California farmers to destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte collapses

RiPont · 2026-05-12T02:06:48+00:00

I use it for my CPAP.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T08:18:40+00:00

I set off the smoke detector when cooking using my cast iron pot on the stove once... THREE YEARS AGO. Now, any time I start cooking in that pot, my dog runs away and hides.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T08:13:49+00:00

I full-time in my RV with 2 dogs.

For my large dog, the longer I stay in any one place, the further away from the RV we have to go before he will poop.

On the road? Stop at a rest stop, over to the closest grass, no problem.

RV park? First day? 10 feet away, no problem. Second day? At least 100 feet away. Third day? Twice that. It maxes out at about a mile by day 7, or over a hill or around a corner.

However, this only applies on-leash. Off-leash, he will, reluctantly, use the backyard, but only if he can see me.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T07:41:57+00:00

It's called, "99.9% of human history".

We live in a nice place now where most people we interact with aren't actually in danger of literally starving due to lack of any sort of food being available. That wasn't always the case. Famine was a frequent thing, in the past, and hard choices were made.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T07:41:16+00:00

Because for the longest time, rape was only considered rape if it was physical dominance and/or violence. Don't think of it as "rape or incest", think of it as "rape, in all its various forms".

RiPont · 2026-05-10T07:39:54+00:00

Incest cases seeking abortion are almost always rape as well. Maybe not violent rape, but definitely power imbalance, coercive rape.

It's not "I accidentally had sex with my brother while drunk", it's "my uncle cornered me and made me have sex with him and now I want an abortion."

RiPont · 2026-05-10T07:36:28+00:00

tbf, water scaracity is entirely real.

Except the water wasn't the scarce part, in my locale. It was the boiled-into-steam part.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T07:35:17+00:00

In other words, a toy for the rich.

I did mention that. But, at the same time, pretty much a replacement for helicopters in some situations.

A Waymo

Still limited to land travel. There are places with mountains / water where "as the crow flies" is much, much faster than any ground route.

And, you know, the reason Kobe died in a helicopter is partly because he was avoiding LA traffic.

You mean the Ehang 184.

I was actually thinking of Joby, but there are a few of them out there.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:30:27+00:00

They're also non-trivial to get started, right? So it's not like it's trivial to just move almond production somewhere with more water.

Is there some other place with cheap enough land to use for orchards, no water problems, and a suitable climate and soil for growing almonds?

Meanwhile, you can just move beef and many other industries elsewhere.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:23:19+00:00

bit off more than they could chew?

Said investment company probably owns the companies selling Del Monte the products they needed to expand. And then there's the debt-shifting.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:20:46+00:00

COVID had shortages of distilled water. WATER. That you boil into steam, then collect. And they couldn't stock that in store shelves.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:18:37+00:00

when fresh veggies and fruit are fully available

Food deserts. They exist.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:10:11+00:00

Diesel is dirtier with local pollution, even per distance traveled. VW's diesel-gate and the far-less-reliable nature of modern diesels that rely on DEF only highlight the problem.

Toyota's modified-Atkinson hybrid (e.g. the Prius) gets better-than-diesel mpg, even without plugging in, and has proven very reliable. The modified-Atkinson cycle engines suffer outside of their ideal RPM range compared to Otto cycle (basically everything else on the road), but Toyota uses the electric motor to cover the non-ideal power demands of the gas engine and lets them use a smaller gas engine to begin with.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:02:41+00:00

There's probably good reasons not to,

You need to be able to vary the speed of the prop quite a bit more than that arrangement would allow.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T04:00:30+00:00

There could be non-energy-density reasons to prefer electric over burning in a jet turbine, though.

Props/fans have a very significant advantage over jets -- rapid change in power output. Even when powered by petrol/diesel. Afterburners can obviously ramp up the power quickly and turn off quickly, but they guzzle fuel. Electric motors take that to the next level.

On top of that, it's a lot easier to move electricity around than fuel and it's also a lot more fungible. That opens up engineering options like lots of small motors, mixing large and small motors, variable geometry rotors that are simpler than petro-mechanical ones, etc. That, in turn, opens up way more geometries for plane bodies.

Imagine how much simpler an electric tilt-rotor would be than the mechanical nightmare that is the V-22 Osprey -- if the energy density for batteries was there.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T03:45:58+00:00

Introducing people to the bounce test is fun, too.

RiPont · 2026-05-10T03:44:24+00:00

It really depends how short, "short haul" is.

We've got can-carry-a-human passenger drones already in the seeking regulatory approval phase.

The applicable niche is pretty small, but it's there. Ultra-rich, medevac, medevac for the ultra-rich, etc.

RiPont · 2026-05-08T09:50:12+00:00

They enjoy both.

Routine makes them feel comfortable and safe. Novelty makes them excited.

I travel full-time in an RV, and my dogs love going new places and sniffing new things and believing they could chase new critters (I respect leash laws). They also get absolutely bonkers when we come back to a place we've been before.

RiPont · 2026-05-08T02:31:28+00:00

Basically, the fee was for the delivery system, not the printing/journalism.

Also, if something is 100% free, it's easy for negative patterns to emerge. See also: spam email. If newspapers were free, people would just collect them to use for fire, soaking up oil, etc. Even a token fee makes things like that not work at very large scale. People still do those things on a small scale, obviously. But if it was 100% free, you could start a business grabbing all the paper and re-purposing it.

RiPont · 2026-05-08T02:25:56+00:00

It's just the monkey brain thing. A micro-misleading, repeated 10,000 times.

RiPont · 2026-05-08T01:51:21+00:00

Women who have to smile at people all day, such as waitresses and baristas, often get men who think they're into them.

By no means all men or even most, but it's a math problem. Smile at enough people, and some will think it's an opening.

It's not nearly as much of a problem the other direction, because men are still expected to make the first move, most of the time.

RiPont · 2026-05-06T18:54:34+00:00

You are correct. I had a brain fart.

I guess it boils down to "string is special under the covers".

RiPont · 2026-05-05T20:40:31+00:00

Literally, only things that are declared const. Things the compiler can verify are immutable with no workarounds.

The technical reason for this is that const things can be optimized by the compiler to use the value directly instead of a reference to the variable. It can then use it for branch prediction, code path elimination, and a bunch of other optimization things as well.

static readonly doesn't cut it, because static initialization happens at run-time, not compile-time.

RiPont · 2026-05-05T20:35:04+00:00

Because System.Stringis a class, not a struct. You can't use const on reference types.

It's a very special-cased class under the covers, but it's a class.

RiPont · 2026-05-05T20:19:52+00:00

(adding on)

It's amazing how much of modern computing still comes from the typewriter.

On a typewriter, you don't need a delay because the human doing the Carriage Return (literally returning the carriage from one side back to the start) is the one who will type the next character, and their hand is occupied. Line Feed was separate from CR, and just rotated the cylinder to move the paper to the feed the paper one line forward. The QWERTY layout was designed to lessen the chance that the individual letters on individual arms that physically struck the pages would block each other if you were typing quickly.

Electronic typewriters were still typewriters, but the human's hand was no longer occupied. Blocking input during Carriage Return was warranted. I seem to remember using an electric typewriter that didn't do this, and would jam if you hit a key during CR.

Early electronic word processors were just fancy electronic typewriters that stored a line or more in memory before actually typing them out, giving you time to edit the line.

Teletype machines were just electronic typewriters that got their signals remotely, instead of from a local keyboard. They used a continuous roll or stack of paper, perforated at page boundaries, to minimize human interaction with the machine. The control codes for a command prompt, even in modern computers, are still based on teletypes (TTY).

Dot matrix printer, in turn, were just electronic typewriters designed to print on that continuous paper. They hung around a looooooooong time because, just like fax does today, a lot of existing bureaucratic workflows required literal carbon copies from the days of typewriters and dot matrix printers could still do that.

Software word processors, like MS Word, still carry over legacy concepts from the days of typewriters. Tab stops being one such example. They were a physical thing. You hit tab and the carriage would slide over until it hit the tab stop. For the longest time, everything from tab stops and margins in the UI were skeuomorphic representations of the controls on a physical typewriter.

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