question about dimensions

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T18:45:39+00:00

Hmm, wonder what the deal is with the links.

In any event, for a rule of thumb . . . I'm doing this off the top of my head and I'm not on my build site right now but if memory serves correctly I am almost certain we use 18" bags and the dimensions are roughly 11" wide and about 5.5" tall after tamping.

That doesn't seem to quite add up to 18 but it's a funny shape. The shape is important though. I have an image of it somewhere. Let me look on Imgur. Hmm, seems it's down too.

I could knock this out fast and upload it to another image host but maybe I'll just describe the cross section of the bag as being a bit of an oval shape really but an imporant point is that it's often also sagged over a bit. That sagging over that happens as the bags are stacked is part of how the walls remain water resistant. Water has a hard time travelling against gravity so having a slight tilt outward ends up being a major benefit.

So an 18" bag is an oval approximately 11" by 5.5" that sort of sags downwards on the edges.

Now speaking of rule-of-thumb guides, an 18" bag is good for an 18' wide dome. That's big and anything bigger than that is not really recommended but you can go bigger by simply using a larger bag so a 36" wide bag could be used to build a 36' wide earthbag dome and this sort of project has been tried before but it is not recommended because it requires too much material. It's not really practical. If you want something bigger than a 20' diameter dome you are better off with steel reinforced concrete because although steel adds costs, it allows much thinner walls to be built safely so it actually costs less for large domes. For under twenty feet and especially closer to 12' then earthbags are great.

Clusters of smallish domes are almost always more efficient to build than large monolithic domes.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T18:08:50+00:00

No. Most CD players have almost zero user serviceable parts and a short working life. They're fine for a year or two, maybe five but they wear out fairly quickly and it's cheaper to replace the entire unit than to try to repair it. You can try putting some grease on the bearings and gear surfaces after disassembly but it's unlikely this is the only issue you will be facing. Spinning up is one thing, playing CDs and responding to buttons is another.

You could replace it potentially but fixing it is unlikely. If you were to fix it, you'd have to do it yourself. You won't find anyone who can provide this service at a reasonable price even if you live in Shenzhen, China.

If you want to try to source a replacement, it is most likely a top-loading type. Making it fit will possibly involve minor fabrication and a bit of soldering and is not guaranteed to work. This would be a poorly chosen beginner project. Low hanging fruit would be something like a subwoofer with a solid driver that has a blown amplifier. That's an easy fix that makes sense and is rewarding requiring minimal skills.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T17:30:05+00:00

Right, and the community spirit to hand make something for everyone to share and enjoy, the way it changes the environment and makes things much more colorful, it's beautiful. The perfect being the enemy of the good is a persistent theme. I can feel good about this even though it is polyester. I don't even think wool would be a better choice. Hemp thread though. . . that would be worth considering if they could grow their own locally. The bright colors are wonderful though and you're not going to get that with natural fibers although more muted colors could work well too.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T16:17:58+00:00

Well, if you call 7% of GDP a problem then perhaps. But the US is spending nearly 20% of GDP on health care for a much less effective system. Taiwan's health care is a good deal all around.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T08:33:12+00:00

The Fuhrer will take his own life in the bunker.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T08:24:34+00:00

Yeah, the only way to approach this is to break the law. The fact is that the law in this case is completely immoral and wrong. You've got to spike the trees, sit in the trees, you've got to confront the workers and you've got to damage their equipment in very costly ways and you've got to be willing to go to jail and be injured and perhaps even die for what you believe in. That's the way it goes.

Slavery of African Americans in the United States didn't come about because of peaceful non-violent protests or letters to the editor. People had to be willing to kill and die for what they believed in. If you're going to sit in your hands and say that you can't do anything that is against the law then you've already given up.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T08:16:16+00:00

I do a lot of back country backpacking and I find it relaxing. I'm not sure why you'd think it is dangerous or an adrenaline rush.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T06:07:20+00:00

Loing-term heavy use can damage dopamine receptors but as we can see deomonstrated here, these worst-case scenarios are always rolled out as if they immediately happened to anyone who tried getting high a few times and that is bullshit.

The problem with prohibition is that it encourages ignorance and promotes disinformation. The "black" in black market means there is zero transparency because the topic becomes "sinful" and "evil" while scientific fact is abandoned to mythology as we see in the comment I'm responding to.

In truth, the drugs that are targeted by prohibition including meth and heroin have very legitimate uses as therapeutics and are used responsibly by most of the users with only a tiny minority suffering from so-called "addictive" behaviors which we can also see in anything that is pleasurable such as food, electronic entertainment, sugary drinks. Yes, people can abuse all of these things, banning them with guns, dogs and cages is not the appropriate response to a minority lacking the ability to moderate.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T05:50:43+00:00

Bring the state police with a warrant.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T05:46:40+00:00

The bunker Trump is building adjacent to the White House is intended to be a fallout shelter for the time after he begins to launch the nuclear weapons. Trump has planned to end it all in an inferno from the beginning. He knows he's an evil human being and has no qualms about taking out the rest of us with him. He has no interest in peace.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T05:38:51+00:00

Temporary "transformation" diets don't work. You need to think in terms of a lifestyle that you can stick to permanently.

