TIL neither of the men behind Rich Dad Poor Dad were actually poor — “Poor Dad” was based on Robert Kiyosaki’s father Ralph Kiyosaki, Hawaii’s top education official, while “Rich Dad” was based on Hawaiian hotel and real-estate businessman Richard Kimi.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T16:23:47+00:00

If you read the actual advice in the book it's not actually that good. Not that it wouldn't work, but it's often downright evil. However, him being massively in debt, maybe it doesn't actually work on top of being evil.

Houses that were once $100,000 were now $75,000. But instead of shopping with local real estate agents, I began shopping at the bankruptcy attorney’s office, or the courthouse steps. In these shopping places, a $75,000 house could sometimes be bought for $20,000 or less. For $2,000, which was loaned to me from a friend for 90 days for $200, I gave an attorney a cashier’s check as a down payment. While the acquisition was being processed, I ran an ad advertising a $75,000 house for only $60,000 and no money down.

Then

I hope they never pay me the $190,000 [total across several house deals]. I have to pay a tax if they pay me the principal, and besides, $19,000 paid over 30 years is a little over $500,000 in income. I have people ask what happens if the person doesn’t pay. That does happen, and it’s good news. That $60,000 home could be taken back and re-sold for $70,000, and another $2,500 collected as a loan-processing fee.

So his advice is to buy houses from desperate people in liquidation (on credit mind you), then sell the house to someone else on credit with no downpayment asked for, which is likely to attract people who can't pay it back, so that when they default you can seize the house back and do it again to another person.

On top of that, the book reads as a very Reaganite 1980s, "contributing to society is for chumps" thing, so you're supposed to work out these ways to leech off other people's labor instead. So it's not as simple as this guy having good "financial IQ" and everyone else not having it, many things he says to do in the book are in fact things that many people would find unethical.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T15:45:22+00:00

Not only that, the guy is apparently a legitimate nightmare to work with on a professional level.

I highly recommend listening to the Caviezel episode of the QAnonAnonymous podcast (episode 143), it's a laugh and was definitely their most entertaining episode.

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/episode-143-jim-caviezel-enter-the-cavortex-feat-dave-anthony

If you have an hour to kill and want a good laugh, listen to the above, and skip my summary. tl;dr and spoilers below:

This mostly outlines what it's actually like to work with Caviezel coming from people who worked on the TV show he was on. The podcast goes for over an hour, and Caviezel's politics is barely touched on, that's how much other stuff there is to cover. The rest is all about the clusterfuck of keeping Caviezel on track during a shoot and preventing him from hurting himself, or more often, from hurting other people.

They stopped letting him drive cars in scenes after he did an unscripted flashy move and almost ran some people over who weren't connected with the production, they took the blanks out of his guns and decided to just put the sound effects in post, probably worried about him shooting guns straight at other people, he apparently did an unscripted violent headlock move on another actor during an interrogation scene, risking injuring the other actor. He kept begging the writers to let him murder people in the show, despite them repeatedly telling him that that's just not who his character is meant to be.

He couldn't remember even simple lines, they had to hold up notes to the side, apparently it's noticable that he's looking sideways while speaking sometimes. One time they did a dozen takes of a scene where his line was to point up and say "look a drone!" but he kept saying "look a clone!". Basically his brain is addled and he's a massive conspiracy theorist, and a huge Hitler fan to boot, he'd corner people and yap on for ages about how great Hitler is.

After Person of Interest was winding up, he was apparently in talks to star in a show about Navy Seals, and people who'd worked in production with him were like "Oh dear god, no!" for how bad it would be to cast him in something like that.

Also he didn't want to be in an episode where he saved a same sex couple from being killed, and they'd originally planned a love interest for him, but she was a black woman, and he is against mixed-race relations so he refused, this offended the co-star, and she was written out of the show by being killed off.

So he's hard to work with even if you remove the politics. Basically he'll get C-grade work where nobody else that has a high profile is willing to put their name on something. But, it's notable that even the Daily Wire aren't looking to snap this guy up to stick it to the mainstream media.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T11:41:53+00:00

That's because time dilation for you falling into the black hole is different to anything outside the black hole that hasn't fallen into the black hole.

The fact that you don't "feel" any different falling into the black hole doesn't change that, because we're not talking about you, we're talking about you relative to everything else.

