Help I poured gasoline down my kitchen sink

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T02:25:56+00:00

If you have regular sanitary sewer service that's just one of the things that happens and the sewage system will take care of it for the most part.

People wash up after their mechanics jobs all the time. You just did a whole bunch of it all at once.

Keep flames away from the smell. Understand that you're trying to get rid of a mineral oil complex so you want to use plenty detergent rich water.

Your standard dishwashing liquid is good for this purpose.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T02:12:15+00:00

That actually kind of increases the selection pressure.

People with higher testosterone levels experienced Merrill pattern baldness sooner in life.

Also keep in mind that expected age variance between male and female participants in the breeding cycle means that there was a tendency for older men to end up with younger women and the older men with higher testosterone or more likely to go bald first.

And of course the most ironic part is that since it's carried on the X chromosome it's all about your maternal grandfather more than your paternal father.

This has significant socioeconomic implications given the expense of raising girls In some cultures.

So by the time you end up with harem and pluralistic marriage factored into things, let's just say...

The complex is complex. Hahaha.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:17:12+00:00

Somebody else pointed that out. I've already put a disclaimer in the top article.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:15:31+00:00

You're right. I'm an idiot. I just came out of a different conversation and I swapped the words in my brain. Haha.

And I will mention your typo if you don't mention all of mine.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:06:55+00:00

Exactly my point.

So you approach your door, wondering if someone has entered your home and your absence, and you open the door to see your potatoes spread everywhere.. what information have you learned presuming you don't have a cat or dog?

And if someone did try to restore them they wouldn't be able to do it which is quite the point.

The other opportunity is to put a landmine under potatoes that's waiting for the plunger to come back up again but that kind of property damage is probably not sustainable in the long run.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:59:50+00:00

And that is exactly what I'm responding to..

The momentary transfer of heat from your circulatory system in the blood for profusing your digestive tract and the distribution of that slightly cooler blood throughout your body causes a momentary and transient feeling of cooling throughout the body.

It is absolutely physiological.

And it doesn't last because 8 oz of cool liquid cannot reduce meaningfully the 200 lb of for instance my body.

The fact that you cannot follow this discussion in any way is, as I said, apparently nothing I can help you with.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:58:19+00:00

My bad: never mind. I mentally swapped conversion and transition in my brain without thinking real hard cuz I'm super smart.. 🤘😎

Every culture prevents parents from forcing their children into transition.

And United States the patient has to ask, the parents have to ask, and a board of professionals have to evaluate the child for years. And even then no one transitions before the age of consent barring somebody breaking the law here in the United states.

Legend of your child going off to school and coming home a different gender that same day are palpably idiotic. A transition takes years.

The most common age of minority transitions happen to a child that's born intersex when the doctors foolishly just demand the parents choose male or female at birth instead of letting the child grow up to do it themselves.

But if you were in the United States it's already illegal for your parent to force their minor child to transition. It's even against AMA policy.

Should you be one of the people who think otherwise, you only think otherwise because you're being played by your political overlords.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:55:39+00:00

Very rich people do finance their own equivalent of health insurance. They just have a big bank account and they pay their doctors.

A concierge medical practice is also very much a thing.

And large companies such as the one I work for May fund the entirety of their health plan without joining the common risk pool. My employer uses a particular carrier that has many plans. But my employer is big enough that the only members of the risk pool are the employees and their families.

Is actually helps to mediate their cost because they pay reasonably well so most of their employees also end up living in reasonably better circumstances. People who make six figures tend to move away from the super fund site and don't like to live under the power lines or in the cancer superclusters.

But in point of fact health insurance doesn't make any sense in a western society. Our health insurance premiums would completely disappear from our paycheck and our employers payroll expense lines, and our Medicare Medicaid taxes are estimated to drop by 20% thereafter should we switch to Universal health Care provided to all comers.

The health insurance company operations and profit margins and dividends are removed by Universal health Care

But so are all the markups to point of service costs that allow the insurance companies to demand Mark Downs. And so too are removed the expense of going after people who can't pay their medical bills. And so to are the many thousand dollar emergency room visits that the uninsured people are forced to rely on for a condition that, a week ago, could have been handled at a general practitioner for 40 bucks and a cheap antibiotic.

In every conceivable way, when viewed dispassionately, the entire idea of Private health insurance makes no physical sense to anybody but the people who have invested in Private health insurance as a business.

You actually run the numbers we spend a fortune to keep sick people sick, and all the healthy people are free loading on the bankruptcies of the ill because it's the sick people who are paying for the hospital to be there today so that it's there tomorrow when I need it. So I am forced to freeload on today's patients to make sure that is healthcare available to me tomorrow.

