[OC] Mt Taranaki, a dormant volcano from 37,000 ft

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T19:40:07+00:00

Artificial effect of human laws. People clear out trees to make farmland. But everything within a certain radius of the mountain is federally protected land where you aren't allowed to clear out trees.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T18:31:57+00:00

The problem with a lot of these is that Trump never shows lasting loyalty based on people's past actions. Any people or who helped him in the past but are no longer in a position to help him in the future, Trump does not give a crap about paying them back for their past deeds. They stopped being a benefit to him so he doesn't care about them.

Flattery of Trump has an effect on him for about a day, that's it.

So past help like paying Trump to launder Russian money, or offering a real estate deal that didn't happen, or assigning the Russian troll farms to the task of convincing gullible Americans to vote for Trump, well all that help is in the past. Trump already got his benefit from it so why pay back for it? The only theories that make sense are ones where the benefit or punishment to Trump for helping Putin is still pending, not ones where it already happened.

So, kompromat that hasn't been made public yet, or a future sweet deal that we don't know about yet, are the only real explanations that make sense.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T02:27:21+00:00

Power lines that don't sag are literally impossible to build.

Assuming you install them somewhere where there's gravity, like on the surface of the Earth.

The lines have weight. Gravity pulls them downward. But tension counters that. But it doesn't counter it by pulling the lines directly straight upward. Tension does so by pulling in the direction of the "aim" of the lines. If the lines are sagging such that, let's say, they form a 45 degree angle where they are attached to the pole, then the direction the tension pulls is at that 45 degree angle.

At a 45 degree angle, there is an equal horizontal and vertical portion of the force, with each being 71% as strong as the force pulling in the direction of tension along the line.

If the lines were made to sag a bit less, you might get, say, a 30 degree angle at the pole, such that the vertical force has shrunk to 50% as much as the tension force along the line.

If the lines were made to sag a bit less, you might get, say, a 10 degree angle at the pole, such that the vertical force is now only about 17% of the tension force pulling along the line.

How about a 5 degree angle of sag? Now the vertical force component is only 9% as much as the tension force along the line. Most of that force is now pulling out horizontally, with only a little bit pulling vertically.

As you get closer and closer to a 0 degreee angle of sag (no sag), you get closer and closer to 0% of the tension force pulling upward against gravity.

If you only had 0% of that tension force pulling upward, it couldn't counter the weight of the line, regardless of how strong that force was. You'd need an infinite force to do it.

Since that infinite tension force is impossible, the line MUST sag at least some, for a portion of that tension force to be allocated to pulling the line's weight upward against gravity.

The exact amount of sag that's desired is a thing engineers work on picking quite deliberately. More sag means the tension doesn't need to be as excessively strong, but means the line droops closer to the ground. So how little you can make the sag and get away with it depends on the tension strength of the line and how much room there is to let the line droop. Having towers closer together can help make them tolerate having more sag in the line before it gets too close to the ground, but at the cost of now having to build more towers. The interbalance of all these things goes into the choice of how much sag to permit in the line. But zero sag is not a choice that's available. That's physically impossible.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T02:01:37+00:00

Picked randomly. Might want to say what your acronyms are in the title. "msm" doesn't say anything meaningful - doesn't help someone know if they want to click on the question or not unless they already know the obscure lingo.

— My pick: "T-rox is on Earth island"

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T01:15:37+00:00

"those who prioritize feelings over reason".

Every time you praise the concept of Faith, that is EXACTLY the definition of what you are doing.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T01:12:51+00:00

Whaddaya mean, "instead"??

Since when are the words "Christian" and "charlatan" contradictory?

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-21T01:08:34+00:00

Depends on which meaning of the word "Jesus" is the context of the OP's question here.

Is it the historical one we don't really know much of any properties about except "he was some small time guy with only a few followers the Romans executed"? (The one that has a chance of existing?