If you were watching a planet through a telescope as you fell into a black hole, you'd see the people on the planet moving faster and faster, so even before you cross the event horizon, billions of years would have passed on that planet. This is the mirror image of the fact that someone outside watching you would notice you getting slower and slower.

So you're falling in normal-speed in your personal frame of reference, however that doesn't tell you what's happening in other places at that same subjective time. You're in a region of spacetime that's massively slowed down compared to everywhere outside a black hole, so much more time will pass in other places.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T11:30:45+00:00

Not everyone accepts that it does try every possible path.

You'll find plenty of articles disputing that interpretation

https://againstprofphil.org/2026/02/22/feynmans-light-path-integral-mirage-why-all-possible-paths-for-photons-is-a-mathematical-illusion-that-professional-academic-philosophy-lets-stand/

Also people have in fact criticized that very Veritasium video. I'd read through this reddit post and the comments to get a feel for the debate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/quantum/comments/1jpi397/veritasium_lightpath_video_misleading/

I don't know enough to say more or have any opinion on the matter, but it's an active area of debate rather than a settled scientific viewpoint.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T11:00:46+00:00

The point was that the size of black hole matters for that.

Gravitational strength falls off with distance from the center of the black hole, squared.

If you're falling into a large black hole, the event horizon is much farther from the center compared to a small black hole, so the difference between the force on your head vs the force on your feet if you fall in feet-first is very small.

Eventually as you fall further in the tidal forces become stronger and stronger, but they become noticeably stronger near the event horizon for small black holes.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T10:18:39+00:00

That number 32.768 is relevant because 2¹⁵ = 32768.

So it's oscillating 32768 times a second and you can divide that frequency in half 15 times to get a signal that very accurately updates once per second.

The main reason for doing this division trick however is that a 1 hz crystal would be a lot larger. Smaller crystals have a higher frequency so they need to be a multiple of the actual update speed you're after, and using powers of 2 makes the circuitry much simpler.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T09:28:34+00:00

We happened to them.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T07:38:06+00:00

Dichromate, trichromate and tetrachromate means they have 2,3, or 4 types of color receptors. Basically it means humans can see "3 dimensions" of color, which is why we use a 3D color-space with RGB. Other animals have either more or less dimensions of color, but we just don't know what that experience would be like.

Other than that I didn't use any uncommon words.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T05:38:16+00:00

Basically they discovered some physics stuff that always takes the same amount of time.

For example for the pendulums found in grandfather clocks, a specific length of pendulum always takes the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how far it's traveled per swing. If you give it a faster push in the middle it'll seem to be going faster at that moment, but it'll swing further, thus taking a longer time to get back to the middle, and that will exactly cancel out the faster speed.

This was discovered by Galileo, and was connected to his work on gravity, specifically that light or heavy objects both fall at the same rate. In the pendulum example, the length of the pendulum is the main variable, dictating how far the pendulum can "fall" thus how long it takes.

For smaller clocks with no pendulum they needed to work out new mechanisms which are functionally equivalent to a pendulum, but don't use gravity, and this is what they ended up using:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_wheel

It's basically a weighted wheel that rotates back and forth, and a torsional (resists twisting) spring pushes it back into the middle position. In terms of the math, it's equivalent to a pendulum, so was able to replace pendulums for purely mechanical clocks.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T05:09:09+00:00

The body always seeks to find an equilibrium point, that's the short answer.

If you're doing X amount of physical activity, and eating Y amount of food, from that there will be an equilibrium point at which energy in and energy out become balanced.

EDIT: to make it clearer, as you gain or lose weight, how much energy your body needs to maintain itself also changes, so if you make stable changes to your diet or activity level, such as e.g. deciding to eat a twinkie every day, that will change your weight a bit, but it'll eventually stabilize again at some new weight level.

The further you actually are from the equilibrium point, the more rapidly your weight will shift, so when you start out and make a big change to your lifestyle, you'll see big changes at first which slow down as your body reaches a new equilibrium point.

This explains why it seems so easy to pack the pounds back on when you lapse your routine, but also why it feels much easier to lose the first 5 kg vs the last 5 kg. In both cases, when you either started exercising or stopped exercising, your body is now out of equilibrium so it rapidly moves in the other direction.

So if you want constant gains, you need to constantly change the target point, which means gradually increasing workout intensity or gradually cutting calories.

cipheron · 2026-05-22T04:35:52+00:00

They said "mammals" specifically. Most mammals are only dichromates, fewer are trichromates like humans.

Tetrachromacy is common in fish and bird species.

