It’s ridiculous that it makes sense to buy more home than you need, and to hold onto a house longer than you need it because it’s one of the best and safest money-earning investments you can make.
- Comment on Theft 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t say the democrats have refined their messaging. The leftist democrats who are saying these things are still a minority while the majority of the democratic party want to be seen as centrists who aren’t hostile to big business.
But at least it has gone from 1 prominent person saying these things (Sanders) to now enough that you can no longer count them on just one hand.
The money, power and majority of the democratic party is still against them. But, it really seems like voters are behind them.
Perhaps the good thing is that so many democratic politicians lack a spine. It means that if it’s clear that the democratic socialist message has momentum, they’ll happily pivot to the new shiny thing and adopt it as if it’s where they were all along.
- Comment on Theft 1 week ago:
Ever since agriculture allowed some of the population to not be farmers, there has been inequality.
Overall, it’s probably a good trade-off. I’m not ultra rich, but I’m not a subsistence farmer either. So, some inequality is probably the price we pay for technology.
The current world is better off than most of history. Since the Odyssey is in theatres now, look at that. Odysseus is a king in a palace-centric economy where the riches flow to the kings who then redistribute it to everyone else. In the middle ages peasants were tied to the land from birth. They weren’t slaves, exactly. But, it was pretty similar.
Capitalism was supposed to be more efficient and fair. Instead of the bosses being born as bosses and the workers born as workers, in theory a boss who made terrible decisions could lose his capital and become a worker. A worker who had an idea and could find investment could become a boss. In the 1800s that was revolutionary, until that point classes were classes for life. But, of course, for it to work there needed to be laws and those laws needed to be enforced.
The US was revolutionary at the start because it was going to be a country without a king. They carefully designed the system so the president wasn’t a monarch. However, there were some problems. First, these were 20 year olds in the 1700s. They didn’t know game theory. They were idealists who thought that congressional representatives would be honest and honourable. They didn’t think a party would collude with a corrupt president. Second, these were aristocrats. Sure, they didn’t like kings, but they thought that only land-owning white males should have a say.
So, really, it’s no surprise that a few hundred years later the people who would have been the land-owning aristocrats 1000 years ago are once again in control.
It remains to be seen if the people can once again restore a sane level of inequality, or if this American experiment has run its course and something new will emerge.
- Comment on The perfect date 1 week ago:
Yes, ISO-8601 is objectively better than YYYY/DD/MM or MM/DD/YYYY or other strange formats. But, because it isn’t the most widely used format, it can be less efficient when there’s no danger of MM/DD vs DD/MM confusion.
If person A is talking to person B and they’re from the same culture, some culture-specific version like DD/MM/YY might be easier for them because it’s what they’re both used to, even if it is objectively inferior. But, if person A is talking to person C things get more challenging because if the day of the month is 12 or under, it’s hard to distinguish between DD/MM or MM/DD. Even if person C knows that person A comes from a place that does DD/MM, they don’t know if person C used the native DD/MM format they’re used to, or translated it to them to MM/DD because person A was trying to make things easy for person C.
One of the advantages of the hyphens in ISO-8601, aside from them working with files, is that hyphens in dates are less common than slashes, so if someone sees 1212-11-12 they’re more likely to understand that it’s an ISO-formatted date. If they see 1212/11/12 it might be a MM/DD date or a DD/MM date.
- Comment on The perfect date 1 week ago:
But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage
Uh, no.
- Comment on While he got the core idea right, he shouldn’t have compared apples to Apple’s. 1 week ago:
To Apple’s… phone?
- Comment on The perfect date 1 week ago:
Does “August 3rd” sound unnatural to you?
In spoken conversation it doesn’t really matter. In many contexts you could probably just say “Want to go on the third?” and the person you’re talking to will understand you mean August the third of this current year.
- Comment on The perfect date 1 week ago:
As for why it’s better:
- It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
- Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
- Comment on The light at the end of the tunnel is getting much closer. KEEP PUSHING 2 weeks ago:
According to the same poll, 25% of the respondents had never heard of the Democratic Socialists of America, and 21% had no opinion of them.
Also, 10% of respondents who leaned democratic that the Democratic Party needed to be completely reformed, 47% said it needed major changes, and 39% said it needed minor changes.
Also, this is a major “throw the bums out” moment:
One question was: “Imagine that after the November 2026 elections, most of the current members of Congress are replaced with new members. Do you think that would:”
51% said it would change congress for the better, only 9% said it would change congress for the worse.
Also, even if only 1/3 consider themselves democratic socialists, 73% would be either enthusiastic or OK with nominating someone who described themselves as a democratic socialist, and only 27% would be uneasy or upset by that.