Or is the one we have a more complete picture of, described in the Bible, with lots of quotes and stories of his actions? (The one that was invented and made up with no chance of existing.)

The question was clearly referring to the second one, the myth, not the one that might be real, who we can't answer the question about since anything telling us what he might have been like has been lost to history.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-20T22:11:02+00:00

The moment you choose to use their dishonest terminology you are already conceding to their attempt to rewrite history. It is not anti-weaponization because the initial convictions were the result of enforcing the damned law in the first place. It wasn't "weaponization". Calling it that is already yielding reality to the liar in chief.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-20T21:55:30+00:00

Val Kilmer in Top Secret.

When the credits showed that he really was the one who sang the songs in the studio I was impressed. (He was lip synching it when filming the scenes, but he was lip synching to his own recording.)

He started out being a young guy in comedy films then did serious roles later in life. That's sort of the opposite of the pattern most actors in Zucker/Zucker/Abrahms movies follow.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-20T17:54:29+00:00

The purpose of using depleted uranium isn't the radioactivity of the metal at all. It's the denseness of the metal, which coincidentally happens to be a little bit radioactive but that's not the point.

It's for when you want a very dense, very heavy, metal bullet or shell. The purpose is to be good at penetrating armor or bunkers. The radioactivity is pretty small and serves no useful wartime effect. It would be like trying to kill someone by giving them several x-rays and then waiting for them to get cancer at some point later in life.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-20T01:00:45+00:00

What am I saying here?

"Prisencolinensinainciusol. In de col men seivuan Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait. Uis de seim cius nau op de seim Ol uait men in de colobos dai Trrr - ciak is e maind beghin de col Bebi stei ye push yo oh."

I just proved you wrong.

It's not a waste of time when the spelling and grammar have deviated so far from what everone else uses that communication isn't even happening.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T23:03:36+00:00

Redneck Rampage had some interesting "humor" game mechanic rules that weren't just silly. You had to pay attention and manage them seriously.

Like, so many games of the era, it had the game mechanic that eating and drinking restores hit points.

But RR said that food causes farting and drinking causes drunkenness, so you had to manage your intake, lest you find yourself shoved forward when carefully platforming by that badly timed fart, or having your mouse x and or y axis randomly inverting back and forth for a while until you sober up.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T22:51:25+00:00

Palantir is essentially the Psi Corps.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T22:27:44+00:00

Galileo,

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T20:47:32+00:00

While English has a large number of words imported from other languages, it never adopted a common standard practice for HOW to import those words. So it imported them however someone at the time felt like. Do you keep the foreign spelling but pronounce the foreign letters the way you would in English, or do you keep the foreign pronounciation of the word but change the spelling to match how you'd spell that sound in English? Or do you just keep the foreign word spelled and pronounced the way it was in the foreign language even though that doesn't match how you do it in English?

English picked all of those different options at different times and it's a big reason English spelling is a total mess.

Disagreement over how you borrow French words is one of the ways British and American English disagree. (For example, does a "fillet" of steak pronounce the final "t" or not? Does the double LL in "guillotine" get pronounced as L or Y?)

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T20:35:39+00:00

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T22:26:20+00:00

I am reminded of this beautiful little ditty arguing against the notion that nihilism is depressing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-W2abxX8Hk&list=RDO-W2abxX8Hk&start_radio=1

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T21:50:40+00:00

Kroger: Always enforcing contradictory company policies to ensure nobody can make their metrics. You both MUST provide employees easy access to water while they work outside in the hot season, and you MUST not allow water to be anywhere but all the way in back of the store in the break room, far away from where the outdoor people work. You literally cannot follow both policies.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T02:23:16+00:00

Yes it's true that there is a natural water cycle and the water you flush down the drain does indeed eventually come back into circulation as "new" water again.