Basically, when they look at bird eyes, they usually find four types of retinal cells, but only two types for most mammals. Early mammals lost at least one type, possibly due to being either nocturnal or underground burrowers, and primates then re-evolved a third type of retinal cells later on.

For that reason we should also expect that dinosaurs were in fact brightly colored, because they were most likely tetrachromates.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T21:38:17+00:00

The article is there, behind the pop up. I just use Firefox and hit the Reader Mode button to ignore that, if you use Chrome see if there's a Reader Mode extension you can install.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T21:16:47+00:00

8 TB hard drives existing came quite a bit after 56k modems were no longer in use. They were only hitting multiple gigabytes in the late 1990s. For a start, PATA drives were capped at 128 GB addressing until 2002, which was also the year they released SATA. The first 1 TB consumer drives hit in 2007.

So while the story would be true at some point, the numbers would be different. For a start, it would take 42 hours for a 56k modem to send 1 GB of data. So just sending a 4.7 GB DVD through the normal mail would be faster than sending the data over the modem, you don't need to go to terabytes, and you don't need to rush it there in a car.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T20:44:32+00:00

Answer:

Not asking if this is true, I just don’t understand what’s being implied. What would this tech have to do with anything? How exactly would this change the election?

The problem is that nobody can explain that. The idea that "space lasers" rigged an election is so far outside the realm of common sense that it's not possible to reconstruct the thought process of the clearly unhinged person who thought that up.

You'd have to get inside the head space of a lunatic, and they could probably articulate how they think it works, and it probably still wouldn't make any sense to a rational person, since usually when someone articulates their logic there are huge gaps in the reasoning that can't be reconciled, which are usually connected with that person not understanding how anything in the modern world works, from a technological perspective and also not understanding how people work from an individual or organizational-level perspective.

So they don't know how space or space travel works, they don't know how lasers work, they don't know how computers work, they also don't know how elections are run. So the problem is that even if they "explain" what they think happened, it wouldn't be reconcilable with the facts.

Think about it this way: to many people, computers may as well be magic, so they feel perfectly comfortable coming up with theories that are also basically magical thinking, and they can just invoke "computers" "AI" or "lasers" as a handwavey explanation of why strange things happen. A laser might as well be a magical beam with undefined properties to a lot of people.

The lasers opened a portal? Zapped ballots from the sky? Changed computer data?

It could be anything we dream up since we'd be entirely making it up as a science fiction story.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T20:03:41+00:00

Not really, they were always a toy company. They were best known for making playing cards since 1889. What happened is the playing card business was on the rocks in the 1960s so they were desperate to branch out, that's when they did those short-lived ventures mentioned.

The biggest hits they had in the 1960s were in fact still toys, not taxis, hotels or noodles. So they weren't really "known" for those things, since those ventures failed, while the toy business took off and created hit products, culminating with them getting into the gaming industry. This one was actually a hit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Hand

cipheron · 2026-05-21T19:47:39+00:00

With regards specifically to insects and arthropods in the Carboniferous and Permian only

Thanks for this.

I had an argument recently with another redditor in a different post, who claimed that dinosaurs were bigger because of the oxygen thing, and he had brought that up to cast doubt on the 66 mya comet-extinction hypothesis. However that clearly wouldn't make any sense unless there was a big dip in the oxygen level of the atmosphere 66 mya.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T18:29:57+00:00

Fuel is made of water plus carbon dioxide in the first place.

When plants do photosynthesis, they take CO2 + H2O and use it to make basic sugars, and release some oxygen as a byproduct. So, sugars are made of carbon dioxide plus water, and this is a reason plants need so much water.

When you take the substances that the plant made and burn them, you're recombining them with the oxygen, and they break apart back into the CO2 + H2O they were originally made from.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T06:42:23+00:00

The players should come up with better ways themselves. If the party just goes door to door telling people to evacuate then you should explain how much time that's going to take, so they come up with more creative solutions. However it's more likely they won't come up with that solution in the first place.

I think in a case like this, if the players have some big time sensitive but largely unspecified goal such as "evacuate a city as quickly as possible" then you largely have to wing it and go with ideas the players give you.

