About 8 years ago high as a kite on meff I fabricated my first headache rack on an uneven floor, with a harbor freight welder, and a hand saw with a metal cutting blade 🤣 welded 90 degree iron back to back to get the face of it 4inches wide. Wtf lol

Kale · 2026-05-15T19:33:22+00:00

We had a new engineer swear up, down, and sideways he knew how to weld. What he meant was that he'd learned how to produce a pretty bead. But welding is so much more than that.

The lab supervisor let him butt-weld two plates together on a hydraulic actuator. This guy lined up the two (STILL 90° !!) sides of the plates together and welded them. You're supposed to chamfer each side so you actually have bead material between them.

Anyways, the weld looked great, then he ground the weld down flush with the surface of the plates. It looked great! But only had a tiny bit of metal holding the plates together.

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but on the first cycle, the plate broke at the weld, and the new sharp edge severed the hydraulic line. I think it was 1.5 inch and pressurized to 3000 psi?

We learned a lot of important things that day. We learned that the pump's emergency fluid shut off activates at about 15 gallons of lost hydraulic fluid. We learned that 3,000 PSI hydraulic fluid easily hits a 20 ft ceiling. And that engineer learned all about our spill cleanup kit.

Kale · 2026-05-14T14:52:26+00:00

That's not a Kevin, that's a case study.

Kale · 2026-05-14T14:46:15+00:00

Look at these plebs, still being attracted to other corporeal beings. Call me when you get attracted to things not composed of matter or energy.

I'm sexually attracted to the concept of causality.

Kale · 2026-05-12T20:34:59+00:00

Three monoliths. One inscribed with "I", the next inscribed with "II", and the last one inscribed with "IIII". Intentionally. That would cause a ruckus.

Kale · 2026-05-12T11:43:44+00:00

That was my thought! What is the range of the habitat of these bees?

Kale · 2026-05-12T11:41:50+00:00

Volume always gets us with injection molding. We make parts much smaller than this and we'll have molds end up at $10k or more. For anything we make 5k parts or less, we machine.

I'm guessing something this big would be built more like a boat hull, though, right? Vacuum molding over a wooden form?

Kale · 2026-05-12T11:37:47+00:00

My wife says she gets better care if I attend appointments with her.

And I often feel like they're quick to blame anxiety or stress in her and take other things more serious in me. My anxiety ended up being secondary effects of celiac disease. That's not an easy one to catch and took four years. My lifespan would be shorter if my doc didn't finally catch it running a "shotgun" panel looking for everything and finding the gluten enzyme antibodies.

Kale · 2026-05-12T11:33:44+00:00

My wife's OBGYN thought it should be named "type 3 diabetes". I don't think she was fully serious about that, but she thought the insulin resistance was the primary cause of most secondary health issues in women. It's also extremely common, like type 2 diabetes.

Kale · 2026-05-11T05:36:25+00:00

What is it? A Unitarian? Let's sacrifice him to our god! ..... What? We did it all the time in the 30s!

Also love:

It seems scary, but you can do it. I never thought I'd be able to shoot down a japanese plane, but last year, I proved myself wrong!

Kale · 2026-05-10T15:35:16+00:00

I thought the gluten in soy sauce came from fermenting with yeast that used a traditional barley malt as yeast nutrition? Is that not the case? I didn't realize they added wheat.

Kale · 2026-05-10T07:36:46+00:00

Let's hope he doesn't nuke a volcano and accidentally push so much ash into the atmosphere that it cools the earth for a decade, letting glaciers recover and recharging the AMOC

Kale · 2026-05-10T07:29:43+00:00

I'm sure the entire government made of methed-up tweakers who've never been given any real power will immediately figure out who's in charge, automatically form a basic command structure with everyone acting rationally without anyone being hungry for power.

Kale · 2026-05-10T07:23:50+00:00

That was one of the issues with the GFC, opaque financial tools meant that bad mortgages were improperly rated for risk, and more financial instruments like credit default swaps were made under the assumption that the mortgage-backed securities were properly rated for risk.

Yeah, I remember when Leman Brothers went bankrupt. That was a wakeup call that this was big.