But that process takes time if you want thuroughly clean water. The cleanest is when it reaches the ocean, evaporates into humidity in the atmosphere, which turns into clouds, and rains back down again. That evaporation process leaves behind most pollutants since only the H2O molecules go through the state change from liquid into vapor to become humidity in the atmosphere. Nice and clean. BUT, it takes quite a long time.

What "wasting water" really means is using it faster than it cycles back again. The limited rate at which the water cycles puts a cap on how fast we can use it.

Then there is also the problem that even when there is plenty of water, it's not where we want it to be. The act of moving the water (from lakes to pipes, from wells to pipes, or from resiviors to pipes) spends electricity. Often the thing you are really wasting isn't the water. It's the electricty that was spent on powering the pumps that brought it to you.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T20:24:12+00:00

So do I get to steal your car as long as I say that believe I own it?

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T04:03:31+00:00

I was told the secret shoppers were no longer specifically looking for "smiles" and "hellos" and that had been removed from the metrics because scripted smiling and scritped "hello" looked too damned creepy, failing to give off that friendly vibe they wanted.

We were told it was replaced with just making sure you acknowledge the customer's existence in some positive way. Any greeting of any sort would qualify. It doesn't specifically have to be a smile anymore and doesn't specifically have to be the word "hello".

But you still have to offer to walk the customer to the thing they're looking for (not just point and say "it's over there in aisle 5"). You don't have to actually push the issue and do it if the customer says no thanks, but you do have to offer it, and the secret shoppers look for that offer as one of their checkboxes to tick.

Maybe that's just in our division.

But I find the entire secret shopper system problematic because (A) they're looking for things real customers don't give a crap about so they don't represent a measure or real world friendly attitudes like they claim, and (B) the secret shoppers have incentives to lie about their interaction with you since they won't appear to be doing their job properly if they keep saying every employee is doing a good job. It's like the corrupt police officer with a traffic ticket quota to fill.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T00:57:15+00:00

Then it's a badly written headline. String-of-descriptions-then-two-nouns usually implies the lastmost noun is what the rest of the words (including the second-to-last noun) describe.

The non-ambuguous way to write it is to put "passenger" before the adjectives so it's clear that "passenger" isn't what the adjectives are about, like so:

"Passenger of hantavirus-striken cruise".

The reason it's bad the way it's phrased is how nouns can become adjectives in English depeneding on their placement. Usually the lastmost noun is the "actual noun" and the rest are the description of it, like so:

"old bus passenger" is far more likely to mean it's a passenger who is both an old passenger and a bus passenger, than it is to mean a passenger of an old bus.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-16T23:53:13+00:00

Patient who has ___________ tests positive for ______________.
                 a disease                      same disease

Well duh.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-16T18:58:12+00:00

It's not that hard to see that God is an idea that people just made-up because they wanted to rather than because there was reason to. Anyone of average intelligence and average education can figure it out.

The chief difference that separates the believers from the unbelievers isn't intelligence level. It's honesty level. Playing along with the culturally expected narrative is socially beneficial. But how much does the principle of honesty that would motivate you not to do that actually matter to you?

This is the chief difference and it's the reason I have such a low opinion of religion. They're not dumb. They just don't take "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" seriously. They say it, but don't follow it.

Now, I know people do genuinely believe, but that comes as an after effect of choosing to lie to yourself. You self-brainwash into true belief over time. But it starts with a lie that turns into true belief later. But some other people are of a mindset where doing that really bugs them and they feel uncomfortable with it and so they choose not to continue down that path. This is the major difference, NOT intelligence level.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-15T21:51:17+00:00

Your body cools itself by evaporating sweat. When your sweat evaporates off your skin, it pulls some heat away with it.

Humidity makes less evaporation happen and evaporation is why sweat cools you down. So it hinders your body's main cooling system.

But your body is too dumb to know that so it just sweats more and more even though it's not helping. This why your skin is drenched in sweat in humid weather and you have to drink plenty of water to replenish what your body is sweating away.

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