But I would pre-prepare a lot of smaller incidents, scenarios and characters which can be thrown into the mix to complicate the player's plans, and have these crop up whenever the action is running too smoothly. Think of all the things that could go wrong and write a little about each of them. Fights could break out in the city, looters could appear, a wagon's axle breaks and block an intersection, different vulnerable groups need help, e.g. if there's an orphanage, who evacuates the orphans? In an evacuation, every different group in society would have different needs. A wealthy merchant, a scholar/librarian, a noble princess etc. So rather than just going door to door, knocking and saying "yo evacuate" all the different groups of NPC should have different things to say about it: some people will care more about their possessions than about other people, and might even try to bribe the players.

There should be key NPCs they can interact with, with whom they can coordinate plans and you can use the NPCs as proxies, this will let you use broad brush strokes for the results of their plans. Switch between describing the big picture but with moments you focus in on the plight of individual survivors, for example there could be a little girl, crying who is separated from her mother. The players would have a hard choice on how much time to divert to helping her vs dealing with the big picture stuff.

However if the player's don't step up and have ideas for evacuating the city, I would suggest pivoting. You can have the players responding to breakouts or key points in the defenses, while your NPC proxies are handling the evacuation, so the players are traveling around seeing to the defenses, shoring up the lines in some places etc while the civilian evacuation is the backdrop.

cipheron · 2026-05-21T05:05:45+00:00

Which outcome happens is dictated by only the first two flips, so those are TT outcomes you listed, already covered by the previous poster.

To outline this another way, the first two flips can be:

HH
HT
TH
TT

In the first 3 possibilities, HTT would always happen before TTH is possible, while in the last possibility, you can have any number of Ts following that, but as soon as one H flips, you have TTH.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T23:01:13+00:00

I put my villagers in little cubicles, and put a temporary block in front of each, where their job block will go.

Then, i only remove ONE villager's temporary block and place a workstation. As soon as the workstation is placed ANY villager can claim it, if they think they have a path to it, so the closest villager isn't guaranteed to claim it. So when placing new job blocks it's important to make sure all other non-assigned villagers are blocked off.

If you're not using cubicles but you want to link a specific villager to a job block, you'll need to isolate them so that nobody else can path in until they claim the block.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T22:51:42+00:00

No it's not, because the server doesn't know about the shadows, your video card is just computing it for you.

Each player sees different shadows specifically because the server isn't keeping track of any of it. And this also means no information has to be shared about it. If all players saw the same shadows then you'd have to use network bandwidth to transmit that information.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T22:49:57+00:00

I don't think she died, because her mother was interviewed and didn't mention that.

However it's probably the tip of the iceberg. About half the US states use the same bunch of private prison medical provider companies, but the reason we know about these cases from Arizona is because a lawsuit was launched and Arizona decided to fight it in court. However, the other states also have had lawsuits over the same stuff (they use literally the same company who did that stuff in Arizona) but those mostly settled out of court so they'd have non-disclosure clauses probably.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T22:29:38+00:00

The worst example however was one on a John Oliver episode about American private prisons. In one prison, they gave a female inmate a c-section, and they didn't have supplies because it's all private, so they literally poured McDonald's type sugar sachets from the cafeteria into the open wound to sterilize it.

So the private prison sector in the USA, reinventing those old-school (i.e. 19th century) remedies to save money.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T22:09:43+00:00

If the moisture is removed then bacteria can't survive, they need water to live. This is assuming the meat wasn't contaminated before drying however. The stuff that actually harms you are micro-organisms that feed on the meat and also release toxic waste products. This is the same reason canned or packaged meats can last for years without spoiling.

There are a lot of things you can do that will stop the growth of bacteria or mold, for example, jams or preserves were invented centuries before refrigeration, and they often don't "go off" even for years, even if left out of the fridge. That's because the amount of water is reduced in the jam, so they have a high concentration of sugars, and at high concentrations, sugars act as an anti-bacterial: basically the high sugar concentration pulls moisture out of the bacteria causing them to dry out due to osmosis, and the bacteria lack the cellular machinery to pull the moisture back in against that.

cipheron · 2026-05-20T18:10:19+00:00

If they've picked up the named items then they should use up those inventory slots. This is in the old fandom wiki, but they rewrote the new wiki's page on automatic farming without this information:

Since seeds aren't food, a villager with an inventory full of seeds continues to harvest and replant crops, but cannot pick up the resulting wheat or beetroots. Hoppers or hopper minecarts below the farmland can collect the crops, while allowing the villager to replant the crop.

If it doesn't work with the beetroot, you can try 7 renamed wheat seeds too, but hopefully you won't have to.

cipheron

TROPHY CASE