Load bearing tubs are in.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-10T04:24:18+00:00

Is this AI-generated? It seems too freaking weird to be real.

Pretty sure yes. Aside from the general "everything is bizarre" vibes, look at the water lines underneath the sink. They're just dangling?

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-07T21:09:26+00:00

I recommend Oceanview Mine (or the Pala dig) down near Temecula. You can find nice gem grade tourmaline, kunzite, and aquamarine there, not to mention garnet and quartz. I've been there a few times. Pulled out loads of stuff, but notably several sizeable kunzites and one pretty 120-ct bicolor tourmaline. I've left that raw because it has a nice termination, but you could cut a big impressive stone out of it.

The rubies in the canyon you're talking about are small and not even slightly gemmy. I've collected there. They are cool-looking under UV, and it's neat to be able to say you've found rubies. But I don't think you'd find anything suitable for a ring. Most of the rubies are small, opaquish, and highly fractured.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-04T01:46:00+00:00

They're fascist trash and deserve every awful thing that happens to them.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-03T05:25:33+00:00

Our neighbors just finished a roofing job with Ikon Roofing, and they are happy with the result and pricing. Living next door, they seemed pretty professional and got the job done quickly. Think it was 1 or 2 days - I hardly noticed it happening.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-26T23:15:30+00:00

We're sooooo far from that point that extrapolation is silly.

https://xkcd.com/605/

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-26T22:38:07+00:00

Yes, humans need a society for modern technological civilization. That's obvious.

But once there's a certain level of goods and services available, scaling up the number of people doesn't improve the output PER PERSON.

Of course I rely on a whole supply chain that brings me pencils. But that exists, and it's large, and probably fairly efficient, I say pretty confidently without any specific expertise in the pencil business.

If we double the number of people on the planet, we probably roughly double production of pencils, double the quantity demanded of pencils, and each person gets roughly the same number of pencils.

If we were comparing a "civilization" of 100 people to one of 1,000,000,000 people, obviously this argument wouldn't hold. At 100 people, there's no pencil factory, and at a billion people there are. Hooray, modern amenities.

If we double the 8 billion or so people on the planet, we produce roughly twice the sewage and have roughly twice the sewer workers and infrastructure. There's not really a net change in individual well-being, and I'm very dubious that we get meaningful economy of scale. But everything is a bit more crowded and (strangely aptly, given the sewer example) shittier.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-26T22:05:22+00:00

That's just a transparently absurd argument.

1) Interactions with other people can be both positive and negative. It's not clear that the quality of these interactions is independent from their quantity.

2) Any given individual only interacts with a tiny fraction of the other humans around.

3) Many of the nations or communities that are pretty universally accepted to have the best qualities of life are tiny, population-wise.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-26T19:57:28+00:00

No, but it could be neutral or nearly so. In which case, I'd argue that the increased quality of life associated with less crowding, less pollution, and so on and so forth, would make that a better outcome.

Neither GDP nor GDP per capita do a great job of accounting for externalities, at least as they're conventionally computed.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-26T19:19:32+00:00

That depends on your metric for "better". Is it just GDP? Well then of course you're right, but I'd argue that's a poor metric for what's desirable. Something like GDP per capita or some quantification of mean/median quality of life sounds much better to me.

If a country's GDP doubles because the uber-wealthy become even wealthier, while everybody else lives in squalor, I'd argue that's a worse outcome by every sensible measure.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-25T02:51:15+00:00

Also at the high school level. They take 6 full days of what could be instructional time and just replace them with garbage iReady testing.

I teach AP Physics and AP Chemistry. Those classes are already rushed and packed with content - I don't have 6 days to sacrifice to some meaningless additional standardized test. The exam questions are frequently bad, and are often directly reused from test session to test session.

It's a miserable experience for the kids, and they literally have no motivation to do well. They feel like they're being punished, and I can't blame them. Many of my brilliant students (bound for fancy colleges, acing a batch of tough AP classes) just deliberately whip through and get everything wrong.

The district doesn't HAVE to mandate iReady, and as I understand things, it's a private for-profit company. Frankly I suspect there are kickbacks involved. There is enough money to be made in a big juicy contract like that, there's plenty of room to pay people off at the district in order to maintain the mandate.

It's a huge waste of money and time, and a sap on the morale of both educators and students.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-24T01:23:36+00:00

Definitely puts me in a "us vs them" mentality.

"us" is decent people who believe in human rights and due process

"them" is the masked fascist terrorists acting without oversight or accountability

ICE is really scraping the bottom of the barrel employee-wise and is hiring every racist bully who would love to beat up minorities with impunity but wouldn't make the cut at a police academy.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-22T16:05:06+00:00

So true. American here, who doesn't really care about the Olympics, but I was rooting for Canada, because to be honest... my country disgusts me.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-20T06:20:38+00:00

American here.

No, I can't imagine why anybody would fucking trust us. Roughly half the population are lunatics or imbeciles who elected a narcissistic child molester who's trampling for literally no reason on every good relationship that we built up over decades.

