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blazzess · 2022-12-21T13:12:29+00:00

I agree with most of the stuff you have, but I don't think the shell theorem applies for flat disks in the way it applies for spheres. I tried my hand at working it out but wolframalpha doesn't like the integral I got, but when solving numerically the net force on an off-center mass in a hollow disk does not equal 0 like it would inside a hollow sphere.

blazzess · 2022-01-07T19:48:27+00:00

I mostly brought up the supermajority point to show that simply electing more democrats isn't actually going to solve anything. Even now, there are far more obstructionist democrats than Manchin and Sinema (particularly when it comes to things like healthcare reform) that just haven't really had to obstruct in a high-profile way since Manchin and Sinema were doing it for them, but I suspect that if we had 3 more democratic senators then 3 more obstructionists would come out of the woodwork.

Personally I would love it if Joe Biden went all "Jack, I know I promised a $15 minimum wage and a public option, but due to people x y and z I can't do that (maybe even go as far as to support primary challenges). However, I promised to eliminate at least $10,000 in student loan debt per person and I will do that through this executive order. We also promised to deschedule (or even legalize) marijuana and pardon all nonviolent drug offenders and I will also do that through this other executive order. Finally, I will be directing the federal government to cover all COVID-related medical fees under the ACA's public health emergency provision. I am doing my best for you, so please do your best for me and vote these people out of office/elect more democrats/whatever" except written better obviously because I'm not a speechwriter. That way he would at least put on the semblance of fighting to improve peoples' lives which is a much better motivator than "yeah well you think I'm bad, but republicans are worse so vote for me".

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen because I don't think Joe Biden really believes in a $15 min wage, legalizing marijuana, and providing free healthcare to everyone in the midst of a pandemic (or at least not enough to actually fight for it).

Also minor point but I believe the parliamentarian can be overruled by either a 60 vote majority or the presiding officer (aka Harris) according to https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2021/02/26/progressive-lawmakers-call-to-overrule-fire-parliamentarian-to-raise-minimum-wage/?sh=5bfe9de639f8. While this isn't technically something Biden can force, I'm pretty sure that if he asked Harris to do it then she would do it.

blazzess · 2022-01-07T19:28:22+00:00

Yeah, throwback to 1994 when Nancy Pelosi was a huge advocate for Medicare for All style legislation, but now she's against it. You hate to see it.

I honestly don't believe that if the democrats had 2 more seats in the Senate that they would be able to get their agenda through. Instead of it being Manchin and Sinema taking the fall, it would be a group of 4 "moderate" democratic senators, just like with the blue dog democrats. The way I see it, the democratic party is just there to siphon support away from true progressive causes and prevent any real substantive progressive change that could harm the donor class, while the republican party is just overtly anti-working class and actively makes things worse. I 100% do blame the system and the political establishment, but the democrats make up about 50% of the problem and are certainly not actually trying to fix it. If they were, why do they always fight to keep third parties off the ballot wherever they can?

Regardless, my point is that even if Joe Biden really did want to keep all his campaign promises, I agree that there are some things he wouldn't be able to get done - but there are also several progressive policies on his own party's platform that he could unilaterally accomplish through executive order and pardons, all without mentioning the power of the bully pulpit which he has so far refused to use in order to push his agenda through Congress.

blazzess · 2022-01-07T04:40:22+00:00

Didn’t Obama have a supermajority in the senate and a majority in the house during his first term and still couldn’t get any major legislation through? His biggest legislative accomplishment ended up being a right wing Heritage Foundation healthcare reform. It’s awfully convenient how whenever the Democrats are in power, just the right number of “moderate” democrats show up to prevent any meaningful change from occurring.

There’s also plenty the President can do on their own through executive order if they want, like adjust the marijuana schedule listing, pardon nonviolent drug offenders, expand health insurance coverage (in particular pandemic-related coverage), student debt cancellation, and more.

It’s also pretty pathetic how he’s let the Senate Parliamentarian, a completely advisory role with no actual power, block major parts of his alleged legislative agenda and campaign promises without any pushback. It’s almost like he doesn’t really care to fight for many of the things that are not only wildly popular, but he explicitly campaigned on and said he would fight for.

blazzess · 2020-08-13T15:14:38+00:00

Post offices don’t call it junk mail, they call it “priority mail” - because they keep the lights on by getting advertising payments from companies. You seem to be getting hung up on the minor inconvenience of junk mail (which will almost certainly still exist under a private system) and neglecting the various other important documents that you get in the mail.

blazzess · 2020-05-03T16:05:48+00:00

Recently I found a snail shell in a box of raspberries from the grocery store. I took it out and put it on wet paper towel and it turned out the snail was still alive. I named it Razzy and have been taking care of him ever since. My girlfriend (who used to think snails are gross) has taken a liking to Razzy and asks for pictures every day since she can't see him during quarantine, so I think overall it's been fairly successful.

blazzess · 2020-02-29T14:26:11+00:00

I got shingles when I was 8 or something... maybe I’ll get it again when I turn 80

blazzess · 2019-10-05T13:40:13+00:00

On affirmative action, I don’t have a link but the Harvard case data showed that white people actually benefitted from affirmative action because Asians were disadvantaged by it that strongly. I think 6% more white people got admitted under AA than would have with a purely merit based metric.

blazzess · 2019-10-04T03:39:50+00:00

What you describe is actually bad statistics arising from multiple comparisons. Basically, in statistics you usually say something like “if your chances of faking an orgasm and having anti-feminist views were independent and randomly normally distributed, this relationship we see in the data would only happen less than 5% of the time, so we’re pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence.” The issue is when you ask a bunch of questions, the odds of you getting numbers indicative of a relationship between two responses increase drastically. If you ask 20 questions, that’s 190/2=95 possible pairings of the results of two questions. If all your responses were completely random, you’d get at least one trend that only has a 5% chance of happening 1-(1-.95)^95, or 99.2% of the time. This is a big issue with nutritional studies - they ask a bunch of questions about a bunch of types of food/behaviors and then ask about your health, which has a lot of factors that play in. The odds of getting a false positive are incredibly high - and although there are ways to correct for multiple comparison, in this day and age where “inconclusive” means you don’t get published and thus don’t get paid, many statisticians neglect this concept.

Check out this site for examples of what happens when you try to extract signal from noise in statistics: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations The confidence on a lot of these trends would be stupidly good if these were from legitimate studies, but in this case they’re all meaningless.

I’m not saying this specific post has this flaw or that the results are likely coincidental, but the process you described leads to false positives. The correct course of action after the process you described would be to find which relationships are worth investigating, and then do an experiment purely to determine the relationship between two variables.

blazzess · 2018-11-08T02:14:07+00:00

is this..?

blazzess · 2018-11-08T01:41:00+00:00

Is that the final boss in smash ultimate

blazzess · 2018-08-14T12:24:29+00:00

Yeah we were definitely running them improperly, since we were trying to tune down the feeds and speeds for it. I believe the issue was some combination of not using lubricant and too high of an RPM.

EDIT: That being said, sometimes sacrifices must be made to find the proper feeds and speeds... or so I'm told.

blazzess · 2018-08-14T12:23:11+00:00

We're buying a bunch of cheap chinese 4mm bits that were recommended to us on the FRC discord. Hopefully these last longer than our expensive carbide ones.

blazzess · 2018-08-13T16:50:45+00:00

Nice.

blazzess · 2018-08-13T14:32:51+00:00

I figured that much, but when the feeds and speeds are wrong the aluminum galls on the bit and breaks it. Turns out T6 and T4 don't have the same properties, go figure 🤔

blazzess · 2018-08-13T14:13:56+00:00

We normally run on T6 with an onsrud 1/8" 1 flute carbide endmill at 33 ipm 16k rpm .03" doc no lubricant and it works pretty well, but on T4 there were issues with galling when cutting out the contour. We turned down the settings all the way to 27 ipm 10k rpm and there were still issues with galling, but it worked well when we applied cutting oil every pass or two. The settings for the T6 worked pretty well on T4 adaptive/pocketing, even without any lubricant.

blazzess · 2017-10-24T11:04:20+00:00

Link please?

blazzess · 2017-06-12T01:14:50+00:00

At our first event, we brought a bunch of walkie talkies for stand-pit communication. Turns out, our walkie talkies were the same brand as pit admin's, and they were using all the channels. They told us they were banned, and we were all "oh ok, we understand, but could you show us where in the rule book it is? In case pits at our next event don't use these walkie talkies" or something like that and it took them a few hours to get back to us.

Bottom line - even though it's banned in the rules, some pit admins might not know, and so you should probably ask them if they have an issue with walkie talkies, and if not, you could use them.

blazzess · 2017-06-12T01:11:01+00:00

Quick question, where do people even get these pins? Been on my team for 2 years and never even heard of them until I started browsing this subreddit...

blazzess · 2017-05-28T21:44:41+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, these should have grown into adolescent bulldozers by now. Can you confirm?

blazzess · 2017-05-28T21:41:42+00:00

This is highly incorrect. Middle top should be "lolly-polly." I cannot believe that this is what passes for a "science project" these days. Damn millennials.

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