I actually can’t find in that poll where people identify as democratic socialists. But, everything else suggests now is an ideal time to run a DSA candidate.
- Comment on And Miss The Opportunity To Tap That Ass? 2 weeks ago:
that Jesus is 100% God and 100% Man
That makes about as much sense as Trump saying that prices were down by 500%.
- Comment on Cool Japan 🌸 2 weeks ago:
Racist, but also ageist.
- Comment on Cool Japan 🌸 2 weeks ago:
The “zoo animal” thing seems about right. Sometimes they look at you like they think you’re about to start flinging shit around. Sometimes they’re curious about how the zoo animal is going to do something simple like handle chopsticks. Often they don’t make eye contact or keep their space because they don’t want to have to interact with the zoo animal.
OTOH, part of their being polite is that if the gaijin actually asks them for help, they’re obligated to try to help.
Overall, I liked it. As an introvert, I don’t like countries where people approach the foreigner and try to practice their English on them. There are also too many countries where you’re frequently approached by someone who wants to scam you, or wants you to give them money.
- Comment on Cool Japan 🌸 2 weeks ago:
You found that the Chinese weren’t racist or sexist? I agree with you about Japan, but China was hardly enlightened. They were mostly just louder and more obnoxious, where the Japanese were overly formal and quiet.
Both cultures also had a lot of superstitions, like words or phrases you shouldn’t say, or lucky or unlucky numbers.
- Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible 2 weeks ago:
My sister has that as a tattoo (or some variation on that wording).
And yet, it seems to have become an excuse for why she’s allowed to buy a big gas-guzzling SUV, and drive it whenever she wants, wherever she wants, and fly around the world for fun.
If she’s ever asked, she’s an environmentalist who loves nature. But, she avoids ever having to make tough choices about her own lifestyle because she allows herself the grace to just do what she can do, and not agonize over the rest.
- Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible 2 weeks ago:
“I’m not a monster for choosing to drive a gas-guzzling SUV, it’s the evil oil companies!”
I’m not pretending these companies are blameless. They certainly lobby to reduce people’s alternatives. They probably break any environmental regulation they can get around, and just pay a fine if caught.
But, fundamentally, they’re a business. They wouldn’t be pumping oil out of the ground if people weren’t buying it.
- Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible 2 weeks ago:
Or, better yet, people who “love nature”, so they drive an SUV every weekend for an hour to get to a cottage / camp / cabin. Or go camping, or canoeing, or whatever.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
and not much different from the movie Her
Did you misunderstand that movie? A relationship with an AI is never seen as normal in the movie. The protagonist is a pathetic, lonely man who is going through a divorce. He buys an operating system with an AI component who he then falls for. When he admits to his wife that he’s involved with his operating system, his ex-wife laughs at him for it. And, at the end of the movie, the AIs have evolved so that they’re no longer interested in humans and leave humanity behind to do their own thing.
There’s never a time, even in that movie, where AI relationships are something you’d want to admit to in public.
- Comment on Don't worry guys, it's just cosmetic 3 weeks ago:
1999:
- Comment on British public more likely to prefer Count Binface wins Clacton by-election than Nigel Farage 4 weeks ago:
Cool, definitely not my slogan though. He might have had it first, or he heard it from someone else like me. I just posted it because I like it.
- Comment on I agree with don 4 weeks ago:
Yes?
- Comment on 500,000 households cancel TV licence putting BBC future in jeopardy 4 weeks ago:
the number of adults still using its TV, radio and digital services remained at 94 per cent of the population
It really seems like something that should be handled with a tax.
- Comment on 500,000 households cancel TV licence putting BBC future in jeopardy 4 weeks ago:
Also, there would be potential conflicts of interest with those advertisers and the content.
- Comment on 500,000 households cancel TV licence putting BBC future in jeopardy 4 weeks ago:
The problem here is that they are used to the model where they sell a license to say Sherlock for US audiences and it’s Netflix that buys that for a huge pile of cash. Could they probably make a lot more by cutting out the middle man? Sure, but then they’d have to support all those users directly.
- Comment on 500,000 households cancel TV licence putting BBC future in jeopardy 4 weeks ago:
Broadcast TV may be a dying format. But, BBC is a lot more than broadcast TV. They do radio, they do podcasts, they do short form video content, they do streaming, they do VOD, they do web news and blogs.
IMO, that’s the problem with a TV subscription. A lot of people interact with BBC stuff on a daily basis on phones, computers, game consoles, etc. It’s hard to avoid seeing a piece of BBC content even if you don’t own a TV.
- Comment on British public more likely to prefer Count Binface wins Clacton by-election than Nigel Farage 4 weeks ago:
Make your vote Count.
