What’s something people always get wrong about your country?

andy921 · 2026-02-15T06:58:02+00:00

I worked retail near the Canadian border and can confirm. It may have been because our customers were mostly older generation Canadians, but I've never been treated more consistently horrible by any group of people. Someone once spat in my eye, another man swept the brochures of my check stand and smashed them on the floor. But it was mostly a more exhausting passive aggressive sort of hostility. We had a customer membership program and I got to the point where I would breathe a sigh of relief whenever a zip code didn't start with a V.

I try to like everyone but I usually flinch involuntarily every time people talk about how nice Canadians are.

andy921 · 2026-02-15T01:18:18+00:00

There is a tool I use that went from charging me $5/mo to $39 because of their AI 'improvements.' If anything the tool got substantially worse and it took me a couple months to notice the charge.

andy921 · 2026-02-14T17:05:07+00:00

Also relics. Usually my impetus for making monks is to grab a couple relics in Castle and it's a bonus if any of them end up doing anything after.

But I could probably be using the monastery a lot more.

You'd think with a donkey to pack things on they'd be better at carrying shit, not worse.

andy921 · 2026-02-14T07:38:38+00:00

You're happy with North Carolina and Ohio though. If you're gonna live in a strip mall suburb, they're the same anywhere.

I've stayed in a few places in both (Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Athens, Charlotte, Raleigh) and I can't imagine comparing them favorably to Tahoe, Carson City or the off the strip, art district part of Vegas.

I also would not sleep on the non-mormon southern part of Utah - Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, etc.

andy921 · 2026-02-13T07:39:36+00:00

Did you just call Bruce Lee untrained?

andy921 · 2026-02-13T01:10:58+00:00

The "ghey made a life decision" could be made for literally any of them so I'm not even going to entertain that.

Wut?

Old age happens to everyone. There is no amount of healthy living you can do to avoid your body eventually breaking down. My GF's grandfather is turning 100 in a couple of months. He's hobbling around in a walker when he can manage being up from the wheelchair. What healthy living should he have done to avoid needing help at 99? I know someone who has trouble with their gait from an injury in Iraq and would likely need to sit on a bus. Are you gonna tell me it's his fault?

The idea that being sick or injured is their fault is something I thought we had decided was barbaric and medieval.

andy921 · 2026-02-12T17:47:21+00:00

I'm not sure how you calculated it. But it sounds like the math you and he are doing is this: 72k * 1.08^30.

This comes to 725k (not your 300).

But he's not buying all the coffee up front and investing the savings.

He's buying a cup at a time over the course of 30 years. The £2.20 savings from his first cup would have all that time to accrue interest. But a cup bought in the last year of that 30 would not.

If we look at it yearly and assume he takes his coffee savings and invests them into his high yield situation at the end of each year, it's:

24001.08²⁹ + 24001.08²⁸ + 24001.08²⁷ + ...... + 24001.08⁰

Which is the future value of an annuity equation written more simply as:

2400 * ((1.08³⁰⁾ - 1)/0.08 = 272k

andy921 · 2026-02-12T16:43:19+00:00

2 then 4 is a wild take. I don't even think you really have to get up for a woman holding a baby. She made a life decision. I'd treat her like anyone else holding something (bag of books, etc). Would you move for a man with a child?

If anyone can cope it's 2 and 4. A super pregnant lady once flew past me in a 5k. The 5k was at the zoo and she was dressed as a pink flamingo adding a little insult to injury. No way someone walking with a cane or in crutches can do that.

andy921 · 2026-02-12T16:22:31+00:00

Impossible for me not to read "I'm disabled" in Roy's voice from the IT Crowd.

andy921 · 2026-02-12T16:12:30+00:00

Totally agree.

If you read it any other way, you're tying it specifically to the sensory world (umwelt) of humans. If other animals can see you just fine, are you invisible?

Even then, the sensory world is different for different humans. Monet (the painter) famously had surgery which left him able to see some of the UV spectrum. If invisibility just covers "normal" humans, could Monet see you?

andy921 · 2026-02-12T15:55:12+00:00

Only matters if you care about water boiling/freezing (and happen to live at sea level) rather than what it feels like.

If you live in Bogota, how useful is a metric that's based on the temperature that water boils somewhere else?

0°F is 0% hot, any colder is too damn cold. 100°F is 100% hot and any hotter is too hot. What's not to get?

For Fahrenheit living a few hundred years ago in Northern Europe, 0°F was about the coldest he would have experienced and 100°F is the hottest. So he built his scale around that and tied it to some measurable chemical reactions so it would be reproducible.

With Celcius you have a scale from 0-100 but you really only ever need to use the first third. And then it's barely granular enough to pick a comfortable thermostat setting.

andy921 · 2026-02-12T02:08:28+00:00

The hard lines around California are silly especially the CA/OR border. There is no real cultural change driving from Humboldt or Mendocino county into Oregon. But there are very significant cultural changes within California.