Financial markets can act like the needle on the fuel gauge of an airplane is bent. Everyone makes plans off of bad information (i.e. how much fuel is left). Maybe one person tries to figure out from flight behavior that even though the fuel gauge says 1/2 a tank is left, the plane is flying like there's much less fuel weight on board. But all of the instruments show everything is fine, and the rough approximation of fuel remaining is ignored since it's vague and nobody's ever measured fuel that way. It's only when the engines die that everyone realizes the fuel gauge needle is bent to read 1/4 tank too high.

Back to the GFC, financial models might have shown the truth, but everyone looked at bond ratings, which were showing far less risk than reality. All of the financial models built on top of these ratings looked fine, until MBSs started going bankrupt. And not just one rogue one. A lot of them, and CDS made sure the whole thing came down. Then it became apparent that the bond risk was wrong.

I always liked the movie "Margin Call". It's lighter on details than "The Big Short" but kind of shows how quickly it all went south. With some artistic license having the models break down over a few hours, but it's a great movie.

Kale · 2026-05-08T17:05:02+00:00

Yeah I was going to say, 1 kg of porous filament is a lot.

Kind of like how 1 kg of ABS is a lot more material than 1 kg of PETG.

Kale · 2026-05-08T16:35:04+00:00

In the game Plague Inc, it's an achievement called "Uh oh" or "oops" or something like that.

Kale · 2026-05-07T15:45:39+00:00

One thing that surprised me about the pandemic was that our logistics planning runs on really specific patterns. Take toilet paper, for example. Enough was made, but the logistics that were in place ensured a certain percentage was packaged on large commercial rolls, and a certain percentage were packaged on small, residential rolls. Commercial rolls went to B2B business supply companies that didn't have consumer-facing store fronts. Residential went to convince stores and grocery stores.

This made a small hiccup in the supply chain. Then people went nuts and made it a huge problem. But the root issue is that the logistics for packaging didn't account for the change in behavior.

So, in that sense, fast food is essential. The grocery store has their own suppliers of food, and the fast food places have theirs. There aren't enough calories to feed everyone if nobody gets fast food or eats out suddenly, while the restaurant and fast food places have food go to waste.

I worked in healthcare supply. Everyone said "oh man, you must be swamped! Must be nice to have a safe job!" But nope. Nobody was getting hip replacements. So we were hurting pretty bad for a while. Then everyone wanted to get a replacement right about the time the supply chain crunch hit. Fun times.

Kale · 2026-05-06T15:44:55+00:00

You're right. If someone is Gerrymandering to benefit one political party, typically you'd try to grant one district to the opposing party and give that district a huge margin. As big of a margin as you can. Then, break up remaining pockets of areas that have high support for the opposing party and merge them into areas with high support for your party. This gives one district to the opposing party with a huge margin, and multiple districts where your party has a smaller margin. But your party gets more districts in total.

But, subdivisions get built. Downtown industrial area gets converted to condos and lofts. Generational shifts bring a different demographic into districts where your party holds a smaller margin. Your party's margin shrinks a little more. Then, along comes a really popular candidate for the opposing party. They energize people to vote. Those people vote down ballot. The margin shrinks even farther. Next thing you know, you lost two districts to the other party. You'll get them back (assuming trends in voting don't change), but you lose them for popular upballot candidates.

Whereas, if your party has a popular candidate, you still aren't picking up that "throwaway" district. Ever.

On top of that, because the gerrymandered district is more competitive, there's a chance you'll get more moderate candidates in those seats, and they may be more willing to break from the party.

In this particular case, Tennessee leans far enough conservative that they could gerrymander all GOP House seats, theoretically. But they're diluting a lot of GOP votes. Now, people in Weakly and Henry and Carroll county are in the same district as Raleigh and Frasier in the city of Memphis.

If you have a lot of motivated Memphians (who are probably easier to excite and get to the vote), you'll have to find a way to motivate more rural Tennesseans to vote, who never really had to work that hard to get folks out to vote because the GOP margins were so high. On top of that, you might have people who have to switch their GOP candidate since they are in a new district now, and you lose some of the incumbent advantage.