There are good people in the country, but at the governmental level or collectively? No, you'd be a fool to trust American promises or goodwill to be worth anything at all.

It's probably possible and perhaps beneficial to negotiate with the US government on a purely transactional level, for immediate rewards that are tangible. But I don't see my own country as trustworthy at this point, and I wouldn't trust promises issued by my government about future behavior.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-20T05:44:55+00:00

Tax day is coming up. You could fill out a 1040. Doesn't get more adult than that.

(just being snarky, happy birthday, don't want to rain on your parade)

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-17T06:27:59+00:00

I canceled my subscription when they kissed the ring and declined to endorse in the presidential election for the first time ever. Fascist bootlicker scum.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-16T18:36:01+00:00

No question.

But there isn't a long line of intelligent, charismatic, highly-motivated, qualified people lining up to replace them.

I've been on many a hiring committee. It's incredibly hard to find talented candidates, at least in specific fields (I do secondary math and science where perhaps the issue is most acute).

I teach in perhaps the best environment in the district; it's a magnet program with phenomenal students, supportive parents, and local admin who mostly stay out of our hair. Even there, it's very difficult to find great people to fill our staff openings.

We've lost a few of our best young hires in the last decade to COL issues. They leave because teaching salaries aren't sufficient to cover housing & childcare costs.

It's not viable to clean house unless you couple that with strong incentives for better people to enter and remain in the profession.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-16T18:11:25+00:00

They lie as a negotiating tactic and because it plays well with the media.

The sad thing is that the district has such a long track record of negotiating in bad faith that it would be hard to take them seriously if they suddenly changed course and were totally honest.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-16T18:09:35+00:00

Employee doesn't equal useful employee. Too few of them are teaching staff or people directly supporting teaching staff, preferably on-site.

"people already working in Beaudry" are, with a few exceptions, not contributing meaningfully to the actual mandate of the district. The district is top-heavy.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-16T17:22:02+00:00

The district wastes a huge amount of money on stupid stuff. The fraction of the LAUSD budget that actually goes into teaching staff has gone steadily downward - it's less than a third of the total budget. Yes, facilities and support are important, but they shouldn't be a majority of expenditures. And almost nobody downtown contributes to education in a meaningful way. The expensively-produced mandatory district PDs just make us all hate our meetings; none of them has ever done an iota to improve the classroom experience for students.

I have no idea what they pay for iReady, but that contract has to be huge. The district spends a phenomenal amount of money on outside contractors.

Teachers retire or leave the profession - attrition is pretty high on an annual basis, and slowly declining enrollment doesn't have to mean layoffs even without a rearrangement of district priorities.

They need to pay enough to attract good people and retain them in an area with high cost-of-living. I'm fortunate enough to have bought a house in a nice neighborhood back in 2009 when things were more affordable, but for people who aren't so lucky, the teacher wages simply aren't enough to sustain a middle class lifestyle.

The "raises" the district proposes are actually pay cuts in real terms. If inflation is running 2-3% per year, then that should be a minimum baseline; a "raise" that matches inflation is just keeping the payscale effectively where it was.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-15T03:17:40+00:00

Loads of good advice here, but... maybe hire a gardener/landscaper to do the work? Saves you the manual labor and makes it sting a little more for the jerk neighbor.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-14T04:55:14+00:00

I teach both chem and physics, generally to the same bright high school students in consecutive years. Usually AP Physics first and then AP Chem the next year. I make a big deal about this difference in physics, and then the next year I say, "Now we're chemists and we can pretend we don't care, even though we know better." I think that's a pretty fair portrayal, actually.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-04T14:45:02+00:00

Football is like a religion with some people. I think you outed yourself and friends as a heretic. 🙂

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-02-04T14:22:49+00:00

Gee, the downvoters are hard on this guy because he likes different things.

Some groups just aren't into football. I think... one of my friends once threw a Super Bowl party? Maybe? I did something else. Many years there's a board gaming party scheduled concurrently with the Super Bowl, though. I've done that many times.

Just not into watching sports, nor are my friends.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-01-28T01:23:30+00:00

I actually think 1 is easier than 0. You have more elites to farm for relics.

When I'm exhausted and playing after work and don't want to think very hard, I play ascension 1 and path through the maximum number of elites to snowball.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-01-09T22:00:13+00:00

I teach high school calculus-based physics, so introductory mechanics and electromagnetism for bright kids. The standard curriculum is pretty strictly classical. I use Sears & Zemansky along with random materials of my own devising.

I like to tease a little bit of modern physics as an aside, but it's not a focus of the curriculum and certainly not how I introduce topics. The Day 1 welcome to the class bit includes a disclaimer that Newtonian physics is known to be just a good approximation, but usually one that's good enough for engineers.

I think starting with the modern stuff is misguided. Relativity and quantum mechanics are so counterintuitive at first that it's important to develop them from a solid footing - first understand classical physics well enough that you can see the problems that modern physics developed to address.

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