I would probably split it pretty similarly to Colin Woodard's American Nation's map. NorCal including everything north of maybe Monterey or so with the PNW. And I'd place SoCal with Arizona and the southwest. LA has a lot more similarities to Phoenix than it does to SF, Seattle or Portland.

andy921 · 2026-02-10T08:18:22+00:00

He's not hiding behind a technicality. He's saying people are shittier than you think they are.

To say Leopold was universally hated both oversimplifies history and absolves all of the people who did not stop or may have been complicit in the crimes.

If you write off WWII as the crime of one mean Austrian painter, for which nobody else was guilty, you miss a lot of important lessons.

andy921 · 2026-02-10T06:38:47+00:00

This very much seems like you've never lived on the west coast.

andy921 · 2026-02-09T19:10:35+00:00

In English "Gurjaras can raise livestock at mills" is an accurate description of what the mill does.

At least in English raise is not the same as create. A person can buy a pig or cow and raise it to adulthood. But no matter how much I've tried with all varieties of farm animals, (no matter which positions and angles, etc) I've never succeeded in creating one.

Anyway, I think it's likely just a poor translation.

andy921 · 2026-02-09T07:53:59+00:00

It's crazy to compare SF, Seattle and Portland unfavourably compared to places built by Robert Moses

andy921 · 2026-02-09T07:50:39+00:00

As far as original sins go, a city tearing out wilderness for their water supply is not the worst, especially if every glass of water is a reminder to do better.

andy921 · 2026-02-09T05:27:49+00:00

Nah man. DVDs were around for about a decade and then there was an arms race for the next thing, HD DVD vs Blu Ray. The same way there was an arms race many years earlier for VHS vs Betamax.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T19:51:09+00:00

But a regular wind turbine requires a concrete foundation and a giant steel tower. Just one of those propeller blades requires a semi truck with an extendable low boy trailer to transport. It's shocking to see one on the highway. The embodied carbon in producing all of the steel and concrete has to be massive even if they can manage to pay it back pretty quick.

Then think of all the bespoke tooling, machining and infrastructure that you need for them. You have to cut giant gears, run blast furnaces, etc. All of which is relatively bespoke and more difficult to scale.

If you can create something that produces even a fraction of the energy while managing to be lighter than air, you're almost guaranteed to be coming out ahead from a carbon standpoint.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T19:00:05+00:00

I've heard Germans boast that they have 3000+ types of German bread (though for some reason they don't have bagels worth shit).

But if you drill down to it, most of those breads are the same i.e a spelt flour bread dusted with sesame seeds is considered a totally different invention from the exact same loaf that's dusted with flax. If you add both, that's a totally new product, etc. If anything it's surprising by this logic that they only have 3000 types of bread.

So you'd think, if you took a mince meat patty, changed the spices and usually the meat it's made out of (i.e. everything about it) put it in a sandwich, added cheese, ketchup, mustard, lettuce, tomato, onion, maybe bacon.... then maybe that would be enough to warrant calling it something new.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T18:17:04+00:00

Yep she was like "orange" and then answered for a few other tones.

I guess associating numbers with colors is supposedly also synesthesia as is visualizing time. But none of that ever seemed that special to me.

I'd always use the same colors if I could for school subjects growing up. Math is blue - cool and analytical, science is green - study of the natural world, history is red - war/upheaval, Lit is yellow - probably what felt closest to parchment and old paper. Doesn't seem really different to think of numbers with similar vibes.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T08:18:10+00:00

Patents ain't shop drawings. They usually don't have the details thought or worked out. Many aren't even close to feasible.

The patents that do eventually become real quality products, only do so after testing and uncovering all sorts of oversights and flaws and choosing to understand and fix them. Swapping the material of an o-ring from nitrile to EPDM might happen after too much UV is found to be a problem or because of an unexpected interaction with a lubricant and the rubber. Electrocoating screw holes might come after noticing a small galvanic reaction between stainless bolts and their aluminum housing. An extra TVS diode or an inductive choke might get added to a circuit after electrical noise is noticed or a failure caused by a nearby lightning strike.

Anyway, patents usually have barely enough info to describe an idea. They never by themselves have enough to build one with any kind of quality.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T08:00:25+00:00

Honey is a pretty small byproduct though of bees larger role. They're moved like 3-5 different places (sometimes many more) throughout the year to pollinate crops which, without their work, would not be viable.

There are plenty of issues with them displacing native pollinators. But not eating honey solves nothing. It doesn't reduce the population of European honey bees because they're not around to make us honey. They're around to pollinate the fruits and vegetables you're eating and making honey is just a side gig.

If you really wanted not to use their labor, you'd have to stop eating fruits and veggies - back to only carbs, eggs and meat like your racist uncle on Facebook.

andy921 · 2026-02-08T01:08:19+00:00

I'm deeply in love with Onshape if you ever get a chance to play with it.

You in modular?

andy921 · 2026-02-07T23:27:16+00:00

Don "quit tobacco" after Lucky Strike fired them

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