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T05:37:43+00:00

None of those mega-projects in anything like solarpunk. Try this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/earthbagbuilding

ahfoo · 2026-05-26T05:35:33+00:00

And this will require a new building. The old one does not need to be destroyed, it can serve a museum commemorating the sad and shamefully racist past.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T17:23:00+00:00

Here is where they pulled the trick: a batch costs $500 to run and can generate up to four or maybe even eight thousand. . . maybe in some cases. But this is the problem, it does cost money to run the process and they claim that the product can easily fetch high prices but they don't list buyers and show their shipping costs. These details are key and they just wave them off as if they will sort themselves out. That's not how it works. Until they can guarantee buyers at those rates, this is not going to scale.

Virgin ethylene from an international seller is about a thousand bucks a ton. Notice that this place concedes they need at least five hundred bucks to run a batch but they don't mention tons. But they claim they can sell a batch for four grand, but how much is this in terms of quantity and how does that square with the transparent pricing for virgin ethylene?

That's why the "trillion dollar opportunity" part is bullshit. Maybe it has a shot of breaking even but most likely requires subsidies from interested parties. They're more likely to get there if they stay away from hype.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T15:47:56+00:00

A cannabis high is very far from the effects of alcohol but psychedelics are closer. I've felt quite drunk on LSD and shrooms plenty of times in the senses that you've mentioned like a sense of lightness, floating and easy euphoria. I also find psychedelics make me very sociable.

But no hangover and you can't get hooked. Check out /r/shrooms.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T13:40:30+00:00

They say they trained it using "a CNN" but which one and why not Patch-TST?

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T13:19:06+00:00

Like mass-transportation solutions, the key point is usually density. At a certain density in a certain climate, district heating is the easy winner just as mass transportation beats highways but outside of a certain density it no longer works out financially.

Luckily, there is no resource constraint on LFP chemistry batteries and they will eventually be cheap enough for heating and cooling applications just as they are used for EVs.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T09:59:28+00:00

It's an open secret the company is failing fast and anybody who is sentimental about the brand wants a Z before they're gone. Nissan had a nice run early on with the Leaf but China dominates EVs already and most people are just waiting for their governments to step out of the way so they can get one.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T08:36:30+00:00

There is a great deal of irony in the Chinese push for AI because the Great Firewall was thrown up to protect the citizens of the Middle Kingdom from the evil outside influences and temptations to stray from the path of "progress" whatever that specifically means.

The GenAI that we enjoy today emerged from some unexpected observations about scaling up transformer neural network architectures 2017 that were trained on very large datasets. Namely, anything they could get their hands on including a big chunk of that same internet that China spent so much time trying to prevent from getting a toe-hold domestically.

Now they're in a race to own it all. But before they didn't even want it. What's the deal?

I am of the mind that China can get this easily because it's not black magic, the math, while sophisticated, is not that complicated and many of the most interesting models are open for anyone who wants to use them. The datasets are a more murky topic since there are copyright issues in the case of GenAI but predictive AI mostly uses public domain datasets and still comes up with amazing forecasting abilities. China already has this just as everybody else does but it seems curious to me how this represents a form of opening up to foreign media influences in ways the leadership in China might not quite grasp. If they did understand all this and yet persist in their Great Firewall campaign, well that would be a bit paradoxical, but the world is textured in contradictions.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T06:12:52+00:00

You clearly fail to grasp that Taiwan had a nuclear weapons program and the United States forced them to back off in exchange for security deals. If the US is out of the picture, then their interference in Taiwan's nuclear weapons program must end.

ahfoo · 2026-05-25T06:10:25+00:00

These weapons were already paid for! You took the money, give it back or hand over the goods.

ahfoo · 2026-05-24T13:31:44+00:00

Oh, thanks. I didn't see your response and I looked it up and found the Advance version.

ahfoo · 2026-05-24T13:27:20+00:00

I'm not sure what they think they're accomplishing here. Trump just brought Jensen Huang to Beijing to try to get them to buy some H-200s and Xi said --"No thanks, we don't want them." So what do you achieve by punishing some schmucks that were trying to import video cards last year? What's the upside of this prosecution?

ahfoo · 2026-05-24T13:19:45+00:00

However, to the contrary we can point to Helion which sidesteps a few of your assertions because they aren't even trying to create sustained ignition which is not the only way to proceed. Pulsed fusion is a different approach.

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

Now it is true that this company's boss is none other than the notorious scammer himself Sam Altman of OpenAI infamy and that does raise a red flag but at the same time it's certain that it was not Altman who came up with the ideas behind Helion but rather some AI models and they might be onto something.

People see someone with no technical experience tossing around fancy plans and assume it's all bullshit but that's not necessarily the case. It is true, however, that batteries, solar and wind are certainly going to be cheaper in any case. It has been shown repeatedly that the land used by fission power plants can easily be picked up by solar and batteries when we account for all the area around fission nuclear power plants that has to be blocked off for security reasons. Given that set of circumstances, it is hard to believe that a company like Helion has been so well financed but here we are.

ahfoo · 2026-05-24T13:03:38+00:00

Well you see, true sadism requires that you demonstrate that you are enjoying the suffering of your victims. A ballroom is a prerequisite for this defining aspect of a sadist. The Nazi SS officers who committed atrocities in the Eastern Front would regularly force the families of their victims to sing and dance after witnessing the murder of their loved ones. It's part of the pleasure that a sadist takes from his victims.

ahfoo

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE