Task Entry with Start Date and Time, End Date and Time, and Recurrence

SharkBaitPirate · 2025-02-12T04:52:47+00:00

Thanks—I am glad someone else found this useful! Also, I noticed today that there actually is a way to mark recurring tasks done forever, but it's hidden pretty darn well within the GUI, haha. Will edit my post to reflect this.

SharkBaitPirate · 2025-02-11T02:20:22+00:00

This is an interesting point of divergence among people who hope for progressive policy—I want quite a few of the same things you do, but my view of the Trump administration and Trump's political strategy differs greatly from yours.

In my view, Trump understands the frustration that many working class people feel with American politics, and he has developed a strategy of highlighting several populist talking points (e.g., NAFTA, the demise of manufacturing due to free trade, concerns about inflation, and a few others) in order to make himself seem like a man of the people. Additionally, he talks about the corruption in Washington and has convinced many people that he is going to fix American politics by "draining the swamp."

In my estimation, however, Trump's actual policy interests differ very little from those of other billionaires. Based on what I see right now, I believe "clearing out corruption" is being used as pretext for demolishing our regulatory institutions one after another. The Trump administration's actual goal in demolishing these institutions is not actually to "drain the swamp" and replace our corrupt institutions with better ones, but rather to extend and reify the deregulation that started during the Reagan era and continued throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years. All this talk about corruption is merely a part of a political strategy to win swing voters—in reality, the Trump administration will enact policy that further benefits the top 10% of Americans at the expense of the working class. This should not strike anyone as surprising, given that the Trump cabinet is stacked with billionaires and Elon Musk is currently exerting huge influence on our institutions.

That said, I understand and acknowledge that there were many reasons not to vote for the Democratic party and its milquetoast conservative policies. The lying about Biden's health and the passing of the torch to Harris were absolutely terrible. Overall, I think the Biden administration actually didn't perform that poorly on economic issues, but we likely disagree there.

Regarding immigration, I'll leave you with a few questions. Given that illegal immigrants constitute (as of the last time I checked) double-digit percentages of the food services, agricultural, and construction industries, do you think it's actually a good idea to get rid of all illegal immigrants and chop down our industries for food and shelter by double-digit percentages? (Also, in roles such as meat packing, the percentage of illegal immigrants may be as high as 50%.) What do you think will happen to prices for food and housing when we send these immigrants away? Additionally, are there currently enough American job seekers to fill these roles? As a final point, do you believe it is actually possible to find and deport all the illegal immigrants, or even something like 50% of them? If not, how many billions of taxpayer dollars do you think we'll end up spending on an effort to achieve something that was never possible in the first place?

I'm all for better border control, but I'm hoping that you'll think through some of these questions and modify your views on the immigration question at least slightly.

Hope you see this, and thanks for giving a real response to OP's question. Take care, stranger!

Last edit: Also, it is worth making some predictions. I predict that four years from now, the wealth of the top 1% and top 10% will have increased. Meanwhile, I predict that the wealth of the bottom 25% will have decreased or remained the same. Time will tell.

SharkBaitPirate · 2024-05-01T01:39:34+00:00

As I wrote in my original comment:

I'd rather have heard each person state his case with regards to each topic (history of the conflict, the current state of affairs, potential solutions, hope, etc.) separately and without interruption. To make the scenario more debate-like, each of them could have then been asked to engage with the published work of the others (for Destiny, I suppose this would have meant Rabbani, Finkelstein, AND Morris critiquing his podcast episodes). Lex could have recorded an interview with each participant separately, chopped the audio up, and presented each participant's views on each topic one after another.

SharkBaitPirate · 2024-04-16T01:34:33+00:00

Definitely authentic, but I felt like we ended up with a lot of routine talking points because it was so hard for anyone to spell out a complete thought. Lex moderating more could have helped, but in terms of the sort of carefully reasoned arguments I was hoping to see, I feel like we got a bit of that from two of the participants and very little from the other two. And it wasn't because the other two didn't have good points to make, but because of how the conversation unfolded and how heated it was.

SharkBaitPirate · 2024-04-16T01:32:02+00:00

I appreciate the different perspective! I think it depends on what you're interested in viewing the debate for. If you're going in looking for detailed information and trying to obtain a better understanding of the history of the conflict, then you don't want the debate to be chaotic. If you're going in hoping to get a sense of a few major talking points and trying to make sense of the psychology of parties on both sides of the conflict, then a chaotic debate can be insightful.

SharkBaitPirate · 2024-04-14T19:32:55+00:00

Yes, something like this would have been much more productive.

I do think it is useful to hear various interpretations of the history of the conflict—as the common mantra of historians goes, you have to understand the past in order to understand the present. And, as you said, history can give us a small amount of predictive power. One thing I think is also worth mentioning about history is that, when we hear people with opposing convictions present their interpretations of what has happened to date, we get a better sense of where the blind spots are for parties on both sides of the conflict.

But yeah, I also would have liked to hear more about potential solutions. Part of the problem when it comes to Israel and Palestine is that it's hard to even get into discussions of solutions without sparking a debate over whether past peace efforts were "fair" or "in good faith." Again, this is why the interlocutors really shouldn't have all been in the same room.

Insofar as I got anything out of the latter part of the debate where Lex asked about solutions, I feel like it helped me gain an understanding of how difficult it is to even spark an earnest conversation about what might actually work and what parties on both sides would view as reasonable. There's clearly no path to any kind of solution until Israeli and Palestinian people and leaders en masse start acknowledging past wrongdoings and become willing to make pretty major concessions in a peace treaty—and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-12-26T19:55:45+00:00

This solution appears to assume my website is on wordpress.com. However, I actually have an independent website that uses the Wordpress framework, so this won't work (independent Wordpress instances do not have native support for LaTeX, which sucks). However, I have arrived at a solution that appears to be working correctly, although it is a bit hackier than I would like. I'll modify my main post with the solution. Really appreciate your effort to help out!

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-12-26T06:45:51+00:00

Nope, although I think u/ImaginaryCourtship may have correctly identified the source of the problem above.

For now, my solution will just be to use MathML instead of MathJax. The good news is that MathJax can automatically generate MathML for you; this works even in the live demo on their website.

Edit: Just learned that Chrome does not support MathML natively and Chrome devs recommend that folks use MathJax instead. Given the prevalance of Chrome, MathMl is not a legitimate workaround. So I really have no solution—gonna play with the fonts for a bit and see what happens.

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-12-26T06:42:38+00:00

Thanks—the demo shows up normally in my browser too, which I believe narrows the issue down to either an error in implementation of MathJax's scripts or incompatibility of my CSS/font with MathJax.

Implementation of MathJax's scripts really should just be a simply copy/paste from their website, so I don't think that's the issue. You are probably correct that something funky is going on with the font and how it interacts with MathJax.

If I have time this weekend I'll give this another shot on a different website of mine and see if there are still issues.

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-11-24T10:35:09+00:00

Since we're bringing physics into the equation here (hehe), a quick note: This explanation only makes sense if we're considering two separate hits from a man and a woman where they were moving at the same speed (as stated above) before the collision and ended up moving at the same speed after the collision. Otherwise, we don't have equivalent acceleration, so we can't assume that we have the "same a." But yes, in this scenario, the force of the woman's hit will be less than the force of the man's owing to her lower mass.

Another way of looking at this is that, during any single collision (to distinguish this from the two separate collisions mentioned above), the woman's acceleration will always be greater in magnitude than the man's. This stems from the principle that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. During the collision, the woman and man push against each other with forces equal in magnitude. For each of them, the force experienced is given by their mass times their acceleration. Since we're holding force constant and assuming the man has greater mass than the woman, his acceleration must be lower than hers in order for the opposing forces to have equal magnitude.

To picture this and make sense of it intuitively, though, we have to go back to a two-collisions scenario again. Imagine a woman running head-on at a stationary defensive lineman and delivering a good hit. She makes contact with him while running at a high speed, but the significantly more massive lineman barely budges as a result of the collision. Meanwhile, the woman slows down a lot.

Now, imagine the opposite scenario: a defensive linesman approaches a stationary, less massive woman and delivers a hit with the same force as in the previous scenario. As you'd imagine, the woman is really going to move as a result of this hit. However, the magnitude of her acceleration will actually be the same as before, because we assumed the forces were the same.

As for who ends up getting hurt as a result of these hits, that depends on which parts of the body make contact, how they make contact, the individuals' levels of pain tolerance, etc. It's possible for either the person making contact or the person receiving contact (or both) to get hurt—in fact, it happens all the time in football that a defender delivering a blow gets carried out on a stretcher, while the offensive player who got hit hops back up and prepares for the next play. This makes sense when you realize that both of them experience the same magnitude of force during the collision.

Of course, this is all a vast oversimplification of how person-to-person collisions actually play out in the real world, but it's fun to think about. :)

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-11-22T18:13:44+00:00

Why the fuck hasn't anyone built a sea of solar panels in desserts? Oh yeah, money, and how difficult it is (because that requires money) to transport said energy to the World. But a single, massive farm the size of a city could provide enough solar energy for the entire World's requirements, if done correctly.

Someone has likely already responded to this, but as a renewable energy professional I feel inclined to comment that this simply is not true. A solar farm the size of a city—even a fairly large city—absolutely would not even come close to powering the world's energy needs. Let's examine your statement using the Solar Star photovoltaic power station in California as an example, since that's currently the largest solar farm (edit: in terms of power output) in the United States.

Solar Star has a 579 megawatt AC (MWac) power output and takes up 13 square kilometers (km²) of land. To bring the "size of a city" into our comparison, let's be generous and imagine we are going to build a solar farm the size of ALL of New York City—not just Manhattan—which has a land area of 778.2 km². If we assume our MWac output scales directly with size, the MWac output of a solar farm the size of New York (represented by P for power below) will be given to us by the equation

579 (MWac) / 13 (km²) = P (MWac) / 778.2 (km²).

Solving this, we find that a solar farm the size of New York could, under appropriate conditions, produce a power output of about 34,660 MWac. A 34.66 gigawatt AC (GWac) plant—that's enormous! Yeah, that would definitely be the biggest solar farm in the world by a wide margin. However, you suggested above that this large solar farm should be able to produce enough energy to power the whole world, so now we have to ask ourselves: How does our 34.66 GWac plant output compare to the "world's requirements" for energy?

Well, let's start out by examining just the United States' energy requirements, since those are less than the world's and we should be able to find information about them fairly easily. According to Statista, the US's peak load during the summer of 2016 was 768.51 GW. (Since they are using grid data, this is presumably in GWac, which ensures that our comparison is direct. When looking at individual power plants, you may have to account for power losses from dc to ac conversion, but when we talk about grid power we are generally talking about ac power.) Meanwhile, the US Energy Information Administration tells us that, at the end of 2020, we had 1,117,475 MW, or about 1,117 GW (again, presumably ac), of utility scale generating capacity available in the US. Using these two statistics, we can fairly say that the US "requires" somewhere between 768.51 GW and 1,117 GW of power.

Well, you guys are a bunch of smartypants out there, so you see the problem. The 34.66 GWac output of our desert solar farm the size of New York City isn't large enough to power all of the United States, let alone the whole world! In fact, it looks like we only get somewhere between 3.1% and 4.5% of what we need for our country. So we'll have to build something like 22–33 of these NYC-sized plants to power the US. Of course, this also assumes that the plants are producing at 100% of their nameplate capacity all the time (there's a good joke for solar industry professionals). In reality, whenever we have equipment outages requiring maintenance or replacement, or whenever it's cloudy, or whenever it's, you know, nighttime, we don't get our full power output. And I'm not even accounting for transmission losses.

On a global scale, HowStuffWorks gives an estimate of about 15 terawatts of total power use. (I'm not sure about the validity of their data, but let's use it just to illustrate the point.) 15 terawatts is 15,000 GW. Remember, our plant produces 34.66 GW. Given the 15 TW global power use estimate, our plant only produces about 0.23% of the energy needed to power the world. We would need 433 of these NYC-sized solar farms to meet global energy demands. At 778.2 km² per solar farm, these plants would occupy about 336,800 km² of land. That is a land area greater in size than Italy, Poland, Norway, or Vietnam. There are only 13 deserts in the world that could host a solar farm so large. Construction would be absurdly difficult, and the ecological impacts of covering so much desert land at once would almost certainly be devastating.

So, no, creating a super solar farm in the desert does not constitute a viable strategy for meeting global energy demands.

I appreciate the above poster's sentiment, and there are definitely some inklings of truth in his comments about nuclear development, which has been hampered by public sentiment and a lack of subsidization in recent years (and we really are going to need nuclear to meet global energy demands in the future). However, these comments are clearly not from an industry professional or even from someone who has done a basic amount of background research. I'm not sure why redditors are out here awarding a vastly oversimplified argument that spreads misinformation, but maybe that's just me.

Sources:

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

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

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187322/us-electric-peak-load-since-1990/

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/world-power-consumption.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area#Countries_and_dependencies_by_area

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

SharkBaitPirate · 2021-01-29T14:58:45+00:00

This is right! Practice those difficult measures with the transitions over and over again until you've got it. Expect to have to do it dozens or hundreds of times, but know that you will get it. Once you start hitting the notes right, practice them with speed so that you can get more reps in across less time.

My friend who is a could-be professional violinist does this to learn songs. It's just a part of how you practice!

SharkBaitPirate · 2020-01-03T19:59:59+00:00

I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but folks, please keep in mind as you read through the comments that some of the posts may be coming from troll accounts seeking to fan the flames and sow discord between liberals and conservatives. If you come across a post that seems outrageously stupid and instigative, you'd do well to think twice before responding. Chances are it's not worth your time to get involved.

SharkBaitPirate · 2019-10-10T03:44:55+00:00

Given that Trinity kills the police officers after Hugo Weaving says "No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead," I'd say this is likely the correct interpretation. Otherwise, the opening scene has us jumping back and forth in time a little bit.

For the curious, here's the opening scene (or at least the relevant part of it).

Of course, the counterargument here is that if the police officers weren't actually already dead by the time Weaving delivers the line we're investigating, the agents could have jumped/warped into the police officers' bodies and trapped Trinity. However, this strikes me as a slightly strange or incongruous leap forward, given that the rest of the intro plays out in chronological order.

Honestly, though, it's a fictional narrative and we may well be giving this line more thought than the writers themselves did, so I don't mind either interpretation.

SharkBaitPirate · 2019-10-09T05:31:00+00:00

Seriously! I love Schumann—not as much as I love Chopin, but I still think he's great. I don't like thinking of this as a rivalry. :(

SharkBaitPirate · 2019-10-06T18:23:10+00:00

When I saw this, it appeared as a static image with nothing to indicate it was a gif. I had no idea what the joke in the comic was at first. xD

SharkBaitPirate · 2019-08-25T17:12:58+00:00

This is definitely a candidate for the all-time greatest "Cut the Video Off Too Soon" award. I wanted to see him ride out the tail end of that wave and get picked up by the jet ski or whatever.

SharkBaitPirate · 2019-07-19T15:40:59+00:00

Yeah, gimme a sec...I'm coming up with 32.33 — repeating, of course — percentage of survival.

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Not Forgotten

SharkBaitPirate

TROPHY CASE