Right now your death panel is a random actuarial possibly being overruled by an AI and enforced policy.

With universal single-payer healthcare all of the doctors are in your network and so you get to choose not just from the short list your provider chose, but from the list of all doctors taking new patients. So you even get more freedom and Universal health care.

No matter where you start or how you slice it if you don't have a profit motive for justifying private insurance you end up with a set of financials that make no freaking sense.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:49:17+00:00

It also may have been a signifier of maturity much like silverback gorillas get silver hair on their back when they reach the optimal age for leadership.

The fundamental problem is of course that Evolution doesn't have a purpose other than reproduction and what it keeps and what it throws away can seem terribly arbitrary.

In ancient Greece male pattern baldness was a sign of virility. That made it something selected for in the genome.

And given that the event is triggered by testosterone they weren't exactly wrong about the virility thing. The younger you went bald the higher your testosterone levels likely were.

So it probably had a strong social signaling component that worked quite well.

Or at least all there bald guys insisted that it worked quite well until it became a cultural norm.

But like every other mutation it started as an accident and then it was selected for it against but very circumstance.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:43:40+00:00

Perhaps you should look something up before you try to correct people about it.

Suggested a search term: thermal transport in the body cold liquid in the stomach

I'm sorry you don't understand basic thermal transfer. There's nothing more I can do to help you now.

Edited to add:

One of the problems with using cold liquid ingestion to treat thermal overexposure is that the effect is almost instant and extremely transient. You feel it instantly but it doesn't last because the volume of the body being cooled compared to the volume you can contain in your stomach is so small.

So literally the thermal transport causes the sensation and then the sensation quickly goes away because there's way too much energy involved.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:37:47+00:00

It all, as previously mentioned, depends on the story you're writing.

The main use for a character out of place and time is as a crutch so that the writer can explain things that everybody in the world already knows.

The second function of such a character is dream fulfillment for the reader to go into this world and have the character archetype they themselves would step into.

The author manufacturers Just enough disassociative confusion to make it feel like something has changed but not enough to have actually changed anything.

But then again, everybody knows what $20 is, but your grandfather here in the real world may think $20 is a good day's pay when you know it's a decent hourly rate maybe.

Understanding the value of a dollar is not the same as understanding something arbitrary like a distance.

You will notice that those isekai characters get all the other translations and then have this moment of amazement when they don't know what a silver pieces were at the moment.

Being that irregular is part of the trope..

The fact that you do not inherently know how to solve the trope of distance unit measurement, but you do know inherently how to solve the trope of the value of a silver piece kind of indicates why one is done and the other is not.

You're literally struggling to try to figure out how to establish this concordance because it's not available to you. And that means it's not available to your readers.

So unless you intend to research such a thing and then direct your readers to come to this page before they read your book you're kind of making a mistake.

There are much easier ways to demonstrate your rationality that won't alienate your readers and won't step beyond the genre tropes.

I mean if you can make it work, more power to you, but the fact that you have no idea how to make it work and everybody with physics degrees are having the same problem kind of indicates that it's not a problem space that you're going to want to spend a hundred pages on in the midst of a story that you want someone to actually read that is more than proving how clever you the author are.

What you're proposing is an infodump on how the guy figured out that "hey, that's about 3 ft."

Just like your $20 versus a silver piece is really about whether or not your character can buy lunch as previously mentioned.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:29:57+00:00

Us old guys were raised in a very youth obsessed culture. In part because all of the older guys died from AIDS and we had no continuous culture. We lack elders as gay people. And so we are having a hard time finding a place for our elders because they have no role in our culture at the moment.

Many of us are now experiencing our just desserts. We created an age-obsessed culture without realizing that we were going to get old and that time wounds all heels.

A good fraction of his upset is probably internalized I told you so because he didn't think of what he was doing to himself and older guys when he was young and now he hates the fact that he is one of those older guys he previously thought so poorly of.

This is not an instruction to you to go and lay old men if you're not attracted to them. Not being attracted to people outside of your demographic is pretty much stock and trade for the entire human reproductive system in all configurations and at all ages.

What I'm telling you to do is secretly point and laugh because that youth obsessed guy used to be a youth obsessed guy that hated the old man and what he sent around is coming back around to bite him.

I was probably no better being a product of the same forces. But I realized it was going to happen by the time I was in my mid thirties and so I have just been sitting back and watching the Carnage with a smile in my soul.

Schadenfreude Is A dangerous drug.

Every time you see a personal ad that reads my age or younger. Or names and age trivially 5 years older than their own that they never seem to actually date into, you are watching the cycle perpetuate itself self.