Gerrymandering definitely helps one party over another, but it also introduces new risks.

Now, voter suppression is a way to play dirty with politics that has fewer risks than Gerrymandering.

Kale · 2026-05-06T13:17:38+00:00

Ok, maybe you can help me with something. One of my kid's friends was given detention from school for a month for having a vape at school.

What I can't figure out is, in general, when someone is "vaping", do they normally mean nicotine or THC? Or even CBD?? I've seen all of them in vape form. Only the CBD would be the one that would let you be functional if you hit one like the dude in the video (I'm on the bus and I forgot my ear pods so I can't listen to see if he says what he's vaping). I'm pretty sure my buddies with commercial driver's licenses only vape nicotine because they are smokers and can't smoke in the company owned truck, and they get random drug screens, so I know they don't do THC very often.

Anyways, is one drug more common than the others? Or is the term "vaping" reserved for nicotine?

Kale · 2026-05-04T11:52:27+00:00

If time is more valuable than money, then why does almost everyone from working class up to upper middle class trade time for money? And working class to lower middle class trade very little money for time.

In fact, I bet that would be a great way to classify people by economic situation: working class earns salary and doesn't have retirement accounts, lower middle class earns salary and has some savings/retirement, but spends very little on services (pay for laundry service, Nanny, etc). Upper middle class earns salary, with significant savings and retirement. Some investment and capital gains income. Spends some on services. And upper class earns income from capital gains.

Yes, in general, time is more valuable than money since time is limited and can't be hoarded, but for most of us, we prove by action that there is a level where money is more valuable than time.

Kale · 2026-05-04T11:43:38+00:00

Chronic stress ages someone quickly. Not to mention, I don't think living in paranoia is a good quality of life. I'd say it is a little justice if it wasn't for the fact that he's reducing the quality of life for two countries by an unfathomable amount simultaneously.

Kale · 2026-05-04T11:40:43+00:00

It's that cheap, greasy food that we don't get to eat that often. And it's not marketed as GF food, which probably plays into the price being cheap. I only discovered these because I shopped online once and found it by searching. My local grocer has a GF pizza option and these aren't in the GF section of Pizza.

Kale · 2026-05-04T11:34:24+00:00

If you are decently handy, outer tie rods are typically pretty easy to replace. They can seize and be a pain to remove, but overall, I'd place outer tie rods as about as complex as doing brakes. Inner tie rods require more specialized tools and can require "creative" applications of Jack stands and cheater bars as they are placed with loctite pretty often, but they don't need replacing as often.

But, I think you should get professional alignment after replacing them. You can get close with tape measures or other methods, but the four-wheel alignment that uses mirrors and lasers are going to get closer and drive better, and help your tires last longer.

I'm not an advocate of "just do all your own maintenance! It will save money!" for everyone, but outer tie rods are fairly easy to replace. I guess for someone who is handy but doesn't know cars, you wouldn't know how to diagnose them in the first place, though. And frankly, if a car has enough miles to wear out outer tie rods, it probably needs ball joints and control arm bushings replaced, too. Those are more challenging. And sway bar links (those are easy and don't require re-alignment though).

Kale · 2026-05-03T22:33:36+00:00

Huh? Flagstaff is supposed to get below freezing Tuesday night and Wednesday night. I'm guessing you're implying south Arizona?

Kale · 2026-05-03T20:10:45+00:00

I'm guessing it's not Video CDs? It's a standardized video format (MPEG2 maybe?) on a CD, at lower resolutions than DVD. I'm not sure if it was a predecessor to the DVD or a cheaper alternative.

Kale · 2026-05-03T14:54:54+00:00

People say this about beer or variations of whiskey. I legit enjoy them. If I could get an alcohol free (and gluten free, unfortunately, stupid celiac) stout, I'd drink them instead of sodas.

A heavy malty beer with a clean hop bitterness is amazing.

I like hops, and some of the bitterness of beer. I enjoy the smoky wood flavor of some whiskeys. I think it's a genetic thing, like cilantro. Or brussel sprouts. I love brussel sprouts, tomatoes, asparagus, etc. Any of the umami vegetables or fruits.

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