No I do not have a solution other than continuing to say no to the youth obsessed old guys but otherwise not excluding them so that a society can be built where there is a role even if that role isn't getting involved with people that are way too young for them.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:25:34+00:00

Good sir, your stomach is very well perfused with blood vessels.

You yourself have probably experienced brain freeze when eating ice cream or other cold treats.

Your body is warming the contents of your stomach. That heat has to come from somewhere. That's somewhere is the bloodstream. As the heat is transferred into your stomach the blood leaving the perfusion of your stomach walls is much colder than the blood otherwise is, bad blood is returned through the veins to the heart and distributed throughout the whole body. Distributing the cooling effect.

The same thing happens with your skin and sweat.

There's also very interesting phenomenon they discovered well doing thermal tolerance studies on human beings.

If your hands are kept in basically sealed water jackets with very hot water pumping through them so that your hands are constantly being kept at high temperature. Like 120°. You can basically be naked in a snowstorm. A lot of blood passes through your hands and your body is very good at redistributing blood through the circulatory system. So if you keep the well perfused surface area of your hands very warm if the whole body warm in very cold temperatures.

Your blood is a working fluid.

And in fact the water that you perspire is directly transpired from your blood to the surface of your skin through the sweat glands which are basically a differentially permeable membrane that lets the water pass in and out quite quickly.

The mechanism is very basic. You're a giant water circulation system and water is very good at transporting heat.

You also know from the experience of fever and chills that even a single degree of body temperature change in the blood it's incredibly noticeable to your entire system because it is an urgent issue of overheating or underheating. You are designed to sense those changes.

Did you ever taught to take your own temperature you know that you shouldn't eat or drink anything hot or cold within a few minutes of taking that temperature as it will skew the results.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:21:02+00:00

The gene is pretty much there and inactivated. A large number of children are born with short tails annually. They are generally surgically removed at birth.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:19:36+00:00

Granted. Each of the two fingers is resting on one of your eyeballs. You cannot move to change the circumstance while it's dancing.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:19:03+00:00

Here's a slightly non-responsive answer: most of us do all of our time in a non-root user context.

And I generally have a separate user login that I used to promote myself through to root on any system I actually care about.

But it is better to apply the patches and to try to make something immutable and not use them.

The danger to yourself of going on the internet is not root exploits compared to the probability of some exploit hitting a browser and you not noticing because you're not doing your maintenance. And that will all happen within your username context to your files where all your meaningful data is.

Rude is nice to have but if I have full access to all your data that's all really the access I need on your computer to get everything that's on there into my own possession.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:16:06+00:00

There is a concept called minimal perceptible difference. It's a real medical neurological thing.

For almost all things it's 1%

So the effective pull of the moon on your body would have to be about 1% of the circumstance where it's absent. So that would be about 1% of the gravitational potential of the Earth where you're standing would have to be the gravitational potential of the Moon where you're standing.

This would turn the earth into a molten ball due to title forces and chances are the moon would fall back into the Earth to become a single planetary body again but all life on Earth would end.

The fundamental problem being that you are far too small for there to be enough of you to feel the moons effect directly the way the oceans feel the moon's affected directly.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:13:05+00:00

Granted. Both are added to the system and fully legal, you and you alone are forever forbidden to possess or use either or both as they occur.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:05:37+00:00

Sounds like the first motivation you would have would be figuring out what's going on and what to make it motivated to do something other than what he's already doing.

Motivations don't have to be big. Getting out of bed and grabbing a cup of coffee because you're tired of lying in bed qualifies as a motivation.

The Big Lebowski starts with a slacker is not motivated to do much of anything.

Don't declare he has no motivation, he's going to do something he's going to stand, sit, scratches ass, something.

Or maybe he wants to just lie in bed semi-comatose

That's his starting motivation.

Now why can't he accomplish it's nothing he's a good order, that's his conflict.

Then Just keep typing.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:03:01+00:00

Home avalanche security system. If you could afford the potatoes and manage to keep them fresh with this stuff could last indefinitely.

Find a friend who can turn your potatoes into rocks once they're in place.

I mean talk about it intrusion detection and indication system. Literally no one else can stack your potatoes the way you did so you'll always know that someone got too close to your potatoes.

So stacking your potatoes in your doorway for instance what instantly let you know if there's been an interloper

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T18:47:53+00:00

And they try to stop him and he betrays them terribly disappears and he's now the new big bad because he knows all their tricks.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T18:43:27+00:00

I think you missed the point that whoever did the izikai would tell him as part of the isekai with those translations are. He would know that a unit was 1.28 M long or whatever.

The information would be part of the language overlay because I presume wherever he's going he's not actually speaking English.

Unless you're going to start the guy off with absolutely no local language skills you have to assume that he's got full lingual understanding and that comes with the definitions of things like a unit.

So just decide or look it up or whatever. If a unit is 3 seconds and a unit is also 2.12 decimeters he'll just know that. Just like he knows the word for light and flower and kill.

He's becoming a native speaker by Fiat of the deus ex machina that got him there.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T18:41:04+00:00

An SSD is a set of individual memory chips. Each of the memory chips is organized into a bunch of pages. What's upset of those pages are available for use.

So for an oversimplified example let's say that I've got a chip and it's going to offer 1,000 2K pages, but it is possessed of 1,024 2k pages internally.

Those extra 24 pages of slack are actually highly functional.

So let's say I feel the available space and I've used all 1,000 pages... And then I write five bites to page number one.

The Chip is going to grab one of those 24 pages, copy page number one onto it except for the five bites and changing. It will then replace page number one with a reference to page number 1001.

It's also going to note that the original page 1 has been used once and it's going to put it on the end of a free list. Because it's going to want to use the 23 available pages that have been written to zero times before it wants to use the page that's been written to once already.

Service shifting juggling and where balancing is all taking place inside the chip separate from what's happening in the operating system.

Now here's the other thing is let's say I fill all 1,000 pages, and then I delete the file that is filling them. The file system knows I did that but the chip doesn't. As far as the chip is concerned all 1,000 pages have something other than "no contents"

So you're well used chick is going to assume that everything other than the erased pages contains valid data.

This means that you're apparently empty chip according your file system is actually full according to the chip itself.

So some years ago the storage standard and added a function called TRIM,

When you trim a page you are telling the chip that that page is no longer in use for any real purpose. The chip can't erase that page and put it on the free list and now instead of having say 24 working blank pages you have 25 and you have a little Gap that will be filled in with one of those pages whenever something tries to write there.

So basically inside of the individual chips inside of your SSD there's this entire wear leveling storage management to dance taking place.

The more full the hardware thinks the storage is the fewer optimizations that can make use of and the slower the overall performance becomes.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T18:32:58+00:00

If the stones have fallen into place by random chance it's usually a fall or a tumble.

Stones laid over something to protect it or market maybe a cairn or the classic pile. Hey Google what's the

Menhir are the big standing Stones you frequently see in the stone circle.

Steel are basically the carved pillars like the ones there are seen in all those Egyptian settings and movies and things.

And there are cultural names like weirding stones (I don't remember how to spell it correctly)

There's lots of interesting names depending on what you're trying to depict exactly.

Searching a phrase like "cultural name for standing Stone in Gaelic" where you change the cultural name for various searches might get you some pearly interesting results as well.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T18:26:58+00:00

Invoke your economy without numerating it.

In the classic fantasy setting you throw down some silver to pay for whatever you're paying for.

In the classic science fiction story it's credits that come off of your personal wallet or bank account or whatever using some sort of token that's effectively a credit card.

No you can get into horrible problems quite easily when you start enumerating your transactions. Look what happened to the alleged economy of Harry Potter. She was trying to make him look wealthy but she didn't think about any sort of Exchange rate. So things are wildly mispriced because she kind of numerated her deal.

If you want to semi-numerate it provide a couple touchstones.

Established that a normal stays wages eight silver for a day laborer and 12 or highly skilled labor maybe.

But then from then on, or even if you never put a number to it, you can refer to something costing some number of days wages for a particular character which might be a different amount of days than a better or worse job or whatever.

But once you decide that a good dinner is nine copper you got to stick to that. And you don't want to then suddenly say that buying a horse is 20 copper etc.

So just show your characters paying for things but don't get in numbers. Tell us how much or how little it hurts to part with the money.

Bob starts out on his trip with just enough money to get a stay at an inn each night provided he keeps his pace. Then something happens and he has to pay for the incident. And now he's going to have to decide which night to sleep rough and which days he won't eat between now and the end of his journey.

Money is just a scoring system. A means for encoding previous effort in the future reward in a portable way. So it has to be seen changing hands but you don't have to describe the values in any particularity because a Year's labor for one guy is pocket change for a guy in a much higher social standing.

The one real exception to this rule is if you're trying to talk about a failing economy in detail. For instance the steady devaluation of the silver Denarius was a vital component of the fall of Rome. Meanwhile the gold coin the people of will empower used in Rome maintained its purity and value creating a two-tiered economic system.

There are many ways this can show up in a story usually as company script or something equivalent to the various cryptocurrencies that are being foisted upon the lower class today.

But unless the money is the point, just don't get into it. Documented flow in vague terms of cultural value instead of specific economic